Stipulating active employment as a qualifying criterion does make some sense. In the current climate, someone who already has a job but is looking for a new one can be perceived as demonstrating ambition, imagination, and a willingness to take risks, all qualities that are attractive to employers. On the other hand, it disregards the global picture. Whether they do so openly or not, companies who consider hiring only the already employed are helping neither the economy nor themselves, since they are not doing anything to reduce the unemployment statistics and are just setting themselves up to be inundated yet again the next time they advertise a vacancy; not to mention the negative impact on other companies whose employees they are enticing away.
There are other, more subtle ways in which hirers discriminate. Some of them are legitimate: It's perfectly reasonable, for example, if a law firm looking for a new partner states in their ad that applicants ought to have trial experience. Some are more dubious. If a recruiter calls you and you don’t answer the phone, that in itself can be enough to disqualify you from consideration, even if you immediately call back. You can even find yourself out of the running for an unskilled, entry-level position in retail or fast food on the grounds that you lack experience in those industries. It's impossible to quantify how many good people employers miss out on by pursuing arbitrary hiring policies, but the fact that there are are millions of highly-skilled, highly-qualified folks still languishing on the unemployment line suggests that it's a lot.
The discrimination provision in the jobs bill has been broadly welcomed, although Obama's customary critics have had little to say on the subject. Opposition to it, and to anti-discrimination legislation in general, has been from two camps. There are, as mentioned, those who are concerned about frivolous torts. These lawsuits are typically portrayed as an enormous drain on the economy, although the actual numbers don't support their claim and they rarely bother to provide any evidence that the suits they complain about actually are frivolous other than that they say so.
Article comments
1 - Glenn Contrarian
Doc -
Great article - and your line that "beggars can't be choosers" echoes what I said in my earlier article wherein I pointed out that a libertarian economy can work, but requires a cheap and compliant labor force - an "underclass", as Dave Nalle called it.
And back come the bad old days of the Industrial Revolution with a great yawning divide of the haves and have-nots. But hey - that's pure capitalist freedom, is it not?
2 - jamminsue
Oh, yes! I recently wrote a paper explaining that the people of the US remain docile ONLY because they think they will be the next winner in the 'next millionare lottery' or 'captain of industry'.
3 - Jordan Richardson
Great article and good to see you writing again, but the links were a little wonky for me. Anyone else have trouble?
4 - Christopher Rose
The links were all messed up but are now fixed.
Thanks for the heads up, Jordan.
5 - roger nowosielski
Rather minor point, Dreadful, for I don't disagree much with the thrust of your argument (except perhaps the beggars' part, since I have no one to account to other than myself). It's got to do with structure.
Your main dichotomy concerns those who are being discriminated against (on a/c of being unemployed) and those who are not.
Then you pose a question: what if the anti-discrimination legislation that's being proposed doesn't pass?
Well, one would expect that the next thing you'd do would be to provide some remedies to those who are being discriminated against and there being no protection under the law. But you don't anything of the kind, so, I don't know how best to put it, you're either shifting the goal posts or simply changing the topic without there being an adequate transition in the body of the text.
Indeed, what you're introducing is another interesting dichotomy between complete and only partial a....s, couched, as you say, in terms of economic realities.
But in reality, neither option you introduce is a remedy (especially to the unemployed). Both serve in fact as forms of consolation: the first, to the discriminated-against group; the second to those who are not.
Do you see what I'm getting at?
6 - Dr Dreadful
Jordan, Chris: That's odd, the links worked for me yesterday.
Roger: Perhaps this is something we can address in the comments space.
7 - Tommy Mack
Stipulating active employment as a qualifying criterion is discriminatory under a lot of US Code, just as age discrimination, which will be proved, in court, when it gets there.
Tommy