Is "Employed Applicants Only" unfair?

Reason.com reports that Kelly Wiedemer has been unemployed all too long. But she is still active.

Kelly is suing Monster.com, the massive job listing site. Kelly is incensed that Monster.com accepts ads stating "unemployed need not apply" or "current employment required", or any variation.

When looking at the vasty number of people that President Obama's socialist policies have made unemployed, and kept them that way, it might appear that getting those "discouraged" people (not employed, but been that way the government doesn't have to count them in the unemployment numbers) should get hired right away, that will solve one of the nation's problems.

I don't see this blatant affirmative action as helping anyone, except maybe Kelly W.

Affirmative action has always hurt, hindered, encumbered, disenfranchised, and held back those that are targeted.

Think of it this way. A company hires people to do a certain amount of production, that is, processing materials to construct something with more value than cost. Getting competent people skilled in the production that the company operates is one way. And employers screen applicants for employment. They want to know that the person has a history of responsible behavior, has whatever knowledge and skills are claimed on the application, and has a certain amount of character and discipline at work -- shows up when expected, every time, keeps personal problems in perspective and out of the work place (within reason), gets the task done without constant close supervision, and works well with others.

Many times an employer takes a chance on a prospect that looks trainable. The character and discipline seem solid and dependable, and experience in related tasks seems to indicate the applicant would make the transition fairly easily. The risk is that it will take days to months -- or longer -- to determine if this applicant actually fits the need, once trained and worked into the company production stream. This is a cost of doing business. The more failed attempts a company makes, the more reputation for "difficult" practices grows among applicants and the industries that live off job applicants -- head hunters, state job services, resume services, etc.

My concern about hiring someone that has been unemployed long term is exactly the same as hiring a homeless person. They have had to adapt to a foreign environment. Just like going to college changes a person, it makes them unsuitable for certain jobs. Trust me, there are many jobs in Ponca City, OK, that will *not* hire anyone that has been to college. Supervisors used to high school graduates don't want the challenges, questions, attitudes, and perspectives of those that have been to college.

Long term unemployment means that work references are out of date. The previous supervisor may be unavailable, the business may not exist any longer, and getting a reliable feel for the long-term unemployed applicant becomes a serious problem.

Next is that unemployment insurance requires one to live according to unemployment insurance rules. The supervision, expectations, team environment -- all are unlike any company production stream. And the long-term unemployed applicant has been training and meeting the expectations of the unemployment insurance lifestyle instead of working related work.

Long-term unemployed often develop changed perspectives and tasks at home; reverting to a typical "leave the home life at home" work ethic may well be difficult, for both the worker and family members. This has the potential to cost an employer a lot, depending on how many interruptions for home issues occur each day.

An employer owes it to the company owners or stock holders to screen applicants fairly, to employ the best applicants for each position, to do a responsible job of screening out costly mistakes.

I feel employers are being responsible when they advertise "employed applicants only". This is not a new policy, because the previous work history is always scrutinized for gaps in related employment. Gaps in employment often indicate potential problems for the employer.

Employers cannot afford to overlook people afflicted with despair and depression, long term. They cannot afford the health benefits to cover applicants with pre-existing problems.

Long-term unemployment is an injury to a person, not a genetic or social barrier. What is needed is not to handicap, permanently, those hired under affirmative action. What is needed is a rehabilitation mechanism. A doctor's affidavit that applicant X has been treated and examined, and is fit to go back to work.

And ultimately, the profit a company makes, the employee costs they minimize, results in the ability to hire and train employees. Increase costs without increased productivity (i.e., profit), and the company cannot afford to employ as many people -- less hiring, more employees laid off.

Reducing the number of employees, and reducing productivity has been the common effect of affirmative action. Such efforts at social engineering are ineffective or destructive to employer and employed.

How about that, Kelly Wiedener? How about working with employers to devise a re-employment certificate that employers can rely on (not just imposed by the state, or even well-meaning affirmative action activists) that covers the unemployed period, the reasons for the unemployment, what workplace discipline and skills are exhibited, long term, and a responsible supervisor that can be contacted, and trusted to give a responsible evaluation of the applicant?

The SF 100. Thanks, Tam.

Tam at View From The Porch continued a bloggish meme.

"(The list, for the two of you that didn't know, is the "100 Best SF/Fantasy Books" based on a poll of NPR listeners. The meme that's going about its to bold the ones you've read.) "

I think I read a couple of the others, but I don't recall the author or title that firmly.

1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
3. Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert
5. A Song Of Ice And Fire Series, by George R. R. Martin
6. 1984, by George Orwell
7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
9. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
11. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
12. The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan
13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
15. Watchmen, by Alan Moore
16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
18. The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss
19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
20. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
21. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
22. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
23. The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King (Only the first two.)
24. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
25. The Stand, by Stephen King
26. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
27. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
28. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
29. The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman
30. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
31. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
32. Watership Down, by Richard Adams
33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey
34. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
35. A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller
36. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
37. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne
38. Flowers For Algernon, by Daniel Keys
39. The War Of The Worlds, by H.G. Wells
40. The Chronicles Of Amber, by Roger Zelazny
41. The Belgariad, by David Eddings
42. The Mists Of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
43. The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson
44. Ringworld, by Larry Niven
45. The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
47. The Once And Future King, by T.H. White
48. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
49. Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke
50. Contact, by Carl Sagan
51. The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons
52. Stardust, by Neil Gaiman
53. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
54. World War Z, by Max Brooks
55. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
56. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
57. Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
58. The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson
59. The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold
60. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
61. The Mote In God’s Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
62. The Sword Of Truth, by Terry Goodkind
63. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
64. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
65. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
66. The Riftwar Saga, by Raymond E. Feist
67. The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks
68. The Conan The Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard
69. The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb
70. The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
71. The Way Of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson
72. A Journey To The Center Of The Earth, by Jules Verne
73. The Legend Of Drizzt Series, by R.A. Salvatore
74. Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi
75. The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson
76. Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
77. The Kushiel’s Legacy Series, by Jacqueline Carey
78. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
79. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
81. The Malazan Book Of The Fallen Series, by Steven Erikson
82. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
83. The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks
84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart
85. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
86. The Codex Alera Series, by Jim Butcher
87. The Book Of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
88. The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn
89. The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldan
90. The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock
91. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
92. Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
93. A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge
94. The Caves Of Steel, by Isaac Asimov
95. The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson
96. Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
97. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis
98. Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville
99. The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony
100. The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis

Some I chose to skip, some I would have listed much, much, much lower on a list of maybe 4,000 or so. And no one listed Wen Spencer's "A Brothers Price" or Mike Shepherd's "Kris Longknife" books. Or McCaffrey's "A Ship Who Sang". Or Frezza's "McLendon's Syndrome". Or Weber's Honor Harrington books. Etc. And even if it was NPR listeners, where is Esther Friesner's "Carmen Miranda's Ghost is Haunting Space Station Three" (An anthology based on Leslie Fish's filk song by the same title.) Where are Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's Liaden Universe books? Where is Elizabeth Moon's "Once a Hero" or her Vatta's War series?

Dammit, where is Stasheff's Starship Troupers series?

Anyway, this was my list.

Efficiency, resilience, and ethics.

John Michael Greer has an important post about systems in general, focusing on efficiency and how efficiency is achieved at the cost of resilience. Please read it; JMG and the commenters have many important things to say.

Myself, I diverge from the conclusion that JMG makes. I find that efficiency is the quality of a system that measures how much output is produced from a given amount of input, based on the primary inputs and outputs of a system. Resilience, to me, is how much change there is in the expected output from inputs that are not the designed input.

Take a rain gauge, and a one inch rain fall. A very efficient rain gauge will report that 1.000 inches of rain fell. A resilient rain gauge will report the same thing, regardless of the presence of dust, bugs, sunlight or clouds, or street work three blocks away.

Efficiency, then, and resilience can both be engineered into a system, with only modest compromises. A well engineered system, either through adjustments and corrections over extended use or by good design, might well have both good efficiency and good resilience.

What JMG, and others, look at, is skewed engineering. That is, emphasizing efficiency while ignoring, or actively degrading, resilience. Few people want a car that gets great fuel efficiency if it means the thing falls over when you turn a corner (one of the examples JMG uses). That is a focus on efficiency without attending resilience. Making a car that won't pollute California, on the other hand, resulted in too many vehicles that were massively inefficient in use of fuel, but very efficient at passing California screening standards (that should not have been a primary output of the design).

So, today I read about Seth Godin's comments on happy and unhappy versions of business ethics.

The happy theory of business ethics is this: do the right thing and you will also maximize your long-term profit.

After all, the thinking goes, doing the right thing builds your brand, burnishes your reputation, helps you attract better staff and gives back to the community, the very community that will in turn buy from you. Do all of that and of course you'll make more money. Problem solved.

The unhappy theory of business ethics is this: you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. Period. To do anything other than that is to cheat your investors. And in a competitive world, you don't have much wiggle room here.

If you would like to believe in business ethics, the unhappy theory is a huge problem.

I see a direct example of efficiency and resilience. In the "happy" theory, the focus is on resilience, on making changes and unexpected inputs to the system (the company) simple noise, and not impacting the ability to do business. In the "unhappy" theory, resilience is deliberately avoided as the sole engineering paradigm is focused on the "efficiency" of making a profit, and avoiding loss.

And I think that Seth and JMG both overlook the obvious.

That is, a resilient design, with good efficiency, is necessary. Spend to much effort on resilience, on effects on the system that don't pay off in supporting the designed output, and you waste resources and opportunities. Any system that fails to produce enough output will fail or be abandoned, so efficiency at some level is needed for survival of the system.

I look at a system differently. The health of the system might describe the ability to survive and perform in the presence of unexpected occurrences, and be described as resilience. Production would be the output of the system, and be described by the limits to how much can be produced, and by the efficiency of using inputs to produce a given output. Basal needs would describe inputs needed for the health and operation of the system that don't directly result in primary output production.

And I think that the definitions of efficiency and resilience are two different axes on a graph, and not opposite ends of a continuous spectrum. The better the design or engineering, the more each is maximized.

For Seth, the happy theory is useless to an organization that doesn't know how to do business. The unhappy theory makes an unwarranted assumption that ruthless operation is necessarily a successful business tactic; it can and often is a more rapid path to dissolution.

About the myth of "buy American"

I got an email, from someone that believes the union line that we have to "buy American" when they really mean "buy Union" so that unions can do what they do with more money.

> http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun/18/business/la-fi-auto-quality-20100
> 618
>
>
>
>
> We don't need government intervention to save ourselves as a country.
> We need a movement. A unified movement for the people, by the people.
> As members of the greatest nation, we owe it to ourselves and the rest of
> the world to protect and strengthen our economy. With the greatest "buying
> power" of any nation, all that is needed for a national resurrection is
> for us to give the power back to ourselves. Support Made In the U.S.A.
> Support yourself. Support US, so that we may continue supporting others.
>
>
> Before your next purchase go to www.MadeInTheUSA.com to search for an
> American manufacturer of that product.


Ultimately, American economic affluence has been built on debt, and only indirectly on spending.

The problem today at the national level is that fewer families have nearly as much money to spend, and major assets like homes have significantly less value to use as collateral. The result is that fewer people have the means or confidence to service as much debt as previously.

Revolving credit accounts (credit cards) are being paid off more than in recent times, so that the total consumer debt is shrinking. Too many people cannot pay, and their accounts are being closed and taken as losses. That means that credit brokers and speculators have a shrinking mass of debt to manage, to package and sell, and to trade amongst themselves.

You are familiar, I hope, with the mortgage problems people are having. Many families believed the hype that they could pay three and four times the cost of their house and consider it an investment, a lump of value to be used into the future. With the current reduced ability to service mortgages, and the way houses have lost face value, fewer homes are being sold as "investments". Which contributes in a big way to the collapse of the value of mortgages outstanding, and even more to the illusory "assets" of the credit default swap and mortgage derivative industries.

The national debt, on the other hand, isn't collapsing or shrinking. The US is more like the family who cannot find jobs that pay as well as before, that sees the values of assets and incomes dropping because of things outside their control. Unfortunately, President Obama seems intent on following the family destined to foreclosure, instead of the choices many families made to reduce their debt to something they could manage on their reduced income, or eliminate entirely.

How families and individuals choose to spend their (fewer) dollars won't matter much, because it won't restore the debt levels that fueled the bubble in the American economy.

Industry won't be nearly as able to respond to increased local demand, today, because the direct and indirect costs have skyrocketed. Government regulations are more onerous. Limits on access to energy, including oil and electricity, are becoming more apparent and limiting growth, and the prices aren't going to be coming down as demand increases and market supplies continue to decline. And too many of the workers of yesterday have fallen from the workplace, and the younger workers that should have been learning industry are mowing yards and hanging out.

Traditional transition jobs, with low pay and providing discipline and training to the young, are going instead to older and more experienced workers displaced from higher skilled jobs by the collapse of credit, increased cost of meeting government regulations, and increases in minimum wage. The lowered family incomes and growing masses of untrained never-employed young and minority people that should have been workers amount to a problem that may take decades -- and much more than choosing to buy American -- to fix.

The mass of unemployed and under-employed people are a drag and a drain on the American economy. While they are potentially a resource, today they consume collected tax revenue and community resources that deplete the assets that others might have used to provide jobs. They are not increasing in skills and future value to the market place; they instead represent a growing body of difficult to hire, difficult and expensive to train, and unreliable workers. The virtues of Americans in previous decades was much less about our liberty and craft, but much because of our dedication to community and nation, our employ-ability and ever increasing body of skill and knowledge.

The body of unsuitable non-workers is building. We are amassing a regulatory quagmire. Their is an increasing squeeze of declining energy available and increasing energy costs. In short, the ability of industry in America to respond to increased demand is limited.

Besides, when you hold out for the Made In America label, think of the number of jobs, in America, you threaten - that distribute, transport, and sell those products.

Choosing what to buy based on where products are made is a mere puff of breath, when applied to the problems of the torrent of economic and personal liberties abuse coming from Washington, DC and the Obama Administration, and this and previous Congresses.

If you want to fix the American economy, I suggest that you start with supporting those Senators and Congresspeople opposed to the current regulatory and tax and debt agendas. I suggest that the most effective steps to make buying American and restoring the American economy is to fix the problems facing the American workplace.

I think that the most hopeful future will hold a lot less affluence, a lot less ability to leverage debt into a sellable commodity, but with more people working for sensible wages (and not whatever government or unions can impose).

"We don't need government intervention" to solve these problems? I disagree. Government intervention is, I believe, the biggest part of America's economic woes and the biggest reason so many young and minority people are unemployable at present, and that so many American families are making do with less than in previous years, with little hope for a quick recovery. Government intervention has to be addressed first, to make anything else worth the effort.

I think much of the growth of American affluence has been directly related to the expenditure of cheap energy -- mostly fossil fuels. Fuels are no longer as cheap, and President Obama is hell-bent on making all energy, including oil and natural gas, more expensive. Those individuals, industries, and governments expecting the historical models of generating lots of money to work in the future are doomed to be disappointed, without the no-longer-available cheap energy those expectations are based upon.

Brad K.
Ponca City, OK