This Week In Jobless Discrimination: Unemployed Applicants Might 'Be Tempted To Steal'

This Week In Jobless Discrimination: Unemployed Applicants Might 'Be Tempted To Steal'

www.huffingtonpost.com

An office manager in Phoenix, Arizona, posted a Craigslist ad this week for a part-time cleaner to tidy up at night. The manager needs somebody who's older than 25, has a car, cell phone, no criminal background and is "currently employed."

That requirement may seem like a Catch-22 for the nation's nearly 15 million jobless, but it's a surprisingly common one. HuffPost has been chronicling this phenomenon by combing the web for job ads that use language such as "Must be currently employed" or

(visit the link for the full news article)

So, the employers refuse to hire the unemployed. Now they are going around saying that the unemployed are more likely to steal.

The poor and unemployed are being demonized and dehumanized more and more in this country. They are blamed for their own poverty, even though they did not do anything so different from many of those who still have jobs. And their impoverishment is openly given as the reason for the snubbing they receive while trying to find employment.

Then, the ones who have jobs are wanting things like food stamps and medicaid slashed so these poor people will not be bothering their tax money.

In many areas, being homeless is practically a crime. But the ones making the laws deny jobs to the poor so that they can afford homes. They are purposely creating millions of new criminals just because they are poor.



www.huffingtonpost.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

www.abovetopsecret.com...

This is another thread I created previously on this type of thing. I forgot to copy/paste it into the OP when I posted this.

I am employed. I am employed because I work hard and I am what employers are looking for.

Many people who lost their jobs in the last couple years of the recession were laid-off because they were not as productive as the people who did not get laid-off.

If an employer is requesting employed people only , it is a VERY effective way to ensure he or she is hiring a very productive worker.

In this recession productive people are the only ones left employed!

I know, I have hired and fired and the unproductive go.

Complainers go, annoying people go, lazy people go, ugly people go, unproductive people go, it is just the way the working place works in reality. Political correctness has ensured that these reasons never publicly are communicated.

Only employed individuals need apply.... Ensuring you get a top notch employee.

Originally posted by wiredamerican
I am employed. I am employed because I work hard and I am what employers are looking for.

Many people who lost their jobs in the last couple years of the recession were laid-off because they were not as productive as the people who did not get laid-off.

If an employer is requesting employed people only , it is a VERY effective way to ensure he or she is hiring a very productive worker.

In this recession productive people are the only ones left employed!

I know, I have hired and fired and the unproductive go.

Complainers go, annoying people go, lazy people go, ugly people go, unproductive people go, it is just the way the working place works in reality. Political correctness has ensured that these reasons never publicly are communicated.

Only employed individuals need apply.... Ensuring you get a top notch employee.

edit on 22-10-2010 by wiredamerican because: words

Yes layoffs have nothing to do with seniority or buddy buddy relationships.

Or how about the fact there is a lack of work or going out of business or outsourcing.

Yeah keep telling yourself that all people that are unemployed are unproductive. Or maybe they just don't own several sets of knee pads and spend most of their work day underneath their bosses desk.

reply to post by wiredamerican


This is the most truly absurd and accurate statement I have heard regarding layoff's. It is those that conform to the status quo that keep their jobs. Those that in any way threaten the status quo will lose their jobs even if they were great people and did a decent job. In more than a decade as management I have seen this over and over and it is true.

Now what did the bible say about these times we live in. Without turning this into a spiritual thread there is a direct correlation of end times prophecy and what is occurring with those good people in the workplace that stand up for justice and fairness and do not bend over for the boss on request, or worship the job in a sense they believe without it they are less than human.

Originally posted by wiredamerican
I am employed. I am employed because I work hard and I am what employers are looking for.

Many people who lost their jobs in the last couple years of the recession were laid-off because they were not as productive as the people who did not get laid-off.

If an employer is requesting employed people only , it is a VERY effective way to ensure he or she is hiring a very productive worker.

In this recession productive people are the only ones left employed!

I know, I have hired and fired and the unproductive go.

Complainers go, annoying people go, lazy people go, ugly people go, unproductive people go, it is just the way the working place works in reality. Political correctness has ensured that these reasons never publicly are communicated.

Only employed individuals need apply.... Ensuring you get a top notch employee.

edit on 22-10-2010 by wiredamerican because: words

So your on top for a reason eh? Good luck to you because a fall from that place would be very painful. I am of the personal belief that humility comes at a cost. And humility, at least as evidenced by your post, is not one of your many valuable and productive attributes.

::sigh:: But for the grace of God go I.

Most medium size to larger companies that do layoffs are not just targeting 'the unproductive'. They target a certain % of a department; they target most of a division that a sister division or acquired company can take on the work for; they target a certain management sector; or they target an entire swath of employees whose work can be done cheaper in India. Lockheed once laid off 11,000 people in a single day. Gee, you suppose all those people were just lazy-ass unproductive workers?

Suggesting that anybody unemployed is incompetent is not only inaccurate, it's a degree of prejudice, especially in this economy, bordering on actually retarded.

I have a very good job I've had for years, but my big company 'restructures' regularly. I know that when some exec group that has never even heard of me in some distant office starts making new structure plans, the talent and skills and work ethic I have are unlikely to mean a damn thing, because they don't know me or anybody else for that matter. It's numbers on paper. We work hard to get more automated so the boss can ship more of our jobs to India. That's the way it goes. It's bad enough that situation is in place; it's bad enough the nightmare it causes qualified, hardworking people when their job is closed for reasons beyond their control; but then having others around them be arrogant and dismissive of them, that is just adding real insult to injury.

May you learn compassion vicariously, not the hard way, as many do.

RC

It seems like discrimination to me. I don't think it should be allowed. Another thing that gets me is most employers want somebody with experience. How do you get experience if nobody will hire you?

Ok I can see this being a fail for the system. It`s just unemployed people came from jobs that were sold out by our government. I come from a Steel making area. Those businesses are sold to China and are run into the ground turning smaller and smaller. Some cut nearly in half. or shut down or moved to Mexico.

I`m unemployed and was one of the best workers on the Job advancing to the top and becoming the one in charge under the owner. I relocated right before everything went to crap to find bad time to move. Not finding work since.

Now here is what really jerks my chain.
Where are you right now. A good few of you I see on here I see make comments pretty often and in different forums have repeatedly mentioned I cant view something because you are at work.
Hmm yep the working class working hard at work Being in web forums just don`t sound so productive to me.. So as far as saying the people working are the best people out there to work is bull and I could even step further into this and bring race discrimination up. The companies have to be fair weather it be for the best working or not.

Getting laid off rarely has anything to do with being unproductive. Ask the thousands and thousands of people laid off by IBM in the last fifteen years. Ask the thousands of people Nortell laid off every year to boost profit margins. Ask the millions of people that ended up unemployed because the business they work for simply closed up.

The company I worked for in 2008 instituted a 10% pay cut to all non management employees. Three weeks later it fired 12.5% of the staff to cut the budget. Then they fired the whole staff except those neccessary to help finsh the last project and invetory everything. Then they closed the doors for good. It wasn't about unproductive people. It was about bad management, a collapsing economy, and a vanishing industry.

Now I get told I'm too smart to work in fast food or retail. They are afraid I might be hired away at some point and they won't get a return on their investment. Then I get told by companys that are hiring, in fields where I have experience, that I have been unemployeed too long. They don't want to "lose time" while I "get back up to speed."

They don't look at the fact that for two years I ran my own media consulting company and worked on project for Atlantic Records, or that I worked on multiple projects in Nashville. Even when I offer to give them the number to contact clients they ask, "how do I know you really worked for them?" Even better is "how do I know this is who you say it is and not just friend?"

Then there was the one guy that told me, "I would hire you but recent studies show that men suffering long terms of unemployment tend to be anti-social, violent, and more prone to substance abuse. We can't take that risk." I asked if he realized that by being gainfully employed those symptoms of depression tend to self correct. "It isn't my job to study studies. My job is to ensure the best work force for ________."

When I pointed out that self employed and unemployed are two different things he said, "one is just code for the other." I have heard some variation on, "self employed means unemployed," so many times I am ready to throw up.

reply to post by wiredamerican


LOL you are obviously in your 20s and have no real work experience to base your self inflated sense of being. What a tool to say those types of things. You see sometimes in our greed driven society the best and most productive lose their jobs because they have gotten raises continually and now make more money than cost accounting desires in COGs...thats cost of goods for you folks in your 20s who think only the productive keep thier jobs.

Write us back when you grow up, and get some hair.

reply to post by wiredamerican


thank god someone said it! everyone wants to say "they fired me because they did not like " when in fact they were lazy, late, or just unproductive no one wants to blame themselves. i had two jobs untill about 5 months ago and now i am in security... and they NEED people. i think a lot of people want to stay on unemployment and complain about "the man" keeping them down and "they try so hard but wont get a chance" well seems like bottom line for whatever reason they failed but blame everything but themselves

reply to post by Jessicamsa


This is nothing new. Well actually what is new is that it finally came out in the open . All of us are only as good as the last six months in terms of potential employess. Agencies can now afford to pick and choose because that is what employers are telling them. Then you cannot even go for a lower paid job as that can be viewed with suspicion. The middle classes are screwed!

Originally posted by wiredamerican


In this recession productive people are the only ones left employed!

Complete and utter bull#

I worked for barclays for 5 years, then the whole building was closed... to save money.
I was offered a job in london but with the money they offered me and the cost and time of commuting to london every day I would be taking a pay cut in order to spend 3-4 additional hours a day travelling, so I refused it,

15 years ago, I moved from just north of Los Angeles to Seattle. I had no worries about finding a job. I had a dozen years of highly successful management experience in a variety of industries, impeccable references and letters of recommendation, and I had always had work, usually more than I wanted.

I provided my resume, the letters, cover letter, on nice stock in a folder to all the major employment agencies. And they said, we have a corporate limit; we can't find you work because your last title was technically a corporate officer and your salary was just above our cut-off limit. They would give me work as a temp, though.

The management agencies had a secretary put my resume in the computer. She asked which of the several industries I worked in, she should categorize it under; she had to check a box. Then a man explained that while employers looking for managers may allow "equivalent experience" to a degree, the agency didn't, so my name would just never come up in their database query.

I talked with an HR woman in a big company who told me that when it came to direct referrals, they hired people based on skill, experience, perceived character. But that when it came to applications/resumes, they were getting massive numbers for a single job opening, and they desperately needed every 'filter' they could get. So they filtered by edu (over or under), by address (too far), a whole list of things that helped reduce literally several thousand applications down to a 'mere' few hundred to sort by hand. What a nightmare for her. What a nightmare for me!

So, it was late 1995 by then. I taught myself html, I taught myself graphic design, I already did a lot of desktop DTP and database stuff, I made some websites for free for people and causes I liked so I'd have a portfolio, and eventually ended up doing webwork, then dynamic dev webwork, then PM of that sort of thing, until I moved to the midwest and my tiny corp sold out to a big corp fish and talked them into taking me on as a product development PM. Which about 3 'restructurings' ago got accidentally-sideways-demoted into being a standard production PM. But I like my job, my boss, my team, my company, and I lovelovelove that I can work from home. But I know that nothing is sure, nothing is truly secure. The better I do at helping my company develop more streamlined, more technical, more automated ways of handling the workflow, the more likely they're going to send my job to india, like they have other areas. That is out of my hands.

The unemployment rate is a helluva lot higher than official stats. They 'leave out' a ton of stuff that directly affects those numbers. Like if you're unemployed and fall off benefits, according to their stats, you just found a job, you're no longer unemployed! And many other criteria. It's not fair or wise to look at a crashing economy with a really high unemployment rate and assume that people without a job were just less competent.

When economy is not so bad, when companies are laying off very SMALL numbers, then yes, it's a good way for them to deal with firing people that they could not legally manufacturer a sound reason for firing otherwise. But whatever time and economy that would be, it would not be recent.

RC

Originally posted by veryinteresting
So your on top for a reason eh? Good luck to you because a fall from that place would be very painful. I am of the personal belief that humility comes at a cost. And humility, at least as evidenced by your post, is not one of your many valuable and productive attributes.

::sigh:: But for the grace of God go I.

Thing is that most employers have that attitude. That's why so many unemployed are still unemployed months and years later.

And with millions of jobs being exported and foreign workers imported to take the jobs still here at a lower pay, the regular people don't stand a chance.

reply to post by Jessicamsa


seems like if people without jobs spent half the time looking for jobs as they do justifying why the dont have a job they might get something done.... also i see so many people have jobs they could get, that the feel are "beneath the" for example. a woman i knew was an architect she got layed off (for calling in sick all the time because she was depressed because of money issues, funny she did not simple goto work to get more money, but thats another story) any way,i offer to get her a job where i am at a call center but she "does not do that kind of work" .... now it is simple you got two types of people. 1. bad things happen they justify and rationalize how it is not there fault and the whole world is just picking on them 2. people who make it happen...... seems like your a number 1 as are many people now a days