Ted Rall for February 27, 2013

Good idea, but like most dishonest things, only if you don’t get caught,

Do you think employers buy the line “stay at home parent” for the past x months/years?

There are no H.R. Douches any more. It’s all done by computerized questionnaire. 10 questions, if the applicant answers any ONE of the questions outside of the application criteria they are rejected.“What pay scale do you expect?” if the answer is anything above what they are planning to pay, you’re rejected.Anecdote: Engineering job, 29000 applications, NONE made it through that simple questionnaire. And Management didn’t even have to pay for a Human Resources Department to look at their resumes either. Win!!

Ima must be a “legacy baby”. She got hers the old-fashioned way, inherited or married into money. No concern for those who have a different upbringing/station in life.

There is no loyalty in business. But it IS expected from the employee!

Only true some of the time, Howie. Who chooses to get sick? Who chooses to get “downsized”? Who chooses to have the company they work for fold? It’s not always easy to get back to work at the pay you may have had before, and the process can lead to maxing out credit cards or using up savings to get by. Add bankruptcy to the mix and it gets worse. After a bone marrow transplant left us with over $500k in medical bills, the bankruptcy lowered our credit score so much that I couldn’t work an engineering job in this country for almost a decade, and even retail employers couldn’t promote me past asst. manager without having to fire me after the credit check. So which choice did I make that was wrong? College education? Engineering job? I guess I should have divorced my wife as soon as she got sick.You, sir, are one sorry excuse for a human being if you believe your post.

Well done Ted.

An acquaintance of yesteryear ran a fake company for a long time which provided unemployed people with fake jobs in order to make it possible for them to get real ones, because, as you note, employers don’t like to hire people who need jobs. The fake company had an ‘office’ (basically, a live answering service), a postal address, stationery with letterheads, business cards, a glossy but ambiguous brochure, the whole megillah. The proprietor ran the service pretty much at cost, a few hundred dollars per case for stuff like business cards, because he had other uses for his shadow corporation which the ‘jobs’ activity helped to obscure. Dozens of people were helped. No one was ever caught. I am sure there are plenty of other people doing the same thing today. Wherever there is prejudice and irrationality, there there is an opportunity to exploit.

Next door neighbor WAS a truck driver, Same company for years. Medical issues forced him off the road, so according to his company’s plan, he no longer qualifies for health insurance. Guess who’s paying? Yeah, us taxpayers! Company policy will not even allow for light duty/in office work. Can’t do THAT job? See Ya!

That statement is the jerk’s excuse for for every bit of misfortune that befalls anyone else. In some cases it is actually true. “You slacked off through high school and are only qualified for menial jobs at minimum wage? Too bad, bad choice, bad results.” or “You majored in ancient history in college and can’t get a job? Too bad, you should have surveyed the job market before choosing a major.”

But in other cases, it’s a fallacy. How about those people who chose to take a mid level job at Enron when it was a legitimate, growing operation? How about those who chose to study architecture – “Everybody needs a place to live, Right?”

Anyone without a political bias who studies the recovery from the great depression will note one thing – when money was dumped into the economy via such stimulus projects as the WPA, CCC, etc, the positive effect was much larger than then the initial cash outlay.

Have you not heard of the,“working poor”? Or have you not seen the new term.“prematemp worker”? Because it cost corporations less to hire temporary/part-time worker than to commit to a full-time worker?And did you forget that the 100’s of 1000’s of layoffs started while Bush was president?

Ted: Thanks for the shout-out! This very real discrimation is the ultimate ‘kicking someone while they’re down’!

I’ve never actually come across anyone who believes in equality of outcomes. I suspect this is one of those fantasies the right has about the left. I grade my students from A to F. They have equal opportunities, but they don’t have equal outcomes. I know it, they know it, and nobody is suggesting otherwise.