The Obama administration has the worst employment record in modern history, but it is pressing forward boldly to create a raft of new jobs — for trial lawyers. To the existing menu of protected classes in job-discrimination cases — race, sex, physical handicap, etc. — President Obama proposes to add a new one protecting the unemployed.
Which is to say, being unemployed would put one in the same position as being black or being a woman when it comes to making claims of discrimination in hiring practices. This is a bad decision for a raft of reasons, but one that must be deeply appealing to the White House: Institutional racism is a thing of the past in these United States, but the extraordinarily profitable industry that grew up around discrimination claims funds an army of “community organizers,” diversity consultants, community-outreach officers, and similar sinecures. It is a large part of the political infrastructure of modern liberalism.
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But setting up the unemployed as a new protected category in employment cases creates some tricky problems. First and foremost, the fact of being unemployed — unlike the fact of being black or being a woman — in many cases will be legitimately linked to a candidate’s desirability in the labor marketplace. It is not that unemployed workers are more likely to be undesirable, but that undesirable workers are more likely to be unemployed. Workers suffering from long-term unemployment begin to lose skills, are less current on industry practices, and begin to dishabituate from the professional environment. Our sympathies are with them — and there are many more of them since Barack Obama became president — but our sympathies do not render such facts irrelevant in employers’ hiring decisions. A salesman who has been out of work for years may in fact be a less desirable candidate than one currently employed, for the specific reason of his unemployment, and an employer who takes that into consideration is not engaged in nefarious discrimination, but in rational evaluation of candidates. President Obama is at odds with reality on this issue, as he so often is.
It is not discrimination that has U.S. unemployment at persistently high rates. The reasons are many, and one of them is the fact that President Obama and congressional Democrats have seized a great many opportunities to make the nation’s economy worse, either out of economic ignorance or out of ideological narrowness, burdening it with debt, binding it with new regulations, and unsettling it with new complexity and heightened uncertainty about the future. That is Mr. Obama’s doing, and it is his problem. Creating a new category of discrimination claims will not produce a robust labor market.
What it will produce is a river of new regulations — the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will be tasked with making sure that job advertisements and employment agencies cross t’s and dot i’s according to federal mandate — along with a flood of new lawsuits. That these lawsuits will enrich the trial bar, a reliable Democratic constituency and a rich source of campaign donations, surely is lost on nobody in the White House.
Some 14 million Americans are unemployed today, nearly half of them long-term unemployed, meaning they have been out of work for at least 27 weeks. Millions have been unemployed for more than a year, and the average spell of joblessness now runs uncomfortably close to a year — some 40 weeks. The president believes he can regulate some of that problem away with new discrimination claims. That is wishful thinking, a luxury that we can ill afford in the best of times. And these are not the best of times.
I have to pick a mathematical nit with the sentence "It is not that unemployed workers are more likely to be undesirable, but that undesirable workers are more likely to be unemployed." Either of these actually implies the other...the correlation of X with Y is the same as the correlation of Y with X, so in particular, if one is positive, so is the other.
A more mathematically correct way to say the same thing that (I think) was meant: Undesirable workers are more likely to be unemployed, and as a mathematically inescapable consequence, unemployed workers are more likely to be undesirable.
Nice. 16,600 Federal Employees working for the US Air Force are scheduled for RIF by Dec. 31 2011.
The most vulnerable are recent military retirees with 20 to 30 years of experience who have the shortest Service Computation dates. The bureacratic regulators of negativism get pay raises and their numbers flourish. They don't produce improved or more efficient weapons systems to protect the country better or any tangible benefits. they enforce rules. Workers in Washington D.C. get the highest pay scales because the cost of living there is very high. Comparable salaries for the Federal hicks in the sticks are much lower. But who remembers whose pay rate? Washington D.C.s of course. The defenders of the country who continue as civil servants get the shaft. A 10% Federal pay cut across the board and hiring freeze for all federal agencies would have saved defense support jobs. I experience the joy first hand. I'm one of the DoD employees caught in the cross hairs.
You guys are missing the long haul plan behind this. What employer in his right mind won't start hiring people hand over fist when this regulation is passed from whatever extraconstitutional committee it is issued.
If I'm a business owner, I know I'm just sitting at my desk, chomping a cigar saying "I don't want to hire people now, I want to wait until I can be sued for THIS too."
Speaking as one currently unemployed, this appears to me to produce a minimal effect on long-term unemployment while not addressing the cause (absence of jobs) in any meaningful way. This measure is by someone determined not to do address the problem but looking for something that makes it look like he's doing something. If that phrase sounds redundant, confused and lame, then it is a good description.
Obama would get to point to one person employed while many remain unemployed because such a law would only increase potential employer efforts to design their hiring policies in a different way and choose not to hire someone like me for a different reason. That way, the attorney I can't afford would have to prove they singled me out for non-consideration solely on the basis of the length of my unemployment. And an employer can also always point to the hundreds or thousands of applicants for each single job and say they preferred the other guy.
Then there is the very real likelihood that such a law would chill hiring and increase unemployment - while Obama points to the one guy hired as proof of his success.
There are those who do and those who would control those who do. One group is a host, the other a parasite. Obama was raised, educated and trained as the latter.
And just how are you to prove that unemployment was the reason you were passed over for a hire? Frivolous lawsuits and "affirmative action" style initiatives are the only things that can possibly come out of this.
That's the beauty of this, from the trial lawyer's standpoint. The "victim" doesn't have to prove anything. Once the accusation is made, it is up to the employer to prove the negative.
Every action this president takes to "spur" job growth does the exact opposite. I have a plan to start a small business that will sit on the shelf indefinitely because of this president's policies - Obamacare, this unemployment issue, potential for increased taxes, EPA regulator run amok, etc. This is no way to spur job growth in any way shape or form.
Every job listing these days attracts 100 applications, one happy new hire, and 99 disappointments. Now our President thinks it's a good idea to give those among the 99 who also happen to be currently unemployed a cause of action against the job creator? President Obama truly is the most naive -- or outright evil -- President we have ever had.
The overall effect of employment law has been to make it all but impossible to hire anyone and still remain within a safe harbor. Whatever you do or don't do, there's sure to be some liability.
This may not be the intent of those who created the statutes and precedent that constitute employment law but that is the result.
Increasing business for trial lawyers is the expected result. The unexpected result is less hiring in the USA because, as hiring becomes more costly, employers move jobs outside the country and/or substitute capital for labor.
And ultimately product liability law combines with employment law to make U.S. goods and services less competitive on world markets as it becomes increasingly costly to actually produce anything of value here.
I never thought I would see this in my lifetime but China is becomming a better capitalist country than we are. When a bunch of commies handle the markeplce better than us we are in trouble.
Racism is an excellent strategy.
Is America a racist country? Not really. Look at our president.
Are there racists in America? Yes, tons of them, of all colors.
The left wants to eliminate racism at the level of the individual. That can not be done. So the fight never ends. The grievance mongering and redistributionist nonesense can never end. The racial quotas and set asides can never end.
This is not the only "brilliant" idea on unemployment coming from the Left.
On left-wing blogs like Krugman's and elsewhere, some lefties are proposing that any company that refuses to expand its business and hire more people should be heavily and punitively taxed, and the tax money should go to hiring these people into Government jobs.
Of course the logical extension of this is why have private companies at all, right? Let's just tax them all into oblivion and have everyone working for the Government.
I am interested in three equally qualified applicants for one available position in a certification-required field. Applicant #1 has been unemployed for a year and lost his/her certification. Applicant #2 has been under-employed for six months but is still currently field certified. Applicant #3 is currently employed in the field.
I can:
1. Hire Applicant #3 who is currently cerified and requires no re-training.
2. Hire Applicant #2 who is currently certified but will require some re-training.
3. Hire Applicant #1 who will need to be re-certified and requires the most re-training.
Normally, my analysis would be to weigh the costs and benefits of hiring each candidate against the others. However, under the proposed regulation, I don't care about Applicant #2 or Applicant #3 because my cost/benefit analysis is done solely based upon Applicant #1! (The cost to re-train and re-certify vs. the cost of a potential lawsuit.) It is actually the employed applicants who will ultimately be discriminated against in this (very real) scenario.
Irish, you forgot about applicant #4, the recent high school, trade school, or college grad. They, it seems would not be classified as "unemployed". Therefore, #4 would be in the same catagory as #2 and #3 and in most cases the trade school and college grads would be facing a mountain of debt which can not be discharged by bankruptcy and no job prospects. Have Dear Leaders "youth" followers thought about that one? Thats one way to create a nation of slaves.
As an unemployed person, the main thing I would like the federal government to do is to PLEASE STOP TRYING TO HELP!
Seriously, finding jobs for people is not within the enumerated Constitutional powers given to any branch. The "general welfare" would be better served by letting people be responsible for their own welfare, so they never have to worry who is in the White House. Although, then they might not vote Democrat.
Hello! I would be happy to remember you in the Mass and offer a prayer for success in your job search. If that is something you would like let me know.
I agree that this is idiotic government interference, but a few employers left the door open by specifying in ads that the unemployed should not apply. It would've been more discreet to just toss the resumes.
Once a few articles were written about such ads, that gave this ridiculous administration a nice, high-profile example of businesses being big bad meanies, and an opportunity to try to make themselves look good at the expense of people who are actually useful. How could they possibly resist?
The Obama administration is determined to impede private sector business growth and job creation - thereby making all of us more dependent on big government - and this is its most recent tactic. Given the cost of litigation, Obama's gift to the nation's trial lawyers ensures that billions of dollars that would have been spent on private sector business expansion, investment and hiring will be diverted to settle frivolous lawsuits filed by corrupt lawyers on behalf of undeserving plaintiffs. Who says Barack Obama doesn't know how to fix a broken economy?
