Over the last two months we’ve had a nice little flurry of worthwhile
thoughts on employment. Before that,
though, let’s have a brief look through that same prism at President Barack
Obama’s final State of the Union Address.
On jobs in America, there wasn’t a lot. He had two correct general ideas, with “how
do we give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security in this new
economy?,” followed, nine of the speech’s 72 (!) applause breaks later, by
“today, technology doesn’t just replace jobs on the assembly line, but any job
where work can be automated,” so “workers have less leverage for a raise.” Around them, however, we heard the wrong suggestions
– “equal pay for equal work, paid leave, raising the minimum wage,” and calls
for more education, particularly “hands-on computer science and math
classes.” There is nothing off beam with
either employers choosing to provide paid leave or the existing laws
prohibiting sex discrimination, but further mandates would be misguided. Training, especially with the irritating
emphasis on that related to science as if to imply that that is where there are
enough jobs for the students, still too often only shifts who gets scarce
positions. His free community college
proposal is worthy of further study, but best was his plan for a redoubled
cancer cure effort, which, if it materializes, could open a new vein of
opportunities.
Now to those four ideas.
The first was in a December 1st Wall Street Journal piece, “When a Job Offer Comes Without a Job.”
Author Lindsay Gellman described how Facebook, Intuit, and other companies are
grabbing the most promising recruits first and determining where to assign them
second. What she called “program hiring”
is new only in name, as it is quite similar to what large organizations
actually did from the 1940s into the 1980s, when promotion from within was
routine and they started workers at levels lower than now existing to see if
they would show up, behave themselves, and so on. My father-in-law was to become an innovative
Eli Lilly engineer, but his first work assignment there, despite his science
degree, was sweeping out one of the labs.
Many others started as office boys and file clerks, and “from the
mailroom to the boardroom” became a cliché.
This program hiring is exactly what many workers need, as the concept of
a career, especially with one company, has taken a beating since the Great
Recession. Even though this
job-assignment process is, unlike in the past, cooperative between employer and
employee, apparently more of the latter are fussier than were those in previous
generations about even temporary positions.
I recommend millennials adopt one of the best and most underrated qualities
of the baby boom generation and put up with unfitting work to get positioned
for better opportunities, now that these re-pioneering organizations are
setting them up for just that.
The second was also in the Journal, and explained how an even older hiring methodology is
being brought back. Rachel Feintzeig’s
January 5th “The Boss Doesn’t Want Your Résumé” discussed a few
information-technology companies starting the staffing process by having
applicants perform sample job tasks, such as project work, and by writing
things to show what they know. Since the
candidates are unseen by hiring managers and they do not put their names in
their work, race and sex discrimination, as well as halo effects from such
usually job-irrelevant qualities of charming interview conversation and more
well-known previous employers, are cut way back or eliminated completely. The whole thing is much the same as blind
auditions in music, in which judges do not see the candidates. It is new to the white-collar and
professional world, but was once common in physical jobs, particularly around
the turn of the previous century, when prospective bricklayers might be asked
to carry stacks of them to show they could do it. Although what Feintzeig described does not
replace organizations’ obtaining and using demographic and historical
information, it does put job skills at the front of the process, a huge
change.
The third was what might be called a right-wing business
finding, from of all places the Harvard
Business Review. Published on January
4th and from three authors, it had the stunning title “Diversity
Policies Don’t Help Women or Minorities, and They Make White Men Feel
Threatened.” I am a Caucasian male with
a 20-year corporate business career, and have made many related observations: that the problem with “diversity” is that
hiring, job assignment, and promotion opportunities are fixed in number making them
zero-sum; that that word itself has been distorted to mean preferential
treatment for those in certain groups, instead of its still-current dictionary
sense of synonymous with “variety”; that it is also often a euphemism for
arranging for women and minorities to have special chances for top positions,
and has little to do with workplace behavior; that real human differences go
way beyond genital type and skin pigmentation; and so on. The article made many of these same points. It also posited two more: that such policies served mostly as legal
defense structures, their existence being crucial as talking points to hold off
losing lawsuits in cases of true discrimination; and that in some situations
they actually held back black women (who have been running degree-earning rings
around black men).
In sharp contrast, we had a fine example of what could be
done with such efforts at AT&T about twenty years ago – in a meeting we
divided into groups (men/women, black/white/other, under and over age 40), and after
internal discussion a spokesperson from each talked about what tied them
together. I learned some fascinating
things that day. Although I grew up in
30% black Hyde Park in Chicago, I did not know that, at least as of about 1995,
African-Americans felt free to talk socially with anyone else of their race
whether that person was a fashion plate or a street sweeper, that they “don’t
go camping,” and tended heavily to spend vacations visiting relatives, or that
they still, in something I have never heard a white person express, caught
themselves, as most Americans did in centuries past, attributing higher status
to blacks with lighter skin. This experience
was diversity as it should be practiced, and helped me understand many of my
co-workers better.
Fourth was something President Obama said four days after his
address. He said that each state should
allow a minimum of 26 weeks of unemployment insurance, with suddenly higher
state jobless rates triggering an automatic extension to 52. That is the right thing to do. We are 17.5 million jobs short, with 2.1
million not only officially unemployed but that way for 27 weeks or more, and six
million not counting as jobless but working part-time in lieu of the full-time
opportunity they haven’t found.
Unemployment benefits make up about the most reliably circulating money
there is, so much of them return to the state governments in taxes. The amounts vary drastically between even
similar states – for only one example, Wisconsin has a maximum $370 weekly
benefit with neighboring Minnesota at $629 – but cost of living differs more,
and even Louisiana’s $221 is immensely valuable to anyone with neither work nor
savings, making the length of such benefits, now 18 to 30 weeks (which probably
should be 39) more important. Obama will
formally propose improvements to Congress in his February 9th budget
proposal. I wish him the best with it,
as I do for the implementers of the other three ideas above.