07.26.11
Corporate America Hates You — the reality series
The news now fills up with pieces on another symptom of total decline — the hard scapegoating of the unemployed by the private sector, reclassifying them as total undesirables. Once unemployed, now to be permanently discarded as broken and diseased.
The unemployed need not apply.
That is the message being broadcast by many of the nation’s employers, making it even more difficult for 14 million jobless Americans to get back to work.
[Them the qualifier.]
After all, there are legitimate reasons that many long-term unemployed workers may not be desirable job candidates. In some cases they may have been let go early in the recession, not just because business had slowed, but because they were incompetent.
Idle workers’ skills may atrophy, particularly in dynamic industries like technology. Beaten down by months of rejection and idleness, they may not interview well or easily return to a 9-to-5 schedule.
Yes, think of the mass economic slump as a good thing. It weeded out most of the incompetent people, all of whom deserve nothing for the rest of their natural lives.
Yes, think of how the skills have atrophied. In someone working fast food, or retail, or janitorial work or hospitality, corporate facility security, waiting tables and baggage handling. And the teachers who just automatically forget how to instruct and think because they’ve lost their link to a classroom.
It goes on.
The atrophy argument is risible. Particularly in the United States which has been relentlessly creating jobs which require virtually no skill at all during the last couple of decades.
The last one is best.
It’s the you’ve-turned-into-a-depressed-lazy-decrepit-person-who-smells-and-walks-around-in-his-underwear-all-day excuse dressed up as “[you] may not interview well or easily return to a 9-to-5 schedule.”
If the country’s current soul has its way, and I think it will, we’ll turn mass unemployment into a devil’s mark of criminal bent, mortal sin, and physical as well as mental deformity/inferiority.
The US government, in implementing the 2010 census, hired a few hundred thousand people (a multitude of whom were out of work) on the basis of a simple, honestly-filled out personal history and decent grades on an aptitude test.
And that turned out really well.