Are you someone's ideal?
The worse the economy is, the pickier employers become. The ideal candidate will be described in the ad. If you don't meet the description of the ideal candidate, and are not needing to demonstrate to your unemployment insurance board that you are looking for work, you are wasting your time even applying. In an economy such as ours today, with its large and growing pool of unemployed, someone else definitely does fit the "ideal" description. And typically, more than one person does, so if you are one of the ideal candidates, you still have to face the fact that getting hired is a lot like the movies and TV series "Highlander," where near immortal beings would battle each other to the death because "there can be only one."
An employer
will require degrees when none are really needed for the performance
of the job because the degree requirement cuts down on the number of
applicants whose resumes are clogging his in-box. Experience
requirements lengthen. On-the-job training goes out the window
because now there is someone out there who has done this before, so
the employer can save time and money over training someone. If you
have to learn something, better learn it somewhere else, or expect to
be an unpaid intern.
In fact, the notion of internship is being
abused by some employers who are not offering school credit or even
minimum wage. But students take the "internships" anyway for the
experience. (Some
are even paying firms to find them an unpaid internship).
The employer gets free labor; the student feels he is somehow getting
a leg up on the job market by being willing to be exploited, and an
older worker who desperately needs money finds another closed door.
That brings me to the other problem with jobs and hiring -- job
competition is not a game that is played on a level field.
Isms, phobias and favoritism
Racism,
sexism, ageism, classism, homophobia, xenophobia, dislike of another
person's religion or lack of religion -- any of these and more can
exclude an otherwise well-qualified candidate. On the flip side of
the coin, bribery, physical beauty, willingness to grant sexual
favors, blackmail, personal or professional connections to the hirers
and even well-intentioned programs such as veterans' preferences or
racial or gender preferences will increase the chances of some people
while decreasing those of others who have similar resumes.
This tilting of the playing field is an add-on to the general understanding that there can be only one winner per job. On a level playing field, the odds would be against you before you start because of the nature of the system. The isms and phobias just rub salt on the wound.
The personalization of economics
Conservatives would have us believe that unemployment is our own fault. People such as 2010 Nevada Republican U.S. Senate nominee Sharron Angle claim that the jobless are "spoiled" people who would rather collect unemployment benefits than find jobs. That is actually an economically rational decision if the job does not pay well enough after deducting expenses such as taxes, transportation, clothing, lunch and perhaps child care, to make the job worthwhile. The problem is not that unemployment benefits are too high but that wages are too low. But that's a topic for another day. You often hear self-improvement gurus say things like if you have a job, the unemployment rate is zero and if you don't have one, the unemployment rate is 100%.
This personalization of economics masks the truth at the heart of the system: Our economic system is built upon the premise of competition, and the duality of competition, by its very nature, creates losers as well as winners, no matter highly skilled, creative, industrious or desirous of success everyone is.
Conservatives bank on the idea of exceptionalism to keep people focused on themselves and the people around them -- is that brown-skinned person down the street an illegal alien here to steal my job? -- rather than on the system that exploits them and the exploiters who work the system to their advantage. Like the young person who takes physical risks because he or she believes in their own invulnerability, we expect to beat the odds. The fact that sometimes we do makes us forget that the job-search game is a casino where a few people win big, but the house stacks the overall odds in its favor. We are urged to believe solely in ourselves and our heterosexual nuclear families by people and corporations whose power would be severely curtailed if we ever banded together for the mutual benefit of our own communities, regardless of all the identity politics factors that now separate us.
We
are encouraged to look at the system in only one case -- we are
encouraged to believe that, if we were freed from government
interference and taxation, we would succeed! Nowadays, Big Business
is like a ventriloquist. It pretends that the government is an
independent actor, but it provides the government's voice and has its
hand up the government's back, or more precisely, in the government's
pockets.
To allow this show to go on, we have to keep suspending
disbelief. We have to pretend that the dummy is really speaking of
its own accord, even though we see the ventriloquist standing by. And
here we do have a failure of personal responsibility. We are playing
our part in the ventriloquist's show.
Your house is owned by the bank; your car declines in value from the moment you drive it off the lot; your processed food is unhealthy junk and your education has put you in severe debt until middle age though it may not guarantee you a steady job, much less "the good life." What is success when we can be thrown away, often without notice, by a corporation, and escorted from the building like a terrorism suspect (or a person who objects to being irradiated or sexually assaulted at the airport)?
The more we look at ourselves as individuals, and focus on enjoying our individual success or struggling with our individual failure within the system, the less likely we are to examine the fundamental order of the system itself, and to parse the limits of what individual effort can accomplish. Yes, success requires a modicum of personal effort and responsibility. But those are smaller tools for success than we are given to believe. I offer the life of George W. Bush as exhibit No. 1 to prove my case.
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