You have to be living with your head in a hole if you're unaware of the endemic level of unemployment in the U.S. since 2007. Four million people (that's one percent of the U.S. population for perspective) are at risk of losing unemployment benefits because they've been unemployed for close to 99 weeks, even if the U.S. Congress extends benefits further (because the benefits are not being extended past 99 weeks) and even more will be approaching that line in the sand. Yet industry sits on its duffs with record profits, and refuses to hire new employees until the economy improves (ie, more people start spending money they don't have).
But it's even worse than you think. Because now companies are poaching each other's employees rather than hiring the unemployed.
Lest you think I'm exaggerating here, this article over at Huffington Post reveals that headhunters (people whose job it is to find employees for companies) are being given directions to avoid the long-term unemployed. Much like the old cliche of girls only being interested in a guy who has a girlfriend, companies are requesting headhunters only recruit the "currently employed" rather than recruiting the "desperate masses."
Please excuse my language here, but this is total and utter bullshit. Fortunately, I currently have a job (and have been working for several years now) but I had been underemployed (as a substitute teaching) before I was hired by my current workplace (a privately-owned company, so there is no madcap quest for cancerous growth of profits which would result in employee layoffs to force those people left behind to work ten jobs to help squeak that extra dollar's profit for the CEO's bonuses).
When I was hired, I was extremely grateful. If they had wanted me to work unpaid overtime, I would have (they didn't and have policies against unpaid overtime, mind you; it's nice to work for a place with a sense of ethics). Thus I can imagine how someone who was unemployed for close to two years who suddenly gets a job might feel. They're going to be among the most loyal of employees. They'll be willing to put up with a lot to keep their new-found job. And yet they're being spat upon by employers who are working their own remaining employees to the bone and beyond because it is simplicity itself to replace them.
It's illegal to discriminate against hiring someone on the basis of their race, their sex, or their age. It should likewise be illegal to discriminate against someone because they are unemployed, or due to how long they have been unemployed. The law would be simple enough to write; it could consist of a half dozen lines. It could even just be an amendment to existing anti-discrimination employment laws stating simply that length of unemployment cannot be discriminated against.
I'd say it should be illegal to poach employees at all, but that's probably going too far, and I'm sure that law would never pass Congress. But an anti-discrimination law based on the length that someone has been unemployed? If Republicans dared to filibuster that law or vote against it, it would be a public relations disaster for them.
Robert A. Howard, Tangents Reviews