Cross-posted at the Writing on the Wal.
I intended to start what might be called a work-imposed blogging vacation on Wednesday, but there is something about this 24,500 applicants at a Chicago-area Wal-Mart story that makes me want to scream. I'm willing to believe the number (although an economist with the Illinois Department of Employment security is skeptical); it's the way it's being used by Wal-Mart defenders that brings me back here to vent.
In particular,
this story from Tech Central Station (touching as it does on two subjects very dear to my heart) has gotta take the cake. According to James Joyner, working at Wal-Mart is just like working in academia:
I have a doctorate in political science and have found myself in precisely the same situation as those Wal-Mart applicants when on the academic job market. Indeed, there were often many more than 79 highly qualified applicants -- Ph.D.s with publications and teaching experience -- for each college teaching position that I applied for.
Because the academic market is so tight, universities have adopted virtually the same attitude toward aspiring professors as Wal-Mart does to prospective stockers. They demand heavy teaching loads, substantial committee work, a rigorous pace of professional publication -- and offer rather paltry salaries. And that's for people who have, on average, twenty-two or more years of schooling.
It's not that I find this comparison insulting. Shoot, I write what I write here in solidarity with Wal-Mart workers. It's that this comparison is deliberately designed to make working at Wal-Mart look more desirable than it is.
What Mr. Joyner fails to note is that the turnover rate of Wal-Mart workers is at least 45% [Charles Fishman, in The Wal-Mart Effect, cites evidence that it may be as high as 60%]. The voluntary turnover rate of tenure-track academics has got to be close to zero. After all, very few of us want our excessive schooling to go for naught. We accept the bureaucracy and the paperwork and the high teaching loads because we like what we do, not because it's the only job out there for us.
Perhaps more importantly, after all that graduate school, we have a very good idea of what we are getting ourselves into job-wise. The "lucky" Wal-Mart workers interviewed in the Chicago Tribune don't work there yet. Therefore, they haven't the faintest idea what kind of employer Wal-Mart is. To claim that 24,500 applicants proves that Wal-Mart jobs aren't that bad is like me telling my wife that childbirth is easy. Nobody can judge it until they try it themselves. When Wal-Mart starts bragging about having to replace 500,000 employees every year, then we'll have an honest portrait of what it's like to work there.
JR