I recently found an array of online job postings that greet seekers with these encouraging words: "MUST BE CURRENTLY EMPLOYED, NO EXCEPTIONS."
The article's author goes on to denounce the trend. If I were unemployed, I would no doubt hate the trend, but I do wonder why exactly it's popping up now, especially since you don't see it in normal economic times.
You do hear, even in good economic times, that it's easier to find a job when you've already got one. That's an interesting phenomenon in itself. And I suspect you can often get a higher salary offer when your new employer feels they have to lure you away from your old employer. But what is going on with "must be currently employed"?
A number of possibilities get bandied about by pundits: Many of the unemployed don't really want to work. Many of the unemployed have rusting skill sets.
Of course, this can't be true of ALL the unemployed. But perhaps businesses are using current employment status as a statistical screening technique. Hiring costs time and money. Hiring the wrong person costs even more time and money.
The question arises: how do unemployment benefits fit into the picture? Are they a vital lifeline to those laid off? Or are they an incentive to not find a new job? Or might they even be both? This last would be my guess, in the sense that such benefits are a help to some, and a hidden trap for others, like so many safety-net programs.
In practice, the political debate here is how long unemployment benefits should last. One year? Two? Until the economy picks up?
The other side of providing unemployment benefits is collecting the taxes to pay for them. Those taxes must themselves be a drag on the economy to some extent. And those taxes are applied to wages, so they directly raise the cost of employing people, which presumably motivates business to hire fewer people, at least to some extent.
Well, it's a fine mess.
If I become unemployed
this mess will leave me even more highly annoyed.
No comments:
Post a Comment