Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, they do. They're not even just the largest employer bracket; they literally employ a majority of the employed in America.
Citation?
Census.
The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
51–60 of 349 posts
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, there is something to what he's saying. The idea that the labor market behaves rationally is a childish fantasy. Employers are not rational. They do all sorts of irrational things, and discriminating against the long-term unemployed (and also women returning to the work force from motherhood) is one of those irrational things. It's almost a dating mentality. They jump to the conclusion: "well if nobody else wants…
Well if they act irrationally they will be sufficiently punished by the market (no childish fantasy required). There aren't enough jobs? Then create more jobs. Starting a company, at my last check, is incredibly simple to do. Of course, turning a profit is hard, which is why people turn to the government to provide them with work rather than take the risk of starting a company. The government doesn't need to turn a p…
The market doesn't punish the companies for irrational behavior when everyone engages in the same irrational behavior.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#53Two things. First, I wouldn't want to naysay the idea that unemployment is a vicious cycle, because it intuitively is. But: this analysis is based on resume callbacks. Something that I think is as true as the "damaged goods" stigma is that most Americans do not know how to market themselves during job searches. If your only access to the job market is through a mechanism that is designed to extract basic facts from a…
It is easy in the tech world (and HN is mostly tech) to confidently say 6 months is a long time for unemployment. At the moment, I'm fairly certain I could have interviews in a single digit number of hours, but that isn't true for people who have to compete for "general skills" jobs (i.e. those that require a resume, but no particular special skills, such as receptionists, admin and the like). Also there are a lot of…
If it's true that 6+ month resume gaps have a deleterious effect on job searches, my point would be that this observation is another arrow in the quiver of people (like myself) who believe that women face not just bias but also specific objective structural disadvantages in the workplace, beyond just the career development time they lose directly to child care.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Corporate System is the current economic totalitarianism in which it's pretty much impossible to stay afloat without corporate blessing. This has never been the case. Large corporations do not employ the majority of people.
Yes, they do. They're not even just the largest employer bracket; they literally employ a majority of the employed in America.
Hm...
http://www.bls.gov/bdm/entrepreneurship/entrepreneurship.htm
Firms with 250+ employees have been slightly >50% since 1996.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cewfs.nr0.htm
37.4% of employees are at firms of 1000+, 6.8% are 500-999, 7.2% are 250-499.
So either the numbers I remembered were a bit outdated, or were using a higher cutoff than 250 (probably 500, since I remember it being not that much less than 50% working at "large" corporations).
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#55It's not a terrible metric. There is an actual correlation between long term unemployment and being unemployable because of lack of skills and incompetence, or serious personality defects, such as drug addiction, mental disorders, criminality, violent behavior and laziness.
Few long term unemployed are long term unemployed for no reason at all. It's hard to take the claims seriously of those such as the article author who are unable or unwilling to acknowledge this.
If authors and social workers are concerned with advocating on behalf of the small minority of long term unemployed who are actually employable, it would be more helpful to have articles that address the issue of how to find the small number of long term unemployed who would make good team additions, without having to spend far more time interviewing bad candidates than one does when hiring currently employed and short term unemployed persons.
Advocating for the government to hire unemployable people for positions in government is one of the worst suggestions I have ever heard. Things are already bad enough with endemic incompetence and corruption in government bureaus without seeking out even more of the incompetent and dangerous and giving them the power and influence that comes with government positions.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Corporate System is actually collapsing. [Citation needed] I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen. Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding their economic power to lobby go…
I disagree with this assertion that corporations are a "terrible way of turning human labor into work product." In industries like software? Sure. In industries like coal mining? Explain to me how a decentralized structure would be a more efficient way of marshaling the capital resources and labor necessary to blow the top off a mountain and extract a bunch of rocks from the carcass.
Well, I'm not a fan of mountaintop removal. Still, I get your point, and you're right. I shouldn't say "corporations" are terrible at that, because there are a lot of processes that require (if nothing else) the legal structure of one, but that a certain management style associated with the 20th-century large corporation is counterproductive.
We can't know, because we can't go back in time, but I feel like those coal miners would have been just as productive (if not moreso) if they were better compensated for their work.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#57At some point the pendulum may swing the other way, and employers may not hire anyone who even has a current job, using "loyalty" as a filter. "If they're so bold as to take time off work to go interview here with me, why would I ever trust that they won't just lie for a day off and leave me high and dry in the future?"
If we want to affect quick change for 'long term unemployed', start offering tax breaks to employers (hasn't this been done/tried already?). Reduce payroll tax by 2% for every year a person has been unemployed (2 years = 4% reduction, etc). That would, I'd think, get employers' attention.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#58"It's time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed." What the fuck? If you measure something you do not like, the immediate response should not be to grab a hammer and try to kill it. It probably exists for a reason. Understand the reason. Then take action. It may be that there is nothing you can do -- directly. Only a small few percentage points of the problems in the world go away through direct…
Eh, there is something to what he's saying. The idea that the labor market behaves rationally is a childish fantasy. Employers are not rational. They do all sorts of irrational things, and discriminating against the long-term unemployed (and also women returning to the work force from motherhood) is one of those irrational things. It's almost a dating mentality. They jump to the conclusion: "well if nobody else wants…
So you think I'm arguing for a rational market. I am not. Another commenter thinks that I'm ignoring the benefits of getting up and working any kind of job. I am not.
Why would you guys have such diverse opinions on what I'm advocating? Because the problem is not sufficiently stated. That's my entire point. You make one measurement and say "let's work on this directly" and you haven't said much of anything. All you have is correlation. Lots of correlation in the world. It's like the doctor taking your temperature and then applying ice packs because you have a fever. Maybe you have a cold! Maybe you just exercised! Maybe cool water would be better! And so forth. Hell, I don't know what you have, all you've given me is one data point.
If you don't define a problem well, you can't define an experiment to prove that some intervention works or doesn't work. You just have a measurement you want to be different. That may be a huge social problem, but in terms of being useful, it's not a lot of anything. I don't particularly like the fact that high schools graduate so many kids who fail a reading test, but I doubt changing the test is going to alleviate my concern.
Sure, the market is probably irrational to one degree or another. That doesn't mean that we should approach it with an equal degree of irrationality. This very well could be a multi-faceted problem only solved at the level of the individual, like most problems are. Or not. From this article, we don't know one way or another.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's probably easier to justify a 6 month gap with "I decided to have a kid" than "I was unemployed because nobody wanted me".
I think you'll find, if you talk to a lot of women who have looked for jobs after taking 6+ months off to deal with having a kid, that this is not true.
I'm in the UK so maybe things are somewhat different here with regards maternity but all women I have worked with who have taken time off for this have been given their job straight back once they are ready to return and are usually paid some % of their salary while they were off (I think the law mandates this).
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#60Two things. First, I wouldn't want to naysay the idea that unemployment is a vicious cycle, because it intuitively is. But: this analysis is based on resume callbacks. Something that I think is as true as the "damaged goods" stigma is that most Americans do not know how to market themselves during job searches. If your only access to the job market is through a mechanism that is designed to extract basic facts from a…
"is that most Americans do not know how to market themselves during job searches" Along the same lines I had an office a few years ago in an office park about 1 mile from a Walmart. In all the years I was there nobody ever knocked on our door looking for work or dropping off a resume. At the Walmart though I'm almost certain that they had a steady stream of job seekers showing up and filling out employment forms. I'v…
Your anecdote doesn't really seem feasible for most people. Do you think it's reasonable that someone who has been out of work for 6 months would take on the risk and cost of flying to a tradeshow?