All posts tagged employers
I'm not always wearing my full habit...
Facebook has a message for job seekers: Tell prospective employers that you can’t hand over your password because it’s a violation of the social networking giant’s terms of service.
The company said in a blog post Friday that businesses that solicit access to the Facebook passwords of potential employees are violating Facebook’s terms of service and are inviting a host of other problems.
The post comes amid reports of job applicants being asked by prospective employers to hand over their Facebook passwords so that the employer could fully check their Facebook profiles.
Earlier this week, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said he is writing a bill to outlaw the practice of employers requesting access to private Facebook accounts as a term of prospective employment. He said that amounts to an “unreasonable invasion of privacy” for those looking for work. Several states are also considering legislation.
Facebook: Firms violate terms by asking for passwords
Remember this when some libertarian scumbag falsely claims that corporations aren’t a threat to individual liberties and that the state is not needed to protect society from corporate depredations. — Ryking
(via ryking)
Michigan State University surveyed more than 700 employers seeking to hire recent college graduates. Nearly one-third said parents had submitted resumes on their child’s behalf, some without even informing the child. One-quarter reported hearing from parents urging the employer to hire their son or daughter for a position. Four percent of respondents reported that a parent actually showed up for the candidate’s job interview.
~reblogged by Trent Gilliss, senior editor (via beingblog) I don’t even know what to say about these finding. I see parents negotiating on the playground, but in the workplace for a 22-year-old college graduate? Oy.
From nprfreshair
Bring Your Parent To Work Day: So-called helicopter parents have hit the workplace, phoning employers to advocate on behalf of their adult children. Human resource managers say more parents are trying to negotiate salary and benefits and are even sitting in on job interviews.
Undercover Nun’s guess? These parents don’t want their kids to move back into their homes… or perhaps they’re trying to get their children to fly the nest after they’ve moved back in.
This says a lot about American culture in the 21st century, doesn’t it?
(via beingblog)
We also hugely underestimate the role of chance in life (this is System 1’s work). Analysis of the performance of fund managers over the longer term proves conclusively that you’d do just as well if you entrusted your financial decisions to a monkey throwing darts at a board. There is a tremendously powerful illusion that sustains managers in their belief their results, when good, are the result of skill; Kahneman explains how the illusion works. The fact remains that “performance bonuses” are awarded for luck, not skill. They might as well be handed out on the roll of a die: they’re completely unjustified. This may be why some banks now speak of “retention bonuses” rather than performance bonuses, but the idea that retention bonuses are needed depends on the shared myth of skill, and since the myth is known to be a myth, the system is profoundly dishonest – unless the dart-throwing monkeys are going to be cut in.
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman – review | Books | The Guardian (via ayjay)
Amen!
While we’re at it, how about addressing those companies that require managers to rank their employees and/or fit them to a bell curve? If you don’t intentionally hire incompetent idiots to fit the lower half of the curve, then why should the company force you to rate good performers as failures?
Gah! It’s so frustrating! Can’t we just be honest and call annual raises “cost of living increases,” and truly reward great performance separately from these?
(via ayjay)
Squashed: It takes two to strike a bargain...
… which is why blaming the public sector unions for unsustainable pension benefits doesn’t make a lot of sense. A variety of administrations decided they could persuade union members to accept lower salaries in exchange for benefits later. Then they neglected to set aside money to fulfill their promises.
If the money isn’t there, the money isn’t there. Shame on the administrations for making promises they couldn’t bother to keep. (And unions: why did you trust those guys?) Don’t blame the unions for large pensions. Negotiating on behalf of their members is their job. They did it. Blame the folks who were actually in charge of putting together state budgets.
Hear, hear!
Discriminating against the unemployed
Undercover Nun has often found it to be true that companies prefer to hire people who are already working rather than people who are unemployed. There is a perception that if you’re any good, you wouldn’t be unemployed. We all know from people we’ve met at work, though, that this isn’t always true.
What’s happening these days is even more extreme. Employers are including statements in their job listings that tell the unemployed not to apply, and the number of companies doing this is on the rise.
Now there’s a growing trend of employers refusing to consider the unemployed for job openings, according to a number of people who testified before the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Wednesday. They say that employers are barring the unemployed from job openings, which is particularly unfair to older workers and African Americans because more of them are unemployed.
“Excluding unemployed workers from employment opportunities is unfair to workers, bad for the economy, and potentially violates basic civil rights protections because of the disparate impact on older workers, workers of color, women and others,” said Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, in her testimony.
This is a sad and scary thing. It could turn out with tragic results, not only for those who lose everything due to unemployment, but for the American business world as a whole. It’s pretty tough to keep your skills fresh when you’re unemployed for more than a few weeks. While you’re unemployed, you probably aren’t paying into a retirement account, and you may not keep up with routine health care when you don’t have insurance. It’s hard to make investments in yourself, even to make yourself more marketable in the workplace, without motivation and any compensation for the costs.
There are some excellent comments on both blog posts, with some great analysis. (There are also some from people who appear to be ignorant, heartless, or both.) I think Ms. McArdle sums it up best in her conclusion:
What’s happening to the long term unemployed is tragic. Not only are they becoming less employable as time wears on; they’re also losing the economic and social capital that comes from holding a job in our society.How to fix this? Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer. Long term unemployment is not, as far as I know, a protected category, and unfortunately employers often will be able to point to missing skills. The best solution is a booming economy and a tight job market, but I don’t have any idea when that’s coming.
Undercover Nun prays each day for the unemployed. I hope you do, too.
(Source: Los Angeles Times)
Ableism in open enrollment? Gah!
It’s open enrollment time at my work, which means time to make sure the medical insurance is good, to choose an amount for next year’s healthcare flexible spending account (FSA), and to make sure dependents and beneficiaries are all set up properly. In my first glance at the preview materials, I come across this paragraph about our medical coverage:
Your plan premiums also reflect “plan experience,” that is, how much plan participants incur in medical expenses each year. To keep future costs in line, we must work together. [Employer name redacted] will continue to manage our many vendors to provide the efficient and cost-effective delivery of care. You, as a plan participant, can help manage your plan utilization by becoming an astute health care consumer and by staying well — that’s the ultimate health care cost saver. (emphasis mine)
I guess they don’t realize how this sounds to those of us who have chronic conditions and disabilities. You can help keep our premiums low if you stay well, but if you’re chronically ill or disabled, thanks for screwing the rest of us. It’s hard to describe my reaction to this. I’m not really offended so much as frustrated. I feel a little angry, but the best description would be this makes my heart hurt.
Trust me, Employer. I do my very best to stay well, but it just isn’t going to happen completely for me. But hey, thanks for making me feel like I’m the one making health care more expensive for my co-workers and friends. That really brightens up my Monday!
Not.
On personhood
In the August 29 story “A no-show for 12 years, worker in Norfolk still paid,” the Virginian-Pilot reports a baffling story of an employee who remained on the payroll – receiving benefits and regular performance raises – without a record of ever being present at the workplace. This story made the national spotlight, being covered by CNN.
It is incredibly tempting to put on our Analyzing Glasses: to start digging for the details, to try to figure out what happened and when, to begin assessing blame, to consider consequences. We can throw around words like fraud and criminal and negligence. Instead, I see a deeper story than what appears on the surface.
So far, this employee’s name has not been published, but we know that the employee is a woman. We have seen nothing yet in the media that grants this woman personhood: no name, no hometown, no job title, no family. And yet, we know that this woman has all of these things. She has a mom and a dad; she may have a husband, children, grandchildren. Maybe she has an older brother or a younger sister; maybe she has nephews and nieces. Maybe she goes to church every Sunday without fail, wearing her best dress and her best heels and always a hat. Maybe she knits. Maybe she blogs. Maybe she has laughed about this every day for the last twelve years. Maybe it has eaten at her soul like a cancer. We don’t know. We have trouble seeing this woman as a person.
From what I see, moreover, the Norfolk Community Services Board has had the same trouble. This employee was not a person there, not a woman with a mom and dad, with a home and a garden and a needlepoint sampler. This was not a young lady just graduated from college, eager to help people, living on her own for the first time in her life. This woman was no more than a social security number, an employee number. She lost her personhood in bureaucracy, and will forever be known now as the Norfolk No-Show.
It becomes so easy, in the grind of quotidian business life, to become a nonperson. You can punch the time-clock, sit quietly in your cubicle, answer calls from irritated customers, eat your bag lunch, and drive back home without a feeling that anyone at work would notice or care if you just didn’t bother to show up tomorrow. You can be promoted to management, full of wonderful ideas, and be ground down by cut budgets and lay-offs, to the point where you’re supervising four times the employees you were a year before, you don’t know their names, and you laugh bitterly when trying to write performance reviews and dole out raises. This can be true in both public and private sectors, and especially during a time of economic uncertainty.
After punching out at the time clock, or submitting your daily time log online, you may drive back home in a daze, wondering Did I accomplish anything today? Is the world any better now than it was this morning? Why am I doing this? Is this really what I’m here for?
The teachings of the Judeo-Christian West tell us that each of us has dignity and worth, simply by virtue of being a person. But so much of our culture in a so-called developed nation deprives us of our dignity and worth, of our very personhood, and we all suffer from it. To express this in terms that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. used in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, an institution that is not rooted in eternal truth and natural truth is an unjust institution. Any institution that uplifts human personality is just. Any institution that degrades human personality is unjust. A workplace that robs us of human dignity and worth is unjust and unhealthy. Any workplace where an absent employee can go unnoticed for twelve years is one that degrades the personhood of its employees.
This is the underlying sickness at the Norfolk Community Services Board – and at many places of work around the country. This is an unjust institution that is willing to turn its employees into nonpersons. As a Christian, an Episcopalian, and a Dominican Sister, I name this injustice and sickness as sin. Because Christianity is about relationship, sin is a breach in relationship, a separation or an alienation. By compromising the dignity and worth of this woman, by failing to accept her personhood, the relationship between employer and employee is degraded and broken, which causes a chain reaction that affects a number of relationships. How can any man live to his potential as a nonperson? How can a woman find and live the true vocation of her heart when her personhood is denied? And as a nonperson, how can anyone live in authentic relationship with co-workers, friends, or family members?
To be sure, I don’t have all the facts yet. It is entirely possible that this woman contrived to bilk the Community Services Board, and thus the taxpayers of the City of Norfolk, out of thousands of dollars over the last twelve years. Because the Virginian-Pilot account tells us that the investigation “is nearly complete and will soon be turned over to the Norfolk police,” I surmise that this woman is probably not an innocent victim. By no means should it be inferred that fraud or similar misdeeds are excusable based on the underlying theme I see here.
Instead, let me give you a challenge. Tomorrow, when you go to your place of work – or stop by the DMV, or call your insurance company, or try to make heads or tails of an application for SNAP benefits – pay attention to the people around you. Consider that each man and woman is an individual who possesses dignity and worth, who has his or her own family and home and story. Think about your personhood. And remember to respect the personhood of those around you.
