But Now You Know

The job you really want, right now, is being held by some lazy, incompetent fool, whose boss wants to fire him…but cannot, thanks to people like Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee. In fact, Cohen probably identifies with the guy stealing your job.

This is because of the way government meddles with the hiring and firing of employees, now.

Involuntary Employers

Obviously, part of the problem is that it’s so hard to fire bad employees.

• First, ridiculous laws allow privileged groups to claim discrimination or mean treatment based on race, sex, lifestyle, or many other things, claims as vague and unrefutable as fake neck injuries…and just as indicative of the evils of lawyers and our corrupt legal system.
• What’s more, an employer is nearly as likely to be assumed guilty, by the public or the courts, as if accused of child molesting.
• The maze of what is a privileged group is so insane that the employer can’t guess WHO might turn out able to sue. Are you of a privileged lifestyle? A favored fringe religion? They’re not even allowed to ask…so EVERYONE is seen as a potential trap.

So the safe thing to do is just leave the bad employee in his job, and suffer the economic burden to the company (and therefore economy), spending even more money to work around the problem.

If only employers were free to fire bad workers, it would be easier for ALL workers to get jobs, and then prove themselves to keep them. Even if you lacked experience, an employer could feel free to take a chance on you, and see how you work out.

Forced Anonymity

Since you are banned from proving yourself on the job, you need to prove yourself before you’re hired, but when you first apply for a job, the employer knows nothing about you but some claims on a piece of paper. When he interviews you, he can ask questions that show how much you have memorized, and he can get an idea of how likable you are…but he still can’t know how you behave as an employee.

It’s to your benefit to be able to show a prospective employer what a great worker you really are, and the only really effective way to do this is through references.

But laws and our harmful legal system have made that almost impossible.

The references of bad former employees have to fear repercussions if they say anything bad about an employee…in fact, it’s considered increasingly dangerous to say anything NEUTRAL about an employee, as this has become a way of clearly not saying something good about him, to bypass the prohibition.

This means that anyone trying to call your references can’t really trust all your good reviews, so you’ve lost this tool for proving your value.

Know Your Associate

It is also illegal, effectively, to hire mainly people you know or have some social affiliation with, especially if most of whom you know are healthy, straight white males. You are required to have some artificial ratio of sex, race, sexual preference, even political viewpoint and other things, depending on how crazily PC your state is…and statistics say you won’t accidentally know exactly the right proportions of each, when thinking of what friends could fill that job opening.

This is unfortunate, because you have a better idea of the abilities of people you know, despite any biases you may have from friendship or other factors, than you could possibly know about strangers applying, especially under the current anti-reference conditions.

Another tool for finding a good employee, down the drain.

So employers are unable to screen workers well before they hire them, yet are trapped with the bad ones once they do.

Let’s Ban MORE Hiring Tools!

Not trying to prove the point by showing he's fugly, just want you to see who's attacking your right to win a job

As employers grow more desperate to find ways to pre-prove employees they are scared to hold to any standards once hired, some are resorting to running credit checks. Obviously, while it doesn’t directly show how they work, it increases the odds of knowing something about the character of the person. Not perfectly, but it gives them some chance to reasonably guess.

So you can’t prove your worth on the job, because the employer fears firing being stuck with bad workers.

You can’t prove how great you are with references, because it’s effectively illegal for them to be honest.

One of the few ways left is to allow a potential employer to run a credit check. Sure, it doesn’t show how you do a job, but there is some loose correlation between character and good credit. If your credit’s at least OK, the odds are at least somewhat better of you taking commitments seriously. And, anyway, it shows you have less incentive to steal from the company.

Having them run a credit check on you may be the thing that seals the deal.

But now,  Representative Cohen and others like him want to ban even this entirely plausible hiring tool.

They literally want to make it illegal for you to give your job prospect permission to run a credit check.

Obviously, aside from how almost any intrusion in the free market causes harm, this is wrong. They want to deprive both you and the employer of one of the few remaining ways to prove you should be hired.

Why, we wonder, aren’t they instead trying to restore the other, better ways that were already banned?

If checking credit does not work well, it will die out with competition. If it works well, they have a RIGHT to use it.

Interestingly, the only employers I’ve ever had do a credit check on me were government agencies and their contractors….and this bill exempts those, as corrupt Congresscritters typically protect themselves from the bad laws they impose on us.

This bill needs to be stopped, and the current laws preventing good job matching need to be fixed.