President Obama wants to end discrimination against the unemployed, by making it an unlawful employment practice to not hire someone because they’re unemployed.
My question, and this is only partially rhetorical: does anyone think this is a good idea?
The only possible scenario I can imagine where someone’s status as unemployed- and only that- would prevent an employer from hiring them is if the applicant in question had lost their job through no fault of their own, was very qualified, and the employer had some irrational dislike for people who had lost their job. In which case that particular employer would be stupid, and lose out to an employer who was in the habit of hiring people based on competency. That seems like it would be a pretty rare scenario.
Meanwhile, the law would encourage any unemployed person who was not hired for a particular job to take that employer to court. Not wishing to be exposed to frivolous law suits or be told that they have to hire someone who is potentially less qualified than other applicants, employers might choose to not hire people at all.
There’s also the point that if someone who is hired for Job A already has a Job- Job B- they’re going to have to give up Job B (assuming A and B are both full-time jobs) to take Job A. So unless this person’s original employer decides not to fill Job B, that’s a job that somebody will be hired for. I suppose you could make an argument that having people move jobs all the time is inefficient, but isn’t it a lot more inefficient to have employers sidelined with nuisance suits and/or choosing not to hire in the first place?
Now, I understand that the jobs plan is more Campaign Obama than President Obama, and he couldn’t care less that the thing doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing, but why include this provision?
Does he think he’s going to score political points here? Make Republicans come out for discrimination against the unemployed? Is he pandering to the unemployed vote (good luck with that)? Is he pandering to the stupid vote (“if employers can’t discriminate against unemployed people, they’ll hire all the unemployed people!”)?
I just don’t see it. I also don’t see how people can call Obama a centrist when he chooses to throw out such strange and novel restrictions on business owners.
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