South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Naked Capitalism can’t understand why Americans who lose jobs “become pariahs in the job market.”

I think there have been significant second-order effects as a result of a restructuring of the American workplace by employer who like to claim that “employees are our most important asset”: but really treat them as expenses to be minimized, ruthlessly. One is the way unemployment quickly becomes a barrier to getting a job again. There has always been bit of a stigma surrounding unemployment, since the concern is that the individual lost his job for performance reasons, as opposed to bad luck …
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But I’ve seen the bias become far more ingrained over time, reinforced and rationalized by the bizarre way that companies now spec jobs. Whereas in the stone ages they’d hire a competent-seeming individual with some relevant experience, they now look for people who have done exactly the same job at a similar company. This overly narrow hiring spec then leads to absurd, widespread complaint that companies can’t find people with the right skills. That’s bunk. As Dean Baker has pointed out repeatedly, it means they need to pay more, or as I’d suggest, they need to broaden their horizon a tad. The idea that people need a lot of costly training is in most cases grossly exaggerated, a convenient “whocoulddanode” for manager who are quick to fire people and then discover when they want to gear back up that there are costs of brining new workers on, no matter how hard they try to minimize them.

The post concludes

So this “skills” meme is basically an excuse for bad policy and lazy management. It allows for the rationalization of outcomes that would have been seen as unacceptable in the Reagan era. And it’s hard to pin this development on the Fed. This weakening of the position of workers is the result of both deliberate action and misguided economics frameworks. It’s time to take aim at the ideology, not just some of its key followers.