I don't get why we use this term. You're either employed or you're not. Just because you got an education in something that is no longer valued by society doesn't mean you're entitled to a job doing whatever you're educated to do.
Society rewards those that provide some good or service that is wanted/needed.
Furthermore, employment by others is not the only option. You can also work for yourself (except when the state forbids it through licensing and permits)
It's certainly not all bad. Giving people who would otherwise have no job prospects the experience of coming to work every day, getting used to the routine and socialization of a work environment and evaluating their ability to be a part of that system is valuable. Even if it only lasts a few months, it's much better than nothing. Especially given that the only alternative for most of them is a blanket rejection based on something they did years ago, often without an interview.
It would be better for all of society if programs like this were more common.
As Spooky23 pointed out below, their very "unemployability" is also a function of public policies (like employer-linked retirement accounts and health insurance) that continually increase the fixed-costs of each marginal worker, discouraging hiring.
Unemployable does not mean "can't get the job I want", it means "can't get a job". It's when your useless ten year old degree in education stops you from getting a job as a waitress so once again you're having sleep for dinner.
The second of those is huge. Unfortunately, it's well-founded prejudice too; a lot of people who are jobless are jobless for a reason. Many "layoffs" are a euphemism for being fired, and interviews are imperfect to say the least. If I don't catch the reason you're unemployable, there are two possibilities:
(1) You don't have a reason, and you're perfectly employable
(2) You do, and it slipped past the interview process.
The longer you're jobless, the less employable you are. Employable people will snatch up new jobs very quickly. If you've sent 10,000 resumes and flunked 100 interviews, and pass mine, odds aren't that you've magically improved, but that you got lucky. If you've been unemployed for the past two years without good reason, you're very likely in that bin, so for most hiring managers, the longer you've been unemployed, the harder it is to pass an interview screen.
On the other hand, shit work 9-5 looks the same on a resume or in an interview as real work. A hiring manager won't know any better.
As a footnote, leverage is a real issue, but is easier to manage. Many companies will try to take advantage. However, at least as often:
- The hiring manager (personally) doesn't care about how much you cost. They want a good team, and it's not their money.
- The employer has fixed salary grades. There's little room to negotiate. If you do negotiate, the impact is generally transitory (if you're hired at the top of your salary grade, you can expect to have no raises for a few years without a promotion).
- The company compensates fairly, since they don't want a revolving door of people.
I'm not going to argue whether that's a majority or minority of companies, but it's manageable. At that kind of employer, you might get a few thousand extra with leverage than without, but it won't be a difference of tens of thousands of dollars, and nowhere near "being taken advantage of."
I agree. Perhaps Mr Harari wrote that to provoke the readers. The next sentence is: «People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable.» – so perhaps a better term is the «unemployable class».
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