Note : while I’ll be discussing a significant plot element in Season 3 of House of Cards, I will refrain from spoiling anything related to the main plotline. Please do the same.
In Season 3 of “House of Cards”, Kevin Spacey as president has come up with a piece of legislation intended to fix America. It’s a massive, 500 billion dollar government program meant to provide every unemployed person in all of America a job.
Now, there’s some…issues with this.
First of all, the price for labor in the USA at all comes with it the implicit assumption that if you don’t take a given employer’s offer, you may spend more time unemployed. Similarly, once you have a job, employers can threaten to fire you if you don’t work harder. If you are guaranteed a job, even if it is a much worse job working for the government, that threat doesn’t apply.
I cannot even imagine the effect it would have on the labor market as a result because it’s too complicated.
Another problem occurs in that it results in the government propping up unprofitable businesses. For example, a character in the show received a job as a dishwasher. The restaurant manager said “well, it’s been nice to have the extra help, but without further funding, I’m going to have to fire one of you…”
If the restaurant doesn’t bring in enough revenue to pay all the dishwashers without government help, maybe what it is doing as a business is not viable. This, notable, is an argument you could level at walmart. If they aren’t paying their employees enough to stay alive without government help, maybe they shouldn’t get that government help and should be forced to raise their prices and be a viable business.
With all that said, I do feel the government could do a lot to clean up the employment game. Instead of having job seekers have to apply at each and every employer, filling out a nonstandard form each time, and essentially wasting weeks of their lives - someone with poor prospects may have to do this for months to years and still won’t have a job.
Instead, the government (or a government mandated central firm) needs to maintain a central clearing house.
All job seekers should be able to fill out a standardized, computer searchable form. Any employers who have additional questions should be able to send them to a job seeker, and the job seeker’s answers to those questions should become part of the profile searchable by other employers.
Let’s say the job seeker reports they have a bachelor’s in Petroleum Pumping and 2 years experience working for Petroleum Pumps LTD. An employer creates a “secondary” questionnaire, and they autosend that questionaire to any job seeker who has a bachelor’s in petroleum pumping. The questionnaire asks if they have any experience in AR510 model pumps. If the seeker clicks “yes”, it automatically answers the identical question in secondary questionnaires sent by other employers.
Done correctly, a job seeker merely spends a few hours giving all the necessary information, and then every employer in the United States who could possibly offer them a job has a chance to make an offer.
We could even streamline the interview process by having third parties interview people, with the interview results available to all employers.
This means we won’t be able to blame the unemployed if they don’t get a job. If no one in the entire USA is interested in a person with a particular set of skills, the jobs must not exist. Similarly, it means that with a few clicks, implicitly, any job seeker has applied for every job that exists inside the USA that they could possibly fill.
The government could also stop a lot of predatory practices this way, as they would have accurate statistics on everything. It would be much easier to detect discrimination when you have access to the actual resumes of everyone who applied to every firm.
We could also eliminate the need for questionnaires in many cases. Employers who have active employees would be required to submit reports that describe what an employee did for them, what skills were required, etc. So the job market would not be a bullshitting contest of people with inflated resumes, at least not to the degree it is now, because people’s actual experiences and skills would be reported by third parties and part of the database.
I thought of this with my own job search last year. I had a set of skills that on paper meant I should have gotten a job immediately. Yet, I found it surprisingly hard to actually find a firm that I had the prerequisites for. I had to waste enormous amounts of time wading through postings, and submitting applications on non-standard website forms. Naturally, it was a total waste of time - I never got a single callback. I eventually got a job because I knew somebody that knew somebody.