I agree that if this policy exists, it’s because they believe that Ivy League graduates won’t stay with the job very long.
About 10 years ago, there was a big lawsuit when a police department (I’m pretty sure it was in Massachusetts) wouldn’t hire a man for a patrol job because his IQ was too high. Their justification was that such a person would get bored with the job and quit in a few years. I don’t remember how the suit came out.
Different line but a partial explaination.
When I graduated from the Maritime Academy shipping jobs were hard to come by. So I started to look for a job ashore.
I would interview at one job and I would get the answer, “Kid we would love to hire you but you just don’t have enough experience.” The next job down the street which pais $.05 less an hour would say, “Kid we would love to hire you but with your background and experience you won’t stay.” The thing that got me was it was nickle an hour that made me over qualified or under qualified.
Over the years if I can talk to the Chief Engineer then I have a chance. If I only talk to personal then little chance, they really did not know what was really wanted.
I am a highly educated lad who toils in a minimum wage position.
I did get a Masters and right now I’d kill for an Office Admin job.
Mostly right. It was New London, Connecticut and the name of the fellow at issue was Richard Jordan. He lost in the district court and the case went to the Second Circuit, which ruled the policy had a rational basis, which is a term of art in Constitutonal law. It doesn’t mean the policy was right per se. Only that it wasn’t subject to equal protection challenge.
But you’ve got to look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics to get a fuller view. A large percentage of a small percent of workers (28% of the workforce is college educated). The BLS indicates that union representation for educated workers is primarily not in the private sector, but in the public sector where salaries are low, unions are already entrenched, politics is rampant, and productivity is non-important. It’s quite plain that where there are no unions currently, there’s no desire for one among educated people. (I quite plainly discounted public/government in my previous post.)
What’s especially interesting are the number of forced union members in all of those statistics (i.e., those who pay dues without being a member, or those who pay agency fees). Unfortunately (and speaking from personal experience here), it’s damned hard to get rid of a union once there’s one in place.
So, private sector, educated people: they don’t want unions. They have the education and resources to start unions if it were something that they wanted, and yet the statistics overwhelmingly support that they don’t start/join unions.
Ouch. A friend of mine in a similarly bitter position posted a link to this column in The Chronicle of Higher Education earlier today on FB: Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go, subtitled It’s hard to tell young people that universities view their idealism and energy as an exploitable resource.
Ow ow ow!!! Reading that article was painful not only because I care about my friend but because I could see, spelled out in blunt and truthful terms, how things got this way for him.
Huh.
I’m a teacher with a very useful and legitimate Masters degree, and work in a district with 300 other teachers who have or are working toward Masters degrees.
We have a union.
This phenomenon is true in a lot of industries. I have had better results talking to the guy who needs me rather than the HR drone.
Teachers are one exception to the general rule that the poster you’re responding to noted.
You guys fall under “the larger the employer, the more likely you get a union” rule.
You’re also skilled enough to make wholesale scabbing difficult.
It’s obviously convenient for your point to dismiss out of hand all numbers that don’t back up your point, but you can’t do that and retain any credibility.
First, let’s address your slander. You’re talking to someone who actually worked more than a decade in local government. Because of the nature of my job I dealt not just with fellow city employees but also town, country, state, and federal employees. From the way you’re blathering I know for sure that you never have. You’re talking through your hat, to put it politely. Governmental employees are educated, pick careers in government because that’s an excellent route toward helping people, and are exactly as productive in a random sampling as a random sampling of anyone else.
Government work and teaching are careers and professions that educated people choose for the work, with the fact that they are unionized important but secondary. Just as educated people choose professions like journalism for the work with the fact that they are unionized important but secondary.
The public/private sector division you make is not just arbitrary and absurd but applies only to the United States. Unions were not invented here. They exist almost everywhere. In many countries professions that are in the private sector in the U.S. are in the public sector and unionized. The U.S. experience is merely a accident of history. The forces behind unionization are universal.
You keep saying that you aren’t anti-union yet you keep spouting anti-union stereotypes without a shred of evidence to back them up.
The fact is that educated people do choose to be unionized and in higher percentages than the less educated. You can’t get around that. In fact, they tend to start unions whenever the economic circumstances of the industry support collective bargaining, and they start alternative collective regulatory and lobbying units whenever the economic circumstances don’t.
Education breeds unions. It has for at least the past century. It has in all western countries. It does so today in greater percentages than lack of education, not only in the U.S. but elsewhere. In a world in which services predominate over labor, education will continue to grow unions. And that’s our world.
Your entire post, exapno, is assuming a lot of facts not in evidence
You are clearly proseltyzing, not arguing a factual.
Regardless, it’s not at all clear that even your basis is correct. The golden age of unions was relatively short-lived and heavily concentrated in unskilled labor. It’s definitely not clear how things will be going.
You have not disproven the previous point, which was that for highly educated labor, unionization was unusual and heavily concentrated in government.
I know that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”, but I have two friends with master’s degrees in criminal justice who worked at Wal-Mart as low-level employees. One is still there, actually.
Were they shooting for academic careers investigating crime, or careers in law enforcement/corrections?
I know the occasional metro PD has layoffs, but I hadn’t realized the cop industry had gotten that bad…
Recently I advertised for a clerk in my office. I was very clear that it is a part time position paying $8-9 dollars per hour and ideally suited for a college student. I had over 150 applications (and they are still coming).
At least a quarter of these were well educated people with extensive work experience. I did not consider them.
This is a job for someone to file, run errands and pick up dry cleaning. The bottom line is an over qualified person would just use the position until something better came along. I couldn’t blame them but I certainly don’t want to go through the hiring process every couple of months.