Is he in the same field and area as you? Otherwise, it could be almost anything. For example, I work for a state agency. My knowledge and skills are highly specialized. If I left this job for any reason , I would be fortunate to find something that paid half as much - I’d pretty much have to start at entry level in a completely new field. You can be damned sure that if I believed I was fired for a discriminatory reason, I’d be suing even if I got another job quickly. Something similar happened to my husband.He worked at a retail store which decided to fire the higher paid store managers, and replace them with younger, cheaper people (the usual reason for age discrimination- the over 40s fired with him didn’t sue because they had to waive that right to get severance pay) ) Found a job quickly enough, but it took a few years before his salary recovered. You see ,at that time the companies in his industry didn’t hire store managers- they hired department managers and promoted from within.
I suspect, at any rate, that most employment discrimination claims don’t even have to do with terminations , but with discrimination in other areas such as assignments, pay and promotions.
And if this is the case you are thinkingof , I’m not sure how much of the damages has to do with the claimed discrimination and how much has to do with the other issues.
He’s done this kind of thing before. And everytime, someone will point out how laughably foolish his errors in reasoning are. But he persists. Go figure.
Working in the insurance claims industry I have to agree the claims that I’ve come across professionally are for the most part bogus. I haven’t had to handle many, but the few I’ve had seem filed by people who refuse to accept their culpability in their loss of employment.
I worked for a while for a company that specialized in insuring the auto trade, mostly dealerships and employment discrimination claims in that business segment were rife. There was one guy who did mostly just that.
I have one now involving loss of professional privileges at an institution. The person who filed it over ten years ago is a relentless ego maniac who lost in Federal court and is now wasting everyone’s time and resources in circuit court. This person hasn’t lost any professional license and can still practice, just not within a certain institution.
Yes, I’ve taken statistics. Since I haven’t undertaken herein to prove anything as a mathematical matter, that’s not especially germane, though.
The OP from its nature is a first-principles argument that most qualified people, it would stand to reason, would not be greatly harmed by irrational discrimination. People can agree or disagree, and have. TMMV. I’ve even acknowledged some unique aspects of my workplace that might make it an outlier (viz., the ease with which people can jump company to company).
People rely on and have their actions shaped by personal and anecdotal evidence every day. If they did not, they would waste an awful lot of time.
I only know conditions in my own field, but there are whole magazinesdevoted to recruiting women and minorities, paid for by ads run by all the major employers. They also have their own job fairs, employee associations, professional organizations, and mentoring programs. I find it hard to believe that a company would take out a pricy ad in a special magazine, send a recruiter to a minority job fair, place the new employee with a mentor, and then suddenly start discriminating against him/her. That’s certainly not proof that discrimination never happens, but it’s a pretty good indication that if it does, it’s some rogue manager, not company policy.
We don’t need to delve into the world of theory to discuss employment discrimination. There are countless places in the world where there are no effective anti-discrimination laws.
I had the opportunity to witness the hiring process at an American run call center in India. All candidates over 30 were instantly disqualified. They were considered too demanding. All unmarried women were disqualified. The company thought the potential of there being a wedding was too distracting. And this is just the stuff I saw. I’m sure people’s individual ethnic biases got in there, too. I saw it happen quite often there. A good friend of mine rented a house and when he showed up to move in, the owner discovered his last name and refused to rent him the house because he didn’t like my friend’s ethnic background.
Or another example- just try to get a job teaching English in Asia if you are black or Asian. It can happen, but you will probably get passed up for jobs that you would have gotten if you were a blond haired blue eyed typical American.
The evidence is overwhelming that in the absence of employment discrimination laws, discrimination runs rampant.
When I was in law school I worked for the “Employment Rights” department of the Attorney General’s Office. This department was misnamed because its function was to defend state agencies from civil rights claims. Based on what the attorneys there told me, many who were good people that were there for 10+ years time, the majority of claims they encountered were, in fact, bogus. Generated by people who were malcontents, or wanted a quick buck from a settlement, or a change of scenery, or to get back at a someone they didn’t like. That said, they always maintained that there was a fair number, though surely a minority, of claims that were legit. Based on that experience I would hesitantly agree with the OP but add that I think its a necessary evil of a very worthwhile system.
These real world examples show that the common argument used by conservatives – “Well, why would a rational businessman discriminate? He’d only be hurting himself” don’t prevent discrimination.
The reason is that, as has been proven over and over in many studies, people are very often not rational at all. In particular, people often make decisions that hurt themselves.
You are assuming that their so-called discriminatory actions are, in fact, irrational. I could, but won’t here, detail why not hiring old workers, or pregnant women, or Hindu brides-to-be, was in fact quite economically rational (albeit I could, in theory get on board with a social-contract argument that we should proscribe such behavior, nonetheless, in the interests of the Greater Good).
even sven, my comments were made in the context of a society that already has in place a fairly effective prophylactic “anti-discrimination” regime. (That’s implicit in the fact that I discussed “employment discrimination claims” – no such thing would exist in your India hypothetical). I’ve previously agreed that absent such regime, employers would be free to take whatever (possibly arbitrary) actions they desired (whether free employment and an at-will regime is good or bad, YMMV). We do not, however, in the West live in a no-rules regime. “Anti-discrimination”/affirmative action rules exist, and IME are substantively (often perversely, again YMMV) enforced. Within such regime, my contention was that those who still fail out, still make claims, were disproportionatly likely to be among life’s losers.
In short, my post was not talking about Indian call centers. It was talking about the type of person who would make an employment discrimination claim within a very PC Western corporate environment. Apples/oranges.
This doesn’t match the pattern of golden parachutes I’ve observed both in places I’ve worked and in our current national financial brouhaha. Instead, over and over again, the pattern I see is that management DOES get raises, promotions, and stock options utterly without regard to whether the company stagnates. Here’s some current examples: Fuld, Fishman.
