It Can Still Get Worse

Bob Herbert has uncovered a disturbing trend:

Bob Herbert, At Grave Risk

According to the National Employment Law Project, a trend is growing among employers to not even consider the applications of the unemployed for jobs that become available. Among examples offered by the project were a phone manufacturer that posted a job announcement with the message: “No Unemployed Candidate Will Be Considered At All,” and a Texas electronics company that announced online that it would “not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason.”

This is the environment that is giving rise to the worker protests in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere. The ferment is not just about public employees and their unions. Researchers at Rutgers University found last year that more than 70 percent of respondents to a national survey had either lost a job, or had a relative or close friend who had lost a job. That is beyond ominous. The great promise of the United States, its primary offering to its citizens and the world, is at grave risk.

This is how far we have fallen, where companies can state ‘unemployed need not apply,’ like the racist hiring policies of the past that excluded Blacks, Irish, or Chinese from possibilities of employment.

Today, the trench between the dispossessed and the world of work grows wider, so wide that very few have the wherewithal to get over.

And where are the social policies that could resolve this? Where is Obama anyway?

How can this be legal? We already know it is unjust.

These are the roots of the coming unrest, here. The unemployed and homeless. the members of broken unions and the pensioners, the college grads with no jobs, the parolee reduced to collecting bottles, the mother with three hungry kids: these will all come to the streets, and cry for justice.

And it can still get worse.