No door greeter job 4 j00, Old Man Withers!Follow

First off, nice to see the corporate atmosphere encourages loyalty with bits like "expressing concern that workers with seven years' seniority earn more than workers with one year's seniority, but are no more productive".

That aside, about this "Don't hire the unhealthy, old and infirm because they cost us too much" bit. There are jobs within the retail world that someone with limited mobility can accomplish: the traditional door greeter, cashier, customer service desk, etc. Wal-Mart proposes to fold physical tasks into those positions in order to weed out a particular class of people. I'm not saying it's right or wrong or that it should be illegal or whatever but I'm curious: if you support businesses doing this as their own perogative to save costs, what is your solution towards the "unhealthy" who need to remain employeed? I doubt many people are working at Wal-Mart on a lark.

Do we support them via the reviled 'welfare state'? Do we just tell them to get another job despite the limited availability of jobs suitable for such people? In fact, Wal-Mart itself is accused of taking over the economic market in areas. Perhaps a town may have had enough small businesses that some had jobs but now there's a single entity that doesn't want you working there. Discounting legality, does Wal-Mart have any ethical responsibility? If not, who does? No one? Is the answer "tell them to die in the streets"?

I'm not trying lead anyone in this but I'm interested to hear what your solutions would be, particularly from fiscal conservatives.

Will they at least stop using socially aggressive retards as greeters? I hate getting slobbery cross-eyed melonheads up in my face spitting "Duh-welcome to Der-der duhh" whenever I go in.

I imagine that's the sort of thing lawyers discuss when using the word "discourage" and making everyone do physical labor as opposed to actively banning employees over 55 (or who need a cane, have a disease like lupus, or some other malady preventing them from sprinting around the parking lot like gazelles).

I believe it's illegal when hiring people for a position, to add employment requirements that have no correlation to successful performance of the job, even if said requirements are ostensibly reasonable or easy to meet. You can't make a college degree a requirement for a janitor. And if you have some sort of exam that applicants take, you have to show a statistical or reasonable correlation between performance on the exam and in the job.

In my opinion it's unethical and borderline illegal to add physical activities to a job description simply to weed out less desirable applicants. Although I'm sure Wal-Mart's legal team can come up with a nice exhibition of how having all cashiers share cart-retrieval is more cost-effective, and therefore a legal requirement.

That just made me guffaw.

Oh god I hope not!

Are you seriously suggesting that the government should get to decide the hiring criteria for a private business? Wow.

That may be true for government contract work. And certainly unions would love to have something like that. But the owner of a business has a right to set whatever criteria he wants. If he wants his janitors to have college degrees, he can require that if he wants. That may not be the most successful business model, but success or failure is his problem, not yours and not the governments.



It's not about "legal". When did you get the idea that requirements for employment had anything to do with legistlation or government in any way? That's insane and remarkably socialist of your. It's really simple. They are the employer. They own the business. They can decide how to conduct that business. If they want to exclude left handed people from employment they can do that if they want. If they want to create a requirement that every employee must do 100 sit ups before work, they can do that.

If their wacky employment practices allow them to succeed in the market, then they aren't that wacky are they? If Walmart thinks that requiring all workers to do physical labor of some kind to ensure they are all physically fit will improve their worker efficiency and ultimately improve their bottom line it is absolutely *not* the governments right to butt in and say they can't do that. That sort of government interferrence destroys innovation.

After all. How do you know they aren't right? We can't have government just leaping into private business and declaring what they can and can't do by fiat. I'm pretty sure that the civil rights act does not say that an employer can't choose to hire or fire people based on their physical ability to do the job. You do *not* have some kind of inalienable right to force an employer to pay you money even though you are less effective at a job then someone else. I know that in our union twisted views on employment we think it should be that way, but thankfully it's not.


Labor competes in the market, just like everyone else. Doing it any other way invites disaster.

I didn't make it up, gbaji:

Legal Hiring Practices FAQ





Going to admit you were wrong now?

probably not



Edited, Wed Oct 26 20:01:54 2005 by trickybeck

No. I did not. I said it wasn't illegal. Not that it wasn't discrimination. Not all discrimination is illegal. You're mixing two different things (as is Tricky).

First off, we're talking about civil law here. What can someone sue for. Not criminal law (something being "illegal"). Huge difference.

You can certainly sue for not being hired for a job for any percieved discrimination if you want. But that does not make that discriminaion "illegal" (not in the same way say that murder is illegal). There are specific exceptions in the case of race, gender, age, and religion (I might be missing one), where you can face criminal charges for discriminating on those basis, but even those aren't set in stone.


But that's not what Tricky said. He said it was illegal for a company to require that its janitors have a college degree. He gave this as a specific example of what was "illegal", not just something that might prompt a civil suit. My counter argument is that if a company wants to set such high standards for its janitors it can. It'll probably have problems competing with companies that hire high school dropouts for their janitors, but I don't think it's the government's job to make that determination. My point is that we can't say with any certainty that if a company can manage to get college educated people to be its janitors for some reason that this wont give them some sort of competitive edge. I can't see it in this case, but we should not make something illegal just because we can't see how it might work in the marketplace. It should only be illegal if we can determine that the practice specifically causes "harm" to someone or a group of someone's.


In this case, it's a borderline issue. One could argue age discrimination. However, remember that discrimination is *only* illegal if the company cannot show a valid business reason for the discrimination. Certainly, a business where heavy labor is required can require a certain physical capability by its laborers, right? That may result in fewer old people being hired. It certainly might prevent physically disabled people from being hired (imagine someone in a wheelchair applying to be a window washer for instance). That's "discrimination", but would never result in either a criminal or civil action as a result. The business can show a reason for it, so it's valid.


If Walmart can show that a certain type of employee is less valuable then others, it can certainly mold its hiring and job practices to that standard. So you can't discriminate based on age, but you certainly can require a level of physical fitness. In fact, that's exactly what they are doing in this case. If an 80 year old can hack it pushing a cart around, then that person can do the job. If their research shows that those physically able to do those tougher jobs are better employees across the board, then that's a completely valid requirement to place on their employees.


You guys are getting too hung up on the idea that all discrimination is "illegal". That's simply not true.

As they've proven over the years, Wal-Mart has no problem with vast numbers of people (including their own employees) being on the government dole.

That's what I said in my first post before you decided condescend me about stuff you weren't informed about.

I think I'm going back to my vow of non-response to gbaji.

It's like playing whack-a-mole.

Heh.. Gbaji missed the point of the question but I don't care enough to get into it. I thought someone might have something more interesting to say than reading "dominant" as "The only place in the region with any jobs at all so we have to sue them for anti-trust"

Um... Illegal as in "In violation with the law"?

The phrase you're looking for is "litigation worthy". That's a much more accurate description of what's actually going on. You are aware that there are lots of things that you can be sued over that are *not* illegal. But simpiltons tend to call them "illegal" because they don't know the difference.

Tricky made it sound like there was some law on the books stating that a company could not set it's own requirements for any given position (his example being requiring a janitor to have a college degree). That is clearly not true...




*cough* I was talking about the government setting education and experience requirements for particular positions. Tricky made it sound like there was some big government "list" that said that X job required Y education and/or experience, and employers could not vary from that. No such thing exists in the US. If I want to require a masters degree and 10 years experience for a janitorial position, I'm free to do that.

There are laws about what you *can't* reject hiring on, and anyone is free to sue for anything any time they want if they think they've been wronged, but no regulations saying what you *must* hire based on exist. That's the point I was trying to make. The US government does not tell compaies what their hiring requirements can be or must be. It only restricts them from rejecting employment based on a very small number of factors.

Again. I was responding to Tricky's example. Read the context around the conversation...