Employers | Ted Rall's Rallblog

Death to the Credentialocracy

January 16, 2024•

The summer after junior year, my college expelled me. Six years later I returned and graduated with honors. During the interregnum, I worked. But finding a decent job was tough.

No matter how easy or rote the gig, every prospective employer listed a bachelor’s degree as a prerequisite to apply. I drifted from temp work to short-term project, barely scraping by. Then I came across a listing by a bank searching for an entry-level administrator. Amazingly, they didn’t say anything about having to have a college degree.

I didn’t lie on my resume. “9/81-5/84 Columbia University” listed the dates I attended. I didn’t state that I’d graduated. Nor did I announce: “DROPPED OUT/LOSER.”

Interviews went well and I was offered the job. It was 1986, my income rose from $10,000 to $17,000, and I felt grand.

On my first day, though, after I’d quit my previous job, my new boss offhandedly asked: “You graduated, right?”

“Yes,” I said. I needed the money too much to be honest.

Four years went by. I was repeatedly promoted and given big raises. I worked on big deals. My boss loved me. We became friends. His kindness was too much. I couldn’t lie to him anymore. I confided the truth.

Something wild happened: he apologized to me.

“I should never have listed that college degree requirement,” he said. “You’re a great employee; if you hadn’t lied I would never have gotten to work with you. I’m sorry you’ve been scared all this time. Thank you for lying.”

He dropped the college credential stipulation from his future job listings.

In 1995 I published a widely-circulated and well-received essay for Might magazine titled “College Is For Suckers“ in which I argued that American colleges and universities were perpetuating a multibillion-dollar scam directed at tens of millions of naïve young people and parents.

It’s worse now.

Because you can’t get a professional job without a degree, post-secondary educational corporations—which is what they are—can charge as much as they want. Banks and the government enable the grift by giving 18-year-olds high-interest loans they can never escape, even if they declare bankruptcy. Easy-money loans have allowed colleges to hike tuition five times faster than the rate of inflation since 1970.

Colleges are selling a service we don’t need or necessarily want. Yet we’re coerced into buying at insanely inflated rates.

Many of us pay for that service and don’t even receive it; 42% of college students will never graduate—mostly low-income and minority people—yet they’ll still owe those loans.

At the root of the student loan-industrial complex is the credentialocracy, a corrupt system in which the college education that people receive serves no practical purpose beyond allowing them to apply for a job. What they study and hopefully learn may be interesting or personally enriching, but it does not provide them with any of the knowledge or training needed to do the job. A mere one out of four graduates works in a field related to their major. Even among that tiny portion, few actually learn stuff at school that they wind up using on the job.

The solution is obvious: employers should stop demanding that applicants obtain an education they don’t need. The Labor Department should issue regulations designed to discourage overcredentialization.

Instead, we’re making the problem worse. We’re saddling families with debt-trap Parent PLUS loans with bigger principals and interest rates higher than traditional government-backed student loans. Student-loan forgiveness schemes dun taxpayers, many of whom don’t go to college, while colleges and banks keep raking in cash and raising rates.

Students loans are a $1.7 trillion business.

Fortunately, the tight labor market has prompted some companies to eliminate silly degree requirements. “Part of it is employers realizing they may be able to do a better job finding the right talent by looking for the skills or competencies someone needs to do the job and not letting a degree get in the way of that,” Parisa Fatehi-Weeks, senior director of environmental, social and governance for the hiring website Indeed told CBS. If history repeats, however, degree inflation will roar back with the next recession.

Credentialocracy is a toxic mindset that prioritizes arbitrary classist certifications over talent and hard work and, as such, should be purged from our collective consciousness. When Hillary Clinton touted her presidential candidacy based on her resume, we ought to have asked: “Impressive list of titles, but what did she accomplish?” When retired generals appear on cable news to analyze the latest foreign crisis, we ought to ignore their honorifics and ask: “Was he one of the neocons who thought Iraq had WMDs?”

Most of the best journalists have never been shortlisted for a Pulitzer. Most of the best musicians are never considered for a Grammy. Awards are BS; diplomas are meaningless. Judge the work, not the plaudits.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Why Business Wants a Recession

September 27, 2022•

Ted Rall

Give Jerome Powell credit for candor: the Fed chairman admits that his policy of increasing interest rates to fight inflation might push the economy into a recession. “No one knows whether this process will lead to a recession or, if so, how significant that recession would be,” he recently told reporters.

If it does, one sector won’t be entirely displeased: employers.

According to the Deloitte accounting firm, a typical Fortune 500 company spends $1 to $2 billion a year on payroll, averaging between 50% and 60% of total spending. Controlling labor costs, unsurprisingly, is a top priority for employers.

In the boom-bust cycle of labor-management negotiations, the post-pandemic Great Resignation has triggered a labor shortage, a phenomenon we rarely witness and tends to fizzle out fast. Workers are quitting and retiring early, tanking the labor force participation rate. Those who remain enjoy the upper hand at interviews that feel like the job prospect is sizing up the company rather than the other way around. Labor shortages are driving up salaries, shortening hours, prompting signing bonuses and forcing bosses to accommodate people who prefer to work at home. Just 8% of office workers in Manhattan are back in the office a full five days a week.

The most recent data published, for June, finds that wages and salaries soared 16.8% on an annualized basis as benefit costs went up 14.4%.

Workers, angry and resentful after decades of frozen real wages and merciless downsizing, are becoming demanding. This reversal of a power dynamic in which workers were supplicants and bosses called the shots has also strengthened labor unions that had been losing membership for years.

This, some CFOs may be thinking, calls for a recession.

Company profit margins are at a 70-year record high, up 25% each of the last two years as the result of raising prices during the pandemic. Which means that, even allowing for an 8% inflation rate, a generic S&P 500 corporation should easily be able to ride out the average 26% earnings decline suffered in the most recent typical recessions that took place in 1990, 2000 and 2020. (A bigger crisis like the 2008-09 Great Recession, which reduced earnings by 57%, is another matter.)

No corporate officer would voluntarily reduce earnings. Or would they, in order to get something more valuable: regaining leverage over labor?

Traditional conservative allies of big business are openly arguing in favor of higher unemployment. “The recent drop in work and labor force participation—particularly among young workers—is troubling [my emphasis],” writes Sarah Greszler in a white paper for the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank. “Job openings, at 11.3 million, remain near record highs, and record percentages of employers report unfilled positions and compensation increases.”

Greszler summarizes: “Continued low levels of employment [sic] will reduce the rate of economic growth, reduce real incomes and output, result in greater dependence on government social programs, require higher levels of taxation, and exacerbate the U.S.’s already precarious fiscal situation.”

Workers, of course, feel like they can finally breathe. High demand for labor means that they can quit positions where they feel unappreciated and/or undercompensated, pack up and move to another state and create a healthier balance between their family and work lives. The current situation is anything but “troubling.”

Executives at employers like Apple, Tesla and Uber have had enough of workers calling the shots. They’re demanding that people get back to work — at the office — or find another job. “A quickly shifting employer-employee dynamic could give companies the ammunition to take a harder line against the full-time work-at-home arrangements that many employees have pushed for, according to corporate policies experts. In fact, they say more companies are likely to start pressing staffers to come back to the office — at least a few days a week,” reports CNBC. “The hybrid workforce is not going to go away, but the situation where employees refuse to come to the workplace at all is not likely to hold,” Johnny C. Taylor Jr. of the Society for Human Resource Management tells the network.

Perhaps no one has told CEOs that at-home work empowers them too. Rather than hiring security goons to escort laid-off workers past their terrorized colleagues, companies can memory-hole the condemned by deactivating their remote-access passwords. Who’ll notice one less square on the Zoom screen?

I’m not subscribing to a dark Marxist suspicion that CEOs, the Fed and other powers-that-be are conspiring to slam the brakes on an economy that would otherwise be coming in for a soft landing as pent-up consumer demand from the pandemic naturally ebbs, in order to return their recently empowered employees to their rightful status as wage slaves. Powell and his fellow governors are doing what comes naturally to government, treating a disease based on a diagnosis that is close to a year out of date and, reasonably, including wage increases as part of their calculus of what constitutes a major driver of the inflation rate.

Business, however, does see what’s coming. If the captains of industry aren’t worried enough to be calling their pet politicians to demand an end to interest-rate hikes, one reason might be that they see a silver lining to the next recession.

Labor-Management Non-Relations

September 16, 2022•

Ted Rall

The clash between labor and bosses used to be so violent that it sometimes resulted in deaths. Now no one wants to talk to one another. Remote workers slack off as quiet quitters, employers scheme as quiet firers and some disgruntled employees slink off to unionize while no one is watching.

The Greatest Resignation

November 17, 2021•

Ted Rall

Employers complaining that they can’t fill millions of jobs. Meanwhile, there are millions of unemployed people looking for work. Employers could fill jobs if they were to become realistic, adapt to the work force as it really is, and make those jobs better.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Call H.R.? Why Not the Cops? The Weird Politics of Sexual Harassment

November 9, 2017•

Ted Rall

When the Kevin Spacey story first broke, he stood accused of one act of wrongdoing: aggressively hitting on a 14-year-old boy.

If true, this is wrong. Very wrong. Obviously. Adults shouldn’t proposition children. But this happened more than 30 years ago. The nature of the response — Netflix distanced itself from the star of its hit show “House of Cards” by announcing its previously secret decision to end the series next year — seems like the wrong response to the actor’s behavior…and one that has become all too typical.

Bear in mind, this was before other people stepped forward to say Spacey had sexually harassed them. Some of Spacey’s accusers worked on “House of Cards.” After that, Netflix would have been derelict not to put Spacey on hiatus as the accusations get sorted out, and to fire him for creating a toxic work environment for its current employees. Which is what it did.

Sexual harassers getting their just comeuppance is a good thing. It is decades, centuries, millennia overdue. What I can’t figure is, why is the knee-jerk response to these accusations, the standard-issue form of social shaming in the 21^st century, to fire them from their jobs — including jobs where they didn’t do anything wrong?

The NYPD may file criminal charges against Harvey Weinstein, whose name will for the forseeable future be preceded by the phrase “disgraced Hollywood producer.” But Weinstein is an exception. For most men accused of sexual harassment and assault during this post-Weinstein outcry, the standard demand is: fire him!

Depriving a man (or woman, if that happens) of their livelihood in response to piggishness seems both too little and too much.

For victims, the knowledge that their attacker lost their job hardly rises to the level of even minimal justice. Nor does it protect other women from falling prey as well. Any sanction short of a prison term for a rapist or a big-time sexual harasser is bound to feel trivial, as though society doesn’t weigh victimhood, as if victims are disposable.

For the falsely accused (e.g., the University of Virginia, probably also the Columbia student accused by a famously mattress-toting classmate), being deprived of a livelihood for a crime they didn’t commit is egregious. We live in a capitalist society without a minimal safety net, so losing your job can — if you are unable to find a new one — quite literally kill you.

Unless the incident occurs on the job, the connection between employment and sexual harassment and rape is as arbitrary and odd as that between employment and healthcare. If a society determines that healthcare is important, it should be available to everyone, not just workers fortunate enough to land a 40-hour-a-week job working at a company big enough to offer a health plan. Similarly, what does sexually harassing 30-plus years ago at a private party — yes, even a boy — have to do with Spacey’s then-current gig with Netflix?

It didn’t turn out to be the case, but try to imagine that the entire brief against Spacey had never expanded beyond Anthony Rapp’s tweet, which describes an incident that Spacey claims he doesn’t recall. It’s safe to say Spacey’s character on “House of Cards” would have been killed off. Spacey probably would have lost other jobs. He would likely have had trouble finding work in the future. You might say good, who cares? But this outcome would have been fair neither to Rapp nor to Spacey.

If Rapp is telling the truth, it would be better for that truth to be determined by the courts, should he decide to file charges. Statues of limitation are challenging in these cases, but the solution is for state legislatures to fix that problem, and for prosecutors to be induced to go after cases tougher than a slamdunk. As it is, political leaders are abdicating justice to social media lynch mobs and employers. There are also civil courts, where the standard of proof is lower.

As far as Spacey goes, is it ethical to take money out of his pocket over an accusation that has never been tried, much less proven, by a judge or jury?

On the other side of the coin, Fox News waited way too long to fire Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes. I’m not typically sympathetic to corporations or their bottom lines, but if I’m the boss at a company, anyone who forces my organization to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement to a sexual harassment victim — because, let’s face it, corporations only pay when they’re guilty — is out the door before it happens again. Mark Halperin allegedly harassed women at ABC; ABC’s firing thus seems cut and dry.

Of the recent firings, NPR handled things better than most. Michael Oreskes hung on to his job as long as his accusers were out of his past, from his previous position at the New York Times. They let him go after a female NPR staffer said he’d harassed her.

These cases of sexual harassment and assault are more straightforward from a human-resources point of view: employers must not permit a hostile work environment. That requires them to fire harassers. But this does not go far enough. What of their victims? Is victims’ only recourse to sue in civil court, or try to get a book published? Here too, we need to adjust the criminal justice system to a post-“Mad Men” world that understands the toxic effects of workplace harassment. Bill O’Reilly probably misses his job, but he’s still rich and life goes on.

As I’ve written before, employers have way too much power over workers. While bosses have every right — and the duty — to fire those who abuse other employees at their current workplace, they shouldn’t be allowed to punish anyone for actions, no matter how heinous, that took place outside the workplace or at a previous job. Otherwise we wind up with insane politically-oriented censorship firings like the case of the neo-Nazi dude who never shared his views at his job at a pizzeria, yet got canned after he was photographed in Charlottesville, and the liberal woman whose marketing company employer let her go after she gave the finger to Trump’s motorcade — while biking, not at work.

Sexual harassers and assaulters should face prison time. So should false accusers. But bosses need to mind their own business — at their own business.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall) is author of “Trump: A Graphic Biography,” an examination of the life of the Republican presidential nominee in comics form. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

The New Journalism

February 21, 2014•

Ted Rall

Not long ago, journalists were expected to work stories by getting out of the office and tracking them down. The new breed of online journalists who have replaced them sit on their butts, monitoring tweets in the hope that some celebrity or politician will say something stupid so they can trash them. This is what, in an age of minute budgets, passes for journalism.