Who Is Owed a Job?
It is perilous to blame individuals for the broken promises of a social contract
I’ve been looking for a job for a few months now. I don’t recommend it.
I work in software, which is a tricky space at the moment. I have some promising leads, but the AI hype seems to be creating a lot of worry among employers that they might hire someone who will under-perform an algorithm in a year or so. The entire industry seems to be holding its breath to see what will happen next.
Because I am a chronic over-sharer, I’ve been talking about the job search process and that has led me into some recent debates over Panda Express, HB1 visas, and the dignity of work.
The initial salvo of this fight was fired by Chris Rufo in a thread in which he stated that we currently have “full employment” implied that college graduates who can’t find a white collar job should consider going into food service after graduation.
I am not unsympathetic to this view. I graduated into a recession and my first post-college job was at a Waffle House. Even so, there is something that seems wrong when someone spends 4 years of their life in an institution of learning only to get a job that they could have gotten with none of those years. It’s not that the food service work is “beneath them, it’s that they spent $100K and four years of their life to try to gain the qualifications necessary a job that actually requires those skills.
The entire conversation consisted of people talking right past each other. On one side were people insisting that food services is Good and Nobel Work (it is!) and that if that is the job that pays the best, you should do it. Implicit (and often explicit) in this view was that the college educated but under-employed see themselves as part of a higher social class who view themselves, by nature of their education and background, as elites who are above normal work.
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