We are all supposed to find a job in the competitive job market. But how can we all do so when competition, by its very nature, creates losers as well as winners?
By Kéllia Ramares
In the recently concluded BCS title game in college football, the top two teams in the rankings went . head-to-head for the chance to state that they were the No. 1 team in the nation for the 2010 season. Before the game began, everyone knew that one of the teams was going to lose. It did not matter how skilled they were or how hard they tried, one of those teams would come up short. It turned out to be Oregon that lost to Auburn by a score of 22-19. The victor was decided at the very end of the game, when Auburn kicked a field goal.
As sports fans, we enjoy a close game. A contest between two teams that are well matched in skill, effort, and managerial or coaching strategy is exciting to watch and to play. Pitching duels, close plays at the plate, extra innings all add to the fun of baseball. What baseball fan doesn’t love the 7th Game of the World Series? Most fans feel short-changed if it doesn’t go seven. The same excitement of close competition exists in all sports: playoff holes in golf, shoot outs in hockey or soccer, buzzer-beaters in basketball, the tiebreaker in tennis, sudden-death overtime in football. The best contests are the ones in which the announcer says, “It’s a shame someone has to lose this game.”
But someone does. 50% of the teams in any league, from your neighborhood bowling league to the pros, will lose on any given day. We know this before any of the games start. The entertainment for the fans comes in finding out who the winners and losers will be, because, as fans of the 7-9 NFC West champion Seattle Seahawks know, on any given day, anyone can win. But the fact that, on any given day, half the teams will lose, is immutable.
There is nothing wrong with people exercising their competitive urges in sports and games in which someone will lose, or having fun by watching such competition. But when you are talking about using competition to decide whether someone can get the materials he or she needs to live, that’s another story. No doubt you have seen, at some time or another, a film in which Roman gladiators fight in the Coliseum. The victor stands over his vanquished opponent, ready to slay him unless the Emperor signals “thumbs up” to spare the loser’s life for a valiant effort. Most of us would disclaim any desire to live in a society that engaged in human blood sport. Yet, how different are we from the Ancient Romans when our society withholds the stuff of life from people who are barred entry or thrown out of the work force? The fact that the “loser” dies slowly, out of the Emperor’s and public’s sight, and sometimes by his own hand, does not make the end any less cruel or final.
The social imperative that everyone who is able, will work in gainful employment, and the demands of the Social Darwinists that those who are unable to work, or who are full-time homemakers, be supported by family or private charity, and not be a burden on society, are forever and inexorably at odds with the true nature of an employment system based on competition.
Skill and effort are not always the answer
Let’s use baseball to strike a blow at the myth that skill and hard work always get you to your goal.
It is possible that a team loses a game through some element beyond its control such as a bad hop on a ground ball in the infield, or a fly ball caught in the wind and carried beyond the outfielder’s reach, or an umpire’s blown call. An individual who had a stellar day at the plate and on the field is nonetheless part of the losing team because of something a teammate did or failed to do, or because of an ill-advised strategy by the manager. Bench players on the winning and losing teams are credited with the win or the loss even though their own skill or effort played no part in the event at all!
(Think for a moment about the scene in front of the Enron headquarters in Houston when the jig was up and people were laid off en masse. They were standing around stunned and crying. Houston police, like police everywhere, were sent to protect the executives and send away distraught workers, when they should have marched into the building to arrest the executives. Those people outside, who just saw their jobs and retirements go up in smoke, played no part in the crimes; they were victims of them. But according to the philosophy of some right wingers, they are losers in a personal sense that lays a person’s misfortunes at his own doorstep, no matter what the cause).
Now expand the results of competition from a game to a season. There are 30 teams in Major League Baseball. At the end of the year, the team that wins the World Series is the champion. At the beginning of the season, the bookies in Vegas will make you odds on which team it will be, as the teams are not all of equal ability. But at the end of each year, 29 of 30 teams are losers. That’s a 96.66% (29/30) failure rate with respect to the goal of winning the championship.
Competing in the job market is a losing proposition
So you want a job! You have completed whatever apprenticeships, certifications or degrees you need. Your knowledge is as up to date as it can be. You know how to sell yourself on a resume, using all the computer-driven keywords that make sure your resume passes the initial robotic screening and is seen by a human being. There are no typos or bad grammar in your cover letter. You know how to dress for success, smile, shake hands and otherwise acquit yourself admirably at an interview, and still there are no offers forthcoming. If there is one job and only two applicants, the chances of getting the position are 50-50. But nowadays, you often hear that there are an average of 5 applicants for every job. One winner and four losers (4/5) is an 80% failure rate.
The odds of getting a job can be worse that those for a team to win the World Series. I recall a rejection letter I received in the mid-80′s for a job for which, according to the letter, 59 people had applied. That was a competition that had 1 winner and 58 losers. That’s a failure rate of 98.30%. (58/59). Last summer, I applied for a part-time job that had a multi-step application procedure. Part of the way through, I was dropped from consideration. I was told at that time that they had over 80 applicants for this one position. Since I was not told the exact number but I know there were at least 80, let’s look at the failure rate for exactly 80; 79/80 equals 98.75%. These figures have nothing to do with the moral qualities of the employer. If an employer want to hire one person for her business and 80 people apply, the failure rate is 98.75% before any value judgments, fair or unfair,are made on the individual applicants. It is not the employer’s “fault” or the workers’ that things are this way. It is just simple math. The more applicants there are for a job, the closer the failure rate for getting hired gets to 100%. Of course, if the employer takes the option of selecting no one from the current pool of applicants, the failure rate is 100%. This happens from time to time. I have seen ads on Craigslist that tell people who have already applied not to re-apply.
Are you someone’s ideal?
The worse the economy is, the pickier employers become. The ideal candidate will be described in the ad. If you don’t meet the description of the ideal candidate, and are not needing to demonstrate to your unemployment insurance board that you are looking for work, you are wasting your time even applying. In an economy such as ours today, with its large and growing pool of unemployed, someone else definitely does fit the “ideal” description. And typically, more than one person does, so if you are one of the ideal candidates, you still have to face the fact that getting hired is a lot like the movies and TV series “Highlander”, where near immortal beings would battle each other to the death because “there can be only one.”
Employers will require degrees when none are really needed for the performance of the job because the degree requirement cuts down on the number of applicants whose resumes are clogging his in-box. Experience requirements lengthen. On-the-job training goes out the window because now there is someone out there who has done this before, so the employer can save time and money over training someone. If you have to learn something, better learn it somewhere else, or expect to be an unpaid intern. In fact, the notion of internship is being abused by some employers who are not offering school credit or even minimum wage. But students take the “internships” anyway for the experience. (Some are even paying firms to find them an unpaid internship). The employer gets free labor; the student feels he is somehow getting a leg up on the job market by being willing to be exploited, and an older worker who desperately needs money finds another closed door. That brings me to the other problem with jobs and hiring: The job competition is not a game that is played on a level field.
Isms, phobias and favoritism
Racism, sexism, ageism, classism, homophobia, xenophobia, dislike of another person’s religion or lack of religion– any of these and more can exclude an otherwise well-qualified candidate. On the flip side of the coin, bribery, physical beauty, willingness to grant sexual favors, blackmail, personal or professional connections to the hirers and even well-intentioned programs such as veterans’ preferences or racial or gender preferences will increase the chances of some people while decreasing those of others who have similar resumes. This tilting of the playing field is an add-on to the general understanding that there can be only one winner per job. On a level playing field, the odds would be against you before you start because of the nature of the system. The isms and phobias just rub salt on the wound.
The personalization of economics
Conservatives would have us believe that unemployment is our own fault. People such as 2010 Nevada Republican U.S. Senate nominee Sharron Angle claim that the jobless are “spoiled” people who would rather collect unemployment benefits than find jobs. (That is actually an economically rational decision if the job does not pay well enough after deducting expenses such as taxes, transportation, clothing, lunch and perhaps child care, to make the job worthwhile. The problem is not that unemployment benefits are too high but that wages are too low. But that’s a topic for another day). You often hear self-improvement gurus say things like if you have a job the unemployment rate is zero and of you don’t have one, the unemployment rate is 100%.
This personalization of economics masks the truth at the heart of the system: Our economic system is built upon the premise of competition, and the duality of competition, by its very nature, creates losers as well as winners, no matter highly skilled, creative, industrious or desirous of success everyone is.
Conservatives bank on the idea of exceptionalism to keep people focused on themselves and the people around them–is that brown-skinned person down the street an illegal alien here to steal my job?–rather than on the system that exploits them and the exploiters who work the system to their advantage. Like the young person who takes physical risks because she believes in her own invulnerability, we expect to beat the odds. The fact that sometimes we do makes us forget that the job search game is a casino where a few people win big, but the house stacks the overall odds in its favor. We are urged to believe solely in ourselves and our heterosexual nuclear families by people and corporations whose power would be severely curtailed if we ever banded together for the mutual benefit of our own communities, regardless of all the identity politics factors that now separate us.
We are encouraged to look at the system in only one case: we are encouraged to believe that if we were freed from government interference and taxation, we would succeed! Nowadays, Big Business is like a ventriloquist. It pretends that the government is an independent actor, but it provides the government’s voice and has its hand up the government’s back, or more precisely, in the government’s pockets. To allow this show to go on, we have to keep suspending disbelief. We have to pretend that the dummy is really speaking of its own accord, even though we see the ventriloquist standing by. And here we do have a failure of personal responsibility. We are playing our part in the ventriloquist’s show.
Your house is owned by the bank; your car declines in value from the moment you drive it off the lot; your processed food is unhealthy junk and your education has put you in severe debt until middle age though it may not guarantee you a steady job, much less “the good life”. What is success when we can be thrown away, often without notice, by a corporation, and escorted from the building like a terrorism suspect (or a person who objects to being irradiated or sexually assaulted at the airport)?
The more we look at ourselves as individuals, and focus on enjoying our individual success or struggling with our individual failure within the system, the less likely we are to examine the fundamental order of the system itself, and to parse the limits of what individual effort can accomplish. Yes, success requires a modicum of personal effort and responsibility. But those are smaller tools for success than we are given to believe. I offer the life of George W. Bush as exhibit No. 1 to prove my case.
If we start our analysis of society and economics with the inconvenient truth of the nature of competition, we logically should ask if it is rational, not to mention moral, to distribute the means to survive biologically: food, clothing, shelter and heath care, and the means thrive culturally: education, communication, transportation and the tools of one’s chosen trade or profession, on the basis of labor market participation? I say no.
CC Kéllia Ramares, 2011. BY-NC-SA
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Kéllia Ramares is a freelance journalist who does a lot of unpaid work. Since today’s world does require a PAID JOB, she would love to be a columnist for one or more progressive publications. Her website is The End of Money: A critique of paying, owing and working “work a living”. She can be reached at theendofmoney@gmail.com.
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