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Establishing rules for the new workplace - Economics

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 2002 by John A. Challenger

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Discriminatory barriers to entry into the job market are falling. Age, sex, race, religion, and ethnicity biases are slowly being rooted out of the system at the legal, social, and educational levels. During the red-hot job market of the 1990s, when unemployment reached the lowest rate since the Vietnam War, companies had no choice but to hire people who otherwise would have been ignored. Biased managers took chances on individuals they normally would have avoided and were shocked to find that many of these former outsiders became the hardest-working employees in their respective departments. Meritocracy made major gains as the most-productive people became recognized for their achievements in the ultracompetitive, profit-driven economic environment of recent years.

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Technological innovation has opened up the potential for enormous changes in the job marketplace. In the early 1990s, the Clinton Administration proposed a national job bank where accessibility to job openings would be coordinated and widely disseminated. The plan was abandoned, but the emergence of the Internet created the beginnings of a national source on the Web.

The Internet job bank facilitates the flow of workers to areas of the country where demand is high. The job-seeker who used to purchase the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal can now easily check out the classified ad sections from virtually every city in the country from his or her desktop. Each of these innovations speeds up throughput of workers to hot industries or regions, giving job-seekers and employers more options in times of recession and drying up pockets of unemployment in periods of economic expansion.

Another major innovation transforming how organizations and people come together is through systems like Resumix. These are huge corporate databases of candidates, allowing companies to locate appropriate workers on a scale unimaginable a few years back.

Not just U.S. workers are affected by these changes. We are moving into an era when the labor supply is global. Mexican mequilladoras, American middle managers working in Japanese-owned companies and vice versa, and technology workers from India and New Zealand (sometimes referred to as software factories) attest to the shrinking of the world and the internationalization of an unskilled and highly skilled workforce.

The rules have changed

Over the last decade, people have come to realize that the "rules of the game" have changed and, like Curt Flood, the baseball player who pioneered free agency in Major League Baseball, they must view themselves as free agents, willing to offer their services where and when they want and to the highest bidder. In increasing numbers, people are open to the idea of leaving jobs voluntarily for better ones, rather than waiting passively and reactively for the company to offer them a promotion or a pink slip.

Job boards like Monster have opened up wide possibilities for expansion of worker free agency. The secret and anonymous posting of resumes allows currently employed workers to advertise their skills confidentially to interested employers. The statistics for growth in voluntary job movement are impressive.

Establishing rules for the new workplace - Economics

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 2002 by John A. Challenger

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