Geographical Discrimination?

[dickie]

So today's job market sucks. In the North Texas area, it's estimated that 86% of the workforce between the ages of 17 and 25 are on unemployment. State and federal funded unemployment insurance is drying up and becoming harder to qualify for. The mandatory jobs you MUST apply for to draw benefits often have absolutely NOTHING to do with your skillset and pay requirements. College graduates are being denied positions because applicants twice their age are taking jobs at a fraction of their pay.

I sat through a meeting yesterday about new hires at our company and how much trouble we were having finding skilled labor to fill the openings because we are located outside the "talent pool" in the Dallas metropolitan area. People are interviewing, but the prospect of the time and money it would take to make the 2 hour commute to and from work at least 10 times a week has them staying at home on unemployment instead of working. The job I do could easily be done from home, but my supervisors are old-fashioned and prefer our employees to show up in-person instead of telecommuting. I would save approximately $120 a month just in gas if I were able to work from home, not to mention wear-and-tear on my vehicle. The positions we are hiring for don't require a person to physically be on our property to do the work, and yet we are still going through the time and expense of hiring from the local idiot population, training them, and having them quit or be fired because they can't perform to expectations.

How many more jobs would be filled if companies started hiring people to work from home? We wouldn't be forced to deal with limited or no prospects in our localities, we wouldn't have so many people straining financial assistance programs, we wouldn't have as much traffic congestion during rush hour periods. Why isn't this catching on with employers? The government could provide certain benefits for providing jobs to remote workers on top of the slightly reduced salaries they would have to pay as a result of cutting transportation costs of their employees.

Why are businesses so focused on filling spots in their parking lots and cubicles with quantity instead of quality? It's almost a form of discrimination in the case I can personally cite where a manager actually rejected better qualified applicants in favor of a string of complete morons with the learning capabilities of a fake office plant that ended up costing more than they contributed.

[Encryptshun]

Workplace flexibility arrangements are actually dramatically increasing in popularity among larger corporations. But as with anything, it is the local management and their personal style which overrules anything corporate policy states. No one is going to fire a VP because they make their employees show up to the office. However, if you could document the cost of employee turnover versus the cost to support a work-from-home initiative with an expanded and better-skilled labor pool as well as write up a policy around which positions qualify for workplace flexibility and which require on-site presence, you might be able to both present a compelling business case and hand out a cultural olive branch.