[content/trigger warning: This post contains a discussion about fat shaming]
I used to smoke, But I’m Not Self-Righteous About Being a Non-Smoker ™. (Seriously, I loved to smoke. Loved it. So I totally get why some people can’t or won’t quit.)
I quit about 6 years ago.
You’ll notice I say “about” because, for me, quitting was a gradual process. One day, I ran out of cigarettes and just didn’t buy more. I stopped taking smoke breaks. And, even though I wanted to smoke, I began using gum, toothpicks, coffee, tea, exercise, water, and fun energy drinks to fill in the gaps of the time I used to spend smoking.
Naturally, I became that annoying person who borrows cigarettes because she “only smokes when she drinks.” And then one day, I stopped doing that too. Now, I’m at the stage where smoking doesn’t even sound appealing to me anymore. I tried a cigarette about a year ago at a party and it tasted/felt like what I imagine it must taste/feel like to people who have never smoked. Like smoke (it taste/feels different and better to many smokers, LOL). I think, for me, I had to make quitting not be a Big Thing that I, like, talked about and shared with everyone. It let me live in denial for a little while about the fact that I was quitting something I really liked to do.
So, with that disclaimer noted, I recently came across this article, about how some workplaces are refusing to hire smokers.
The reasoning is that “such tobacco-free hiring policies, [are] designed to promote health and reduce insurance premiums.” Within the article, the following statistics are noted:
“Each year, smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke causes 443,000 premature deaths and costs the nation $193 billion in health bills and lost productivity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…..The bottom line will benefit because health care costs for tobacco users are $3,000 to $4,000 more each year than for non-smokers, says Bon Secours’ Cindy Stutts.”
While I understand employers’ concerns about “the bottom line,” two issues stand out to me with respect to this hiring policy.
One, I wonder if it will have a disparate impact on certain groups. While I do not believe smokers are, or should be, a “protected class” as is understood in the US legal system, smoking does correlate with socioeconomic status, education level, and sexual orientation*.
For instance, according to the CDC’s statistics, 49% of those with a GED reported being smokers, compared to 5% of respondents with a graduate degree. 31% of those living below the poverty line reported being smokers, compared to 19% living above the poverty line. In addition, a (somewhat dated) 2001 study (cited in
this PDF) found that 46% of gay men and 48% of lesbians smoked, a rate double that of their heterosexual counterparts (data on bisexuals was not included).
A blanket policy against hiring smokers is going to disproportionately impact these groups. The assumption seems to be that such a policy will get people to quit smoking, but an argument could also be made that a policy that doesn’t take into account why some people tend to smoke more than others might not be an effective anti-smoking program. It might just end up turning many smokers into people who are good at hiding their smoking, while, say, tobacco companies continue to develop
charmingly-named projects aimed at recruiting new groups of undesirables smokers*.
My second issue is that if we look at the reasons for the policy in light of the dominant narratives regarding obesity, a policy against hiring fat people could also be developed. No one, to my knowledge, is proposing such a ban (erm… right?), but I think we have reason to be wary of a parallel reasoning process being applied to fat people.
Consider:
The employers’ argument is that smokers choose to smoke, smoking has high health and economic costs, therefore, the hiring ban is acceptable. If people want to be hired all they have to do is make different life choices.
Headlines consistently inform us that Obesity Is Overtaking Smoking As the Leading Cause of Preventable Death in the US. The US Surgeon General reports that 300,000 premature deaths per year are attributable to obesity, while the CDC notes that the health costs of obesity are a “staggering” $147 billion dollars per year.
A quote in the smoking article notes that smokers are easy targets, but (as someone who is, or tries to be, a fat acceptance ally), it also seems like fat people are easy targets too. The two words “smoking and obesity” are practically a conjoined phrase in conversations about “preventable” deaths.
Many fat people believe (and I would agree) that being fat and being happy is a radical act given the degree to which fatness and fat people are shamed and demonized. Many non-fat people view being fat similar to how they view smoking, as a bad life choice and an individual you-deserve-what-you-get moral failing, rather than as the result of more systemic, collective issues.
So, to circle back to a point I made earlier, I don’t expect policies that only penalize people who fall into certain categories and do not address the reasons why people fall into those categories to be effective public health measures. When employer honchos say things like, “We’re not denying smokers their right to tobacco products. We’re just choosing not to hire them,” I think a lot of people are going to hear:
“We’re not denying people disproportionately targeted by tobacco companies the right to their tobacco products, we’re just choosing not to hire them”
or:
“We’re not denying people who live in food deserts the right to eat their cheap, high-fructose-corn-syrup-laden food, we’re just choosing not to hire them.”
or, (my personal fave):
“We’re not denying people who get fat partly because they work in front of a computer all day the right to work in front of a computer all- oh wait… yes we are. Whoooooops!”
[*Note: Although, the CDC also reports similar smoking prevalence levels among Blacks, Native Americans, and Whites (with lower prevalence levels among Asian-Americans and Hispanics), it also deserves highlighting that tobacco companies have aggressively and disproportionately marketed certain tobacco products to African-Americans and that African-Americans disproportianately suffer from tobacco-related disease.]
The smell of cigarettes – especially clinging to clothes – is a migraine trigger for me. I could not work in close quarters with most smokers. Nonetheless, I am deeply opposed to not hiring smokers as a class, just as I’m opposed to the “no surgery until you quit” health bullying. And in my country, at least, tobacco taxes are high enough that smokers more than cover their own healthcare costs.
The “excluded class” reasoning can be extended to just about any group from women (more likely to be carers) to non-Asians (shorter lifespans) to short people (more likely to have heart problems) and it shouldn’t be something to boast about!
> short people (more likely to have heart problems)
As a tall guy, I wish you were right, but all the hits go to the same Finish study that not only failed to control for ethnicity and wealth, but failed to take age into account. As people lose height with age, the study is not worth talking about.
Sebastian – thanks for the correction! I knew it didn’t control for ethnicity and wealth (so it’s still relevant to the issue of discrimination against smokers) but I didn’t know it didn’t control for age either.
While that 300,000 statistic and the fact that it is so often quoted is certainly relevant in discussions of fat hate, I think it at least deserves a caveat that it may not be accurate.
I’m not sure about all the implications of making smokers a protected class, but I do think it’s unethical to refuse to hire smokers, even if there were no implications for fat politics.
I’m pretty sure I read an article about a hospital director or some such who didn’t hire smokers and would like to not hire fat people, too, if he though he could get away with it. So you’re right on target; there are already people who are thinking along those lines.
Ah yes, here it is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us/11smoking.html?pagewanted=all
I think, along the lines of the concerns of the National Workrights Group in the quote above, there are also troubling implications about how much your employer can control your activities in your life outside work. Although it’s not as though there isn’t already a precedent that you can lose your job over stuff you post on FaceBook.
I suspect this is less about Big Brother and more about cutting health care costs. If a health insurer charges a lot more for employees who smoke, then an employer is going to try not to hire smokers.
Mythago – but the same thing goes on in countries with public healthcare, employers stating they would not hire fat people or smokers if they could. There may be financial reasons as well, but I don’t think excluding a class of people is entirely for that reason.
lilacsigil – The key words there are “if they could”. The fact that some employers want to discriminate against this or that group is not surprising. The issue in the US is that not only are they allowed to do so, but that the healthcare system incentivizes them to do so.
What you’d be fighting here is the legality of a formal policy on not hiring fat people. I can’t imagine that there isn’t already de facto discrimination against hiring fat people now.
Hell, in most places employment is contingent on submission and testing of a urine sample to see if you’re using illegal drugs. How long will it be before they start testing that urine for anything else they can find – e.g., sugar to see if someone has uncontrolled diabetes, legal drug residues that will tell if you’re being treated for a given condition, etc. Next it’ll be a blood sample – first to test for illegal substances and then for any kind of markers for health issues they can find. DNA testing would be next.
Paranoid? I’m old enough to remember the outrage against pissing in a cup. We got used to that….
I’m also old enough to remember when companies had cigarette machines right next to the soda machine and you could smoke at your desk. I was just starting out in IT, and I was the “go-to” guy in my department when things went wrong with PC’s, word processors (before PCs you would buy a machine that was hard-wired to do only word processing), etc. The word processors had two 8″ floppy drives arranged vertically in the front next to the monitor (which was integrated into the case). I get the call – “Jean’s word processor doesn’t work, it won’t read the disks.” Back then there was no such thing as hard drives, all data was on floppies.
I go visit Jean. Jean is typing away with a lit cigarette in her hands. She sees me. “Ah, you’re here. This Goddamn thing doesn’t work anymore.” At which point she takes a drag off of her cigarette and blows the smoke directly at the machine, some of it going into the open slots of the 8″ floppy drives. I mentally cringe.
“Let me see what I can do here. Hop up and let me at the machine.”
First I take the keyboard, flip it upside down and smack it on the desk a few times. Probably a tablespoon of ashes comes out. Then I open the case of the machine up and blow out all the ashes and “bunny fur”. Must have been a quarter cup of that stuff, maybe more. Then I take a cleaning diskette, put some isopropanol on it and run it into the drives. You could actually see the dirt on it that came off of the drive heads. You should never have been able to actually see the dirt cleaned off of the drive heads.
I put it all back together, left all the dirt and crap on her desk, loaded up a disk and loaded up a file off it. “It works now. Your problem is that these machines are tremendously efficient electrostatic air cleaners. What broke it is the smoke off of your cigarettes.” And walked off, leaving all the ashes and crap all over her desk.
Then I went to the boss and told her what I found and what I did. I told her “As long as you let her smoke while she’s using that machine it’s going to break – permanently at some point – and you’re going to lose documents off of the floppies that are going to get messed up.” “Well, what do I do – she’s a smoker! She’ll complain like hell if I tell her she can’t smoke at her desk.” “That’s your problem. I can’t change the laws of physics. If you let her smoke at her desk you’re going to lose time and money.”
I don’t remember what the boss did, frankly. It wasn’t long afterwards that the cigarette machine was shut down and you couldn’t smoke at your desk anymore, but I don’t know how much of what I did contributed to that.
Eytan, even if there was no insurance incentive to discriminate against smokers or fat people the lost productivity of smoking breaks and tendencies towards health problems provides incentive enough.
Short people have heart problems??? Well, I gues its a good thing the women of my family generally live to be about 100 then….
What is it about Americans that you aren’t screaming mad about being forced to pee in a cup? For a McJob even? It seems strange that a group of people who always seem to be talking about freedom and civil liberties would accept this.
Nickled and Dimed hit the nail on the head about why the working poor smoke. Anyone who understands how nicotine affects human physiology could see why lower income groups would choose to do so, despite the costs.
If banning smokers from jobs becomes legal the tobacco companies still won’t worry much. There are alternate delivery systems for nicotine, some that are smokeless cigarettes. So they won’t be losing any money.
Some folks are expensive employees. Society wants them to get jobs anyway. This applies to everyone from smokers to obese people to folks in their first month of pregnancy to people who require significant ADA-mandated compliance.
The problem is that the benefits and costs don’t end up in the same place:
-The costs of hiring those folks generally accrue to the specific employer.
-The benefits of hiring those folks accrue to society as a whole.
It’s the MISMATCH that is the root cause of the brouhaha. Right now employers have every incentive to avoid hiring anyone who costs more. Why should they?
Say that Elle Employer might have to pay $2,000 more to hire me. There will be benefits from my working: to me, my family, the stores I shop at, etc. But the benefits TO ELLE of hiring me instead of someone else who doesn’t cost $2,000 are very unlikely to exceed a $2000 marginal change.
But since employers are often basing those decisions on underlying costs, it’s eminently fixable.
The solution is to either adjust the benefits or costs so that the employers don’t get screwed for hiring the wrong person.
Perhaps if I get a job, I add a total of $5,000 to the state economy. Great! So if the state wants me (or folks like me) to get hired, it can chip in the $2,000 to Elle. If it really wants me to get hired, it can even chip in $3,000 to Elle.
But it doesn’t make any sense to expect Elle to act against her self-interest.
@ closetpuritan:
“While that 300,000 statistic and the fact that it is so often quoted is certainly relevant in discussions of fat hate, I think it at least deserves a caveat that it may not be accurate.”
Thanks for bringing that up. It does deserve mentioning. I tried to present the CDC and Surgeon General’s statistics in a way that demonstrated that the narratives between smoking and obesity are similar (without also implying that the stats are necessarily accurate), but I wonder if I should have (or should) explicitly note that caveat.
RonF,
I think you’re right about de facto discrimination against fat people already occurring in employment. I’ve heard anecdotal evidence of it happening and I remember various reports over the years making that observation. (I quickly googled “employment discrimination, obesity” and found this.)
Thanks for pointing that out.
Single-payer health insurance. Or other society-wide risk pool.
Yup.
The overriding concern to me is how deep will we allow intrusions into our personal lives in the name of reducing health costs?
Children often get hurt when they play whether it is free-range play or organized sports. Play is a choice either by the children or their parents. Should employers hire only the childless in order to save health care costs?
What about the adult weekend warriors riding motorcycles, bicycles, ATVs, skydiving, mountain climbing, boating, hunting etc? Should employers be allowed to force their employees to sign affidavits that they will not engage in dangerous activities during their off time and refuse to pay the bills should they engage in them anyway and are injured?
What about adults choosing to have children at all?
childbirthconnection.org reports that in 2009 hospital birth costs ranged from $9,617 to $21,495 depending on the method of birth and whether complications were present.
CNN reported in 2009 that a March of Dimes report found that the average preemie costs $49,000 in just the first year.
Should employers prohibit their employees from having children to save on health care costs?
Just asking the questions here. How many of our choices are we resigned to give to our employers in order to get hired or keep a job?
Why is it morally okay to treat people this way? What happened to Kantian ethics, in which its never right to treat someone as a means to an end?
Say there are two employees, one who smokes, one who doesn’t. Pat Smoker is a high-risk for hir smoking and history of heart disease. Boo Nonsmoker has a clear health history. Which one should you hire? How about whoever does the job the best?
To me, this is outrageous. A person is not a bottom-line. I don’t care how many economic professors and actuaries you hire, there isn’t a value on a person and their actualization. What if, in the example above, Pat is a genius and produces far more than Boo? What money have you saved by hiring a mediocre employee over a stellar one because you decided to discriminate?
Free-marketers will say if it was truly advantageous to hire for work ability rather than health costs, the market will work itself out. My answer to that is that labor is not, and will never be, a free market. There’s a constraint on the bottom of wages even without a minimum-wage – basically the difference between poverty and revolution. There’s a constraint on the top-end because no matter how much you pay someone, there’s still only so much they can do in a day. There’s only so many people with certain skills, and some don’t stay in the market (due to family raising/caregiving/changing professions.)
I’m sorry if this is rambling. You all tend to make great arguments in favor of your position. Mine really, I suppose, is the moral outrage argument combined with the uncertain future. Pat might live to be 80; Boo might get hit by a truck or killed by a jealous spouse. You can’t know, and to treat people this way because of money is the worst kind of evil.
SimpleTruth, you’re ducking the issue.
Nobody is suggesting that a healthy me is more valuable to a company than a sick Steve Jobs, health care costs included. Obviously there are plenty of exceptions.
What they’re suggesting (and what is entirely accurate, FWIW) is that a lot of workers are surprisingly fungible. Moreover, even if they’re not very similar in reality, they may well appear that way at the hiring stage.
This is especially true for lower-end jobs: 1) they require less experience and training; 2) a stellar employee has less ability to stand out; and 3) they have shorter and less detailed interviews, so employees appear more similar.
Once you’re looking at a pool of relatively similar employees, it doesn’t take a moral failing to decide to hire the ones who appear likely to cost you the lest money.
But a wholesale rejection of economic principles may not be especially relevant in the context of an economic discussion. Refusing to acknowledge reality won’t change reality.
It’s mutual, you know.
I just hired someone for part time work. I’m willing to bet (given then job interviews) that about 50% of the employees were lying about their ability. Two interviewees were intending to use me as a (good for them, horrible for me) training springboard to bigger and better things; only one of them was honest about it. One lied about references.
They’re not considering my interests. They’re not considering my family, who depends on my income. They’re not considering the costs of retraining and rehiring, if they prove to be unable to complete the job skills. By and large, they’re just considering what works for THEM: get an interview, even if you have to pad your resume. Get paid now, even if you can’t really do the work very well. Collect unemployment if things don’t work, even if that hurts me.
I don’t begrudge them their self-interest. Why should I stifle mine?
I thought we were talking about biases based on lifestyle choices outside, not hiring practices based on actual qualifications.
Sorry, that should be * lifestyle choices outside of work*
It’s perfectly reasonable for employers to make the hiring decisions that are best for their business.
It’s not nearly as reasonable for employers to make hiring decisions based on personal prejudices that are irrelevant to the success of their business.
Personally, I hate tobacco, and smoking. I support smoking bans and as far as I am concerned smoking in my presence without first obtaining my consent (which I am not always inclined to give) is an act of violence. If I ran a business, I would have a categorical non-smoking policy at work, and would make it clear workers have to leave my business’s premises during their breaks if they wish to smoke. But I would never dream of discriminating against an employee based on whether or not they smoke at home or in social settings. However, if I lived in the US with the bizzare US health care system, I would perhaps have no choice but consider that. Which is just one more argument, in my opinion, as to why the US health care system needs radical overhaul.
@gin-and-whiskey:
Thanks for your response. However, I feel like ethics are, and should be, a part of the hiring process. You say I’m not making an economic argument and ducking the issue.
Alright, so to make an economic argument, making the unethical decision to hire or fire someone based on cost is actually transferring a hidden cost onto society, and therefore not actually based in free-market solutions, where you pay what something is worth based on what the economy says it’s worth, not just what you feel the is the proper valuation.
Case in point: outsourcing jobs to India. Companies, in a (sometimes short-sided) cost analysis, decide it’s easier to pay someone in India to do XX amount of work for, say, $5 an hour. Comparable American wages are at least $7.25 an hour for minimum wage. Followers of Milton Friedman and Adam Smith say good – this is what businesses are supposed to do, exploit markets and create wealth. When there is enough outsourcing to India, wages will rise there and the market will stabilize itself. (I’m ignoring the actual outcomes of this where it actually tends to cost businesses more in the long-run.)
This particular problem of transferring invisible costs is that there is a bare-minimum, ever-rising cost to living in America. People who would be working for $7.25 an hour don’t have the capital or resources necessary to wait around for jobs to return to America. We are creatures of habit, after all, and daily eating is a habit we’re conditioned to have. What do these people, in this situation, decide to do? Well, if there aren’t any jobs and they don’t have the higher skills necessary to enter a different job market, they starve….no wait, they go on unemployment (welfare.) Hidden cost transferred to society right there from businesses operating in America. There are other particularities to this, I know, but I’m trying to stay on one topic.
But that’s on a macro level. What about your example, with a business owner hiring and individualized agents acting (perhaps duplicitously) to procure employment? We’re looking at it from a standpoint of isn’t it better for a business to trim down costs on similar employees, but that’s not a fair question. It skips over what a business wants from their employees. A business wants an employee who gives them more value than they put into them, from a purely economic standpoint. Ideally, looking at costs alone, of course I would hire someone whose CtB ratio was higher in the benefits than the cost. Otherwise, I’m out on Broke Street as a failed business owner. But there are hidden costs there. What if the employee that does the best treats the rest of my employees like dirt and brings down productivity? Now we’re into non-anticipated costs from an economic perspective. So we already can’t look at the situation from pure economics.
Also, we tend not to want to hire people based on their past proclivities. A person who served time for embezzlement is probably not going to be hired to manage our cash flow, even if they’re great at it. Ignoring the implications of recidivism and the problems for a society when reform is impossible economically due to a lack of fungible employment, it leaves the problem of economics alone not being enough for the basis of a decision – after all, he’s great at managing those books! You might save money hiring him as long as you double-checked his work. But hidden costs are creeping in, to the former embezzler who can’t get a job with the skillset in accounting he has cultivated, to the business owner who now can’t base all decisions on productivity, and to society because the system isn’t running as smoothly as possible.
Why, in a time of high unemployment, does Wal-mart still hire very elderly/mentally-challenged adults to be door greeters? Surely they could get more value out of someone with complete mobility and the mental capacity to handle many more tasks? The answer is multi-layered. Wal-mart participates in programs and gets better publicity for helping under-represented populations in the work force (I may be over-reaching here – I’m guessing this is what happens.) Elderly and mentally-challenged people have jobs when they might not be seen as desirable in an entire free-market run workplace. Society benefits from not having to provide as much aid/not being as ableist/diversity.
Ah, diversity. Diversity became a short-hand for affirmative action, and all that those loaded words entail, but it really is a concept that works. IIRC, Amp participates in a writer/artists shared space. My guess would be sometimes there are ideas/concepts that get bounced off other artists/writers that are enriched because of that experience, or otherwise he’d just sit at home and draw. That’s diversity at work. Sometimes having someone who isn’t as economically viable is a great tool for diversity.
The human cost of working is also extreme. We spend around a quarter of our allotted time on this planet at work; there are going to be factors that creep in such as illness, family instability, death that cannot be ignored. We are humans, after all; efficiency is not what we are designed for. Big deal, says the capitalist, that’s not my problem. But then we come across another “hidden” benefit – loyalty. You mentioned in your example that a couple of your interviewees seemed destined to use your business as a stepping stone and move on. In a pure capitalist economy, this is what you should expect – after all, you’re just using them for the value they add to your business, why shouldn’t they use you for the value you add to making their mortgage payments/ resume? In real practice, there’s something more to loyalty – such as staying when you shouldn’t – that benefits a collective society. The employee that costs you a lot of money today because of lost productivity due to a family illness might be the employee that stays late off-the-clock for months because you took care of them when they needed it, or because that’s just how they feel about helping you succeed. That’s not something you can usually tease out in a hiring interview, but it’s of real value to a company (free labor!)
This has already rambled on enough, so I’ll stop, but I hope it helps explain some of the viewpoint I have behind just saying we shouldn’t treat people like this.
In another discussion it was raised that for quite a number of people with mental illness and so on, they find that tobacco is helpful for them to, basically, remain “normal” and “functional”. So if they couldn’t smoke because of their job, they wouldn’t be able to have a job anyway. In that discussion this was brought up as an example of how the needs of various groups with disabilities conflict – the needs of those for whom smoking is essentially another form of medication or self-help, and those with respiratory disorders affected by smoking, or other sensitivities to smoke.
Often in life, people’s needs and wants conflict, but you can’t create a world consisting of only the people you like and agree with. I believe that is one of the things they teach at preschool and primary school – how to get along with others.
However, I feel like ethics are, and should be, a part of the hiring process. You say I’m not making an economic argument and ducking the issue.
Ethics are and should be part of the hiring process, but “it isn’t fair that person X who costs more to employ doesn’t get the job” is not, particularly, an ethics-based argument. The ethics of hiring involve things like not discriminating on non-job-operative criteria, not lying about job conditions or expectations, offering the same salary to people of the same qualification, etc.
Alright, so to make an economic argument, making the unethical decision to hire or fire someone based on cost is actually transferring a hidden cost onto society
One, if it is unethical to make decisions based on cost, then you, I and every other human being on earth is profoundly unethical. Not every economic decision comes down purely to cost, of course, but a few do, and cost is a component in almost every economic decision that human beings make. We do not always break out and articulate the cost component of our decisionmaking, but it is usually there in a greater or lesser role. You may shop at the organic co-op rather than WalMart, for example (prioritizing other concerns over strict cost), but it is highly dubious that you go out of your way to shop at Organic Co-op #2 which has list prices 5% higher than at Co-Op #1 but is identical in every other way.
and therefore not actually based in free-market solutions, where you pay what something is worth based on what the economy says it’s worth, not just what you feel the is the proper valuation.
This is incorrect. In a free market, the price of something may well be (and generally is) set by the market (more specifically, by the summed intersecting supply and demand curves of a gazillion consumers and producers) – but whether you buy it or not depends ENTIRELY on what you feel the proper valuation is. I think the proper valuation of a Star Wars Episode I DVD is thirty cents; Frank (who has terrible taste) thinks the proper valuation is $100. If the market-clearing price for that DVD is $10, I will not buy it and Frank will.
Similarly, if the economy thinks that employing Frank is worth $20,000 but I think that employing Frank is only worth $10,000, then I suggest Frank apply to the economy for a job if he expects to earn $11,000. If society decides that Frank really needs to get $20,000, and that I should be the one to employ him, then society needs to come up with another 10 grand or Frank is gonna be playing a lot of World of Warcraft.
[Indian outsourcing description snipped.] Hidden cost transferred to society right there from businesses operating in America. There are other particularities to this, I know, but I’m trying to stay on one topic.
What’s hidden about the cost? We have to pay newly-outsource-victimized Frank unemployment benefits…but Frank’s previous employers have been paying the premiums for those benefits for years prior. (If they haven’t, then Frank hasn’t been working, and won’t get the benefit.) You characterize this as welfare, but it is far from being welfare; it’s an insurance program, one admittedly mediated by the government.
It skips over what a business wants from their employees. A business wants an employee who gives them more value than they put into them, from a purely economic standpoint.
I believe this was G&W’s original point.
Now we’re into non-anticipated costs from an economic perspective. So we already can’t look at the situation from pure economics.
The examples you give, however, are purely economic. An employee who is mean to other employees, or who has a past history of stealing, is imposing additional economic costs (whether actuarial or probabilistic) on the firm.
Ah, diversity. Diversity became a short-hand for affirmative action, and all that those loaded words entail, but it really is a concept that works.
If that is true, then diversity will be embraced voluntarily by forward-thinking employers. And in fact, in the cases where diversity does have bona fide economic value, workplaces tend to be diverse. However, on balance diversity has not been shown to “work” in the sense of making more economic sense; rather, studies have indicated that communities with higher diversity have lower level of trust and the members of those communities (which presumably would include workplace communities) bear individual economic and psychic costs that they would not incur in a less diverse environment. That’s not an argument against rules that prohibit discrimination (which is pernicious in other ways) but it is an argument that “diversity” for its own sake is of questionable utility to an enterprise.
Sometimes having someone who isn’t as economically viable is a great tool for diversity.
Great. You hire that person, and enjoy the benefits thereof. Personally I’m going to stick with the people who cost less than their benefit to the firm, so that I can stay in business and continue to employ people. Alternatively, as G&W suggests, if it’s to society’s benefit that I hire this person, then all society needs to do is come up with the money that the person is costing me differentially, so that they are no better or worse for my bottom line than any other employee, and then we all win.
@Robert:
I appreciate your input, but I feel there is still the hidden costs an employer’s discrimination puts on society. You also only addressed the parts of my argument that correspond to your talking points, and not the full body of the idea. For instance, when someone goes on unemployment, there is more than just the monetary cost to society. If nothing else, there’s a rehabilitation cost to get them back into shape for the next job. That person’s family or a job program pays that cost; you haven’t paid any of it as their employer.
There is more to price than money, and more to cost than dollars. Human capital is complicated and tricky to put into dollar amounts, and I don’t really feel it’s been a focus thus far in economics. It needs to be.
It is crucial, and the central idea of my posts, that this is a cost that cannot be ignored because it’s non-economic. Telling me my economic arguments have flaws isn’t addressing that basic idea, and indeed, the arguments were there on top of the basic idea, not the other way around. It was to tie to economics as we understand it. If I did a poor job of it, it doesn’t negate the underlying belief that people are more valuable than the dollar amounts in which they trade away their time. It shouldn’t be considered ethical to value people in that way, and as a society we shouldn’t condone it.
I think I’m really beginning to see the real difference between liberal and conservative on this point. Liberals operate at a society level and want what they feel is best for society on a macro level – hence my hand-wringing about Kantian ethics. Conservatives operate at a family level and want to take care of that basic unit, even if it means others have to do with less/without. Am I on point with this?
Simple Truth:
What does this sentence mean? What is a person’s “actualization”?
Those are some rather sweeping generalities. No, I think you are quite wrong in your characterization of conservatives. It seems to me that conservatives are quite concerned with society as a whole.
Simple Truth, either your ideas don’t make any sense and are inherently incoherent, or they do make sense and you’re just doing a bad job of articulating them. Or they make sense and you’re articulating them well and I’m just not understanding your well-expressed coherent concepts.
“it doesn’t negate the underlying belief that people are more valuable than the dollar amounts in which they trade away their time. It shouldn’t be considered ethical to value people in that way, and as a society we shouldn’t condone it.”
In non-dollar terms, humans are more valuable than their market wage. My daughter is worth the world to me, but she couldn’t find work at $2/hour. It is to take a limit and reductive view to limit our valuation of people to their wage potential. But their wage potential is the fraction of their existence that is of interest or utility to an employer; the power company is not interested in how many cute things my daughter says daily, they’re interested in how much cable she can string. Because they’re in the cable-stringing business, not the adorable child business.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding you, but it seems like you are saying it would be unethical for anyone to value other people on anything other than the totality of their humanity. That is a lovely spiritual point of view; as economics, it’s a recipe for everyone starving to death as every rationing and resource-direction decision ends up being made on stupid, irrelevant grounds.
Yet another reason why we need nationalized health insurance: reducing employers’ monetary motivation to discriminate. In the end, this would save taxpayers money by reducing the number of people who are on disability because they are unemployable due to past illness: few people will give a person with a past history of cancer a job with benefits, no matter how long they’ve been in remission (to give one example). Separate insurance from employment and all sorts of issues will become simpler.
Yes! Exactly! Well, it’s not hidden IMO but it’s still a transfer of cost.
The OPPOSITE is also true. Forcing am employer to hire someone without regard for cost, because society “wants” them to be employed, is actually transferring a cost to the employer.
In a later post, you said:
These costs aren’t especially “hidden” or not acknowledged. I am not up on the research but I believe that there’s plenty of evidence regarding the costs of discrimination, at least in a general sense.
Trying to fix confusion: You seem to think that “costs” or “economics” only apply to things like wages and income. They don’t. They generally get applied to all sorts of things, from “value of a human life” to “value of a college degree” to “value of a job.” Robert and I are using the broad definition of “economics” and “cost.” That appears to be confusing you.
It has, by and large, been one of the primary focuses of economics throughout almost the entire time economics has been around.
There is no such thing as a “non-economic cost.” It’s a contradiction in terms.
I think what you mean is that there are benefits and costs for society (and the individual) which go far beyond the simple “taxes, wages, and insurance” costs of the employer/employee relationship.
Nobody disagrees with you about that.
I don’t really have time to respond to this anymore, since I work full-time and attend law school part-time AND I had to work all this weekend. I did read your responses, and noted that Robert thinks I don’t have a coherent point. The only thing I can say at this point is yes, I understand economics is the study of all types of transactions (our Law and Economics professor defined economics as the study of people in times of scarcity, which I think is applicable to more than just money,) and yes, I think it is a problem when people are discriminated against due to hypothetical costs.
I’m sorry I’m not able to continue the discussion. I appreciate all your input.
Not really legal here, except in jobs which have the legal right to screen for drug use (army, police, regional police, RCMP, etc).
Wal-Mart can ASK if I smoke pot (or condone it’s usage, which they’ll attribute to my smoking it), but they can’t test me here.
I’m as baffled as you are that the land of liberty and freedom and all that jazz would so quietly accept that.
Ah and yes, get universal healthcare. It’s about time you did. We still have discrimination issues here, but they can’t be put down to healthcare costs.
Schala, you’re Canadian too?
I second the US getting universal health care, our system isn’t perfect but it pays off when people who are sick get the care they need to keep working and aren’t so burdened by debt that they have to declare bankruptcy.
I won’t expect a response but I’ll leave you with this, and I think your L&E professor would agree:
When you talk economics, you define the universe. You choose the hypotheticals. You choose what to consider. But what distinguishes a good economic argument is a balanced universe.
If you want to have an incredibly broad-ranging conversation about (for example) every direct and collateral cost surrounding the employment relationship, that can work. But then you also need to include equivalent collateral benefits, or you end up with an answer which is inherently biased by your choice of data.
If you want to have a more limited conversation w/r/t to the employer/employee relationship, that’s also fine (and usually much easier.) But then you can’t selectively choose counterexamples which go outside that relationship. A limited conversation is imperfect, sure: but that’s OK so long as the imperfection is reasonably balanced.
The responses you got weren’t objecting to the issues you raised. All of those issues are important. They were objecting to the context: you raised them in a way which made the argument out of balance.
@gin-and-whiskey:
Thanks…that’s absolutely accurate. It wasn’t an intentional out-of-balancing, though. I felt it wasn’t a point of view I had heard in these types of debates, and an important one. Perhaps that makes it out of balance when you’re wanting to balance out details, but too often it’s completely left out.
(I lurk a lot, so I read a lot of what’s posted. I just don’t have time, unfortunately, to drag out the economics textbooks and point to examples and citations of what I’m trying to say, so I felt it wasn’t fair to those who were responding. I’d rather respect their time and energy by having coherent and well-reasoned arguments.)
ST, I do the same thing myself (withdraw because I just don’t have the spoons to prove what I think), though probably not often enough, and you deserve some credit for saying “ok, I can’t keep going” rather than just redoubling your rhetorical energy level and repeating yourself. (I naturally never do that, being perfect.)
I enjoyed the discussion we had and look forward to continuing it at some future point (when I will once again have you wriggling in the crushing grip of reason!)
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I feel like everyone has very valid points (except Robert ;) and I’m still in a time crunch, but I wanted to add this link. I feel like it adds to what I was saying about invisible costs employers absorb when they hire jerks vs. taxing people for what could be a future cost based on perceived health. “How a Few Bad Apples Ruin Everything”
@Robert – I will bask in the glow of perfection of your other comments here until we can rehash this. :)