BS Hiring Practices

Warning – this post violates Leesa’s netiquette guideline about restricting posts to one page on the word processor. Deal with it. I’ll try to keep it down to two pages, but a shorter post wouldn’t do the subject matter justice.

Sorry to disappoint, but I wasn’t serious when I said I would bash gays in my next post. Personally, I approve of gay males – more women for the rest of us. On the other hand, gay women don’t help with my goals, so they’re all sinners who will burn in hell unless they immediately convert, or at least go bi-. Although I will say that most gay organizations, like GLAD, seem to exist for the sole purpose of finding new and exciting ways to take offense. Note – if you’re bothered that your lifestyle isn’t openly embraced by fictional characters such as Jay and Silent Bob, you have way too much time on your hands. Plus you’re a retarded homo. But instead of bashing you, I decided to post my views on the hiring practices of the last company for which I worked, especially how a little racism goes a long way.

The BS (company) branch for which I worked in Birmingham, Alabama hired mostly factory floor workers, but also had some openings for office staff. I applied for a few different jobs before I finally got hired. I received preferential treatment because I had worked there as a temp and they liked me, but I still had to pass a rigorous set of requirements – urinalysis, credit check, criminal background check, and I had to take two difficult tests, one English grammar and the other on matching and categorizing objects. I failed the second one on the first try, but they told me the secret to passing the tests: you didn’t have to get all answers correct, but you did have to answer each question. I was told at least 95% of the applicants failed, but they wanted to keep their BS hiring standards high, even though the tests weren’t valid. I label them invalid because they tested how fast you could complete the tasks, but the company actually wanted people who were accurate regardless of speed. Anyway, I retook the tests (each five pages long with only five minutes to complete), this time setting my watch on the table. When I got to 20 seconds, I completed the last page of the second test by just filling in answers without reading the questions, and I passed.

I didn’t work in HR, but I worked nearby and my daily duties allowed me to see all of the applicants that came through. Most were black, which was fortunate for the company. Officially, they didn’t discriminate. Unofficially, they had a BS ultimatum to hire as many minority workers as possible. Note – in Birmingham, minority means black. They’ll settle for brown or yellow if it’s all that’s available, but black keeps everybody happy. Bonus points for hiring a woman, the other minority.

I observed their practices over several months. The only time a white person made it past the front desk was when they passed all the requirements and we didn’t have an available minority candidate. On the other hand, the minority candidates were hired without meeting the BS standards. I don’t know how well any did on the written tests (I saw them tested, although none were failed), but I’m sure they didn’t all pass the drug and background checks, unless several didn’t start committing crimes and doing drugs until after they were gainfully employed.

There were several incidents which contributed to high minority worker turnover, but I’ll just mention a couple. One night, while working second shift, two employees didn’t return from lunch. Several others reported that the police had nabbed them. One of our supervisors was an auxiliary policeman, so he called his pals on the force and discovered one of the employees had been cashing bad checks throughout the area, so bad that all the convenience stores had his picture posted with a warning to call the police if they spotted him. While arresting him, they ran a check on his friend and discovered he had an arrest warrant as well, although it was from a neighboring city and they didn’t know for what crime. “So-and-so’s not coming back – he got arrested” was commonly heard on the production floor, although it was usually one at a time.

The first time I heard of that happening was on first shift, and it definitely wasn’t limited to a single employee. A group of about thirty used their lunch break to attend a cocaine party which was raided by police. Enough workers were carted away to effectively shut our department down until the second shifters could be called in to work overtime.

The main problem with the BS hiring practices, other than being completely racist, is that they weren’t really doing the minority workers much of a favor. Sure, they were unionized and the pay was decent – even the lowest paid unskilled laborer made more than the majority of the office workers – but most were stuck in their low paying positions. In order to work their way up to a higher paying factory position, they had to show some mechanical aptitude and work ethics. Despite the obvious stupidity of BS management, they did limit their ranks to people who had already passed the other tests (exams, background check, etc.).

I think that’s part of why office staff and especially managers were mostly white. Another company policy was to promote from within whenever possible (although many managers refused to do this). Although they just wanted warm bodies (preferably black, preferably female) on the production floor, they had higher standards for the offices and those few of us in the majority (hetero white males under the age of forty) had already been pre-screened.

Side note – the other attitude which limited the minority workers was rooted in fear of a lawsuit. They taught there BS managers that, if an employee sued for discrimination, it would cost an average of $75,000 in court fees even if the company won the trial. Management took that to mean “Never fire anybody who could claim any type of discrimination unless it’s worth $75,000 to do so.” It never was, so if they risked promoting a minority person (i.e. all those people who are not hetero white males under forty), that person had a job for life.

I had an employee who fit the majority profile and was a hard worker with a good attitude, but had all the attention to detail of a Chihuahua on crack. Unfortunately he was in a job which required precision detail and calculations. I spoke to HR about the possibility of moving him into a job that would better suit his talents, to which the HR manager (the same one who eventually ousted me) said “We’re not going to keep him just because he’s a good guy. As a courtesy, give him one month to get up to speed and then fire him.” By that time the company had been training him for over a year, and another month wasn’t going to help.

Conversely, a fellow supervisor had a black female employee who didn’t work half of the hours she charged to the company, refused to do anything that wasn’t specifically in her job description (even though the description said it was just a guideline, not an exhaustive list of duties), and purposefully screwed up every assignment she was given in order to encourage management not to ask anything of her. Her supervisor decided she needed to go and so spoke to the same HR manager. She (all women in this case, so at least that’s one discrimination angle that can be removed) was told that she could fire the employee, but she needed to carefully document every incident, sit with her weekly for counseling sessions, and that she needed to give her at least six months to improve, preferably a year. With that kind of environment, I’m betting all managers (even minorities) cringe at the thought of hiring a minority.

I don’t really have a point to make – I’m just sayin’, is all.