A Look @ LookismFollow

They play video-games too.

I'm not sure we can have an honest conversation if you're going to be making things up.

Said business can create whatever criteria they want for declaring someone "fit" or "not fit" or "healthy" or "not healthy" provided it doesn't run afoul existing anti-discrimination laws. If they want to say you're fit if you eat an apple a day while you're 400lbs and the Adonis next to you is rejected for failing the apple test, tough noogies for him. Weight seems like a fairly easy thing to measure and quantify as opposed to measuring someone's outside-the-office exercise styles or suntanning habits or hours logged in WoW.

I was kind of specifically responding to something Eske said above me:

My point was that companies have to use as much information as possible to evaluate potential hires, while simultaneously avoiding running afoul of discrimination laws. People with visible tattoos or strange piercings are associated (fairly or not) with certain personality traits which employers might find undesirable. However, there's nothing to say that they can't use this information in selecting somebody for a job.

I tried to draw a parallel to the common requirement of having a bachelor's degree, which by itself tells you nothing about how somebody will perform specific job functions. However, since employers can't administer IQ tests to their potential hires, they use the bachelor's degree as a proxy to identify candidates that have certain qualities or traits that they are looking for, much like they use tattoos/piercings to identify candidates that have certain qualities/traits they aren't looking for. Nobody complains that requiring a bachelor's degree is "educationism" because that would be silly, must like this "lookism" tomfoolery.

Edited, Apr 18th 2012 1:24pm by Demea

Rather them mowing my lawn than flipping my burger.

Actually I do complain about that... silly or not (though I don't use that torturous word you just made up) - I call it classism. There are certainly times when a bach. degree could be considered a genuine job requirement, but it actually annoys me to no end when employers make having a degree (but they don't care in what!) a job requirement.

If it is a job working at a nature center and leading kids on tours of a marsh, sure, require a bachelors in environmental studies or biology or some related science. I can get that. But it is silly to hire someone who has a degree in women's studies over someone who doesn't have a degree but has been an avid birder for decades and can quote from the origin of species from memory. Just because it isn't illegal doesn't mean it isn't discrimination.

I link it to classism because the biggest barrier to school is not motivation, nor intelligence but money. It is wrong to give employers a free pass to hire people simply because their parents could afford to subsidize a useless degree so they could apply for jobs that require you to have completed a degree, any one at all.

I don't blame employers necessarily for using education as a "shortcut" to try to guess whether a person has some sort of basic modicum of brainpower - but I think it flies in the face of the so-called American dream of class mobility if we justify using unrelated credentials to weed people out of the candidate pool.

Not to mention that because a bach. degree is the new high school diploma, I seem to be seeing more and more people with higher and higher degrees who can't write a sentence, let alone a paragraph.

I am definitely biased here, as someone who doesn't have a degree (couldn't afford to finish it) - but was lucky enough to find an employer who didn't discriminate against me on that basis.

As someone who works at a dollar store, I absolutely support discriminating against hiring people who smell. I get customers in my store almost every day who reek of B.O. I'm not sure about other towns, but here there is no excuse for that. We have public showers that require just a few quarters, and there are at least two laundromats. I don't care if people come in wearing dirty clothes, or dirty hands, but coming in and smelling so bad it almost makes me physically ill, that's just rude. And it really doesn't help when the stench stagnates for several minutes after they leave.

Other forms of discrimination are wrong. Discriminating against people based on how they smell, I think it perfectly understandable.

what kind of customers do you expect to shop at a dollar store?

I always viewed undergraduate degrees as proof you managed to put up with institutional ******** for four years without giving up or committing suicide. If you can survive a university setting in the US, you can deal with:

- Boneheaded departmental decisions that make no sense
- Crazy schedules
- Ridiculous deadlines and crunch times on upwards of 5 projects at once
- Fooling several dozen people into thinking you've actually learned something from them in three months
- Dealing with mountains of forms with their own deadlines
- Endless construction around your environment

Ostensibly, completing a four year degree means you've managed to pick up a little bit of time management, organization, and budgeting skills over the course of your education.

The most important skill you learn in college is how to learn (or how you learn). Which, in addition to the things you listed, are all desirable qualities that employers look for in their employees, and are evidenced by completing a bachelor's degree.

So, um... pancakes?

The best pancakes are plain pancakes. No berries, no chocolate chips, none of that *********

Come at me, forum goers.

yeah I have tens of thousands in student loans. I stopped when I realized the probable increase in my wages from the degree wasn't going to pay off my loans in a reasonable amount of time (especially with getting knocked into a higher tax bracket). I made the right choice, since I wouldn't have the sweet job I have now if I had wasted more time at school (due to the economic downturn changing the job market) and lo and behold, I do my job just as well as my colleagues with bach. and masters degrees.

Student loans are bogus to begin with - it is essentially a way of making people who are poor pay higher tuition than people who are rich. It doesn't make an inch of sense.



Yeah, I don't know where you live in Canada but in this province the cost of living is prohibitively high - and during the time I was going to school tuition fees more than doubled, rent skyrocketed (thanks olympics for the real estate bubble!), and minimum wage was flatlined for 10 years.

As for being able to do a degree part-time... yeah, good luck paying for tuition (cause you can't get any loans if you are working full time or going to school part-time instead of full time), paying exorbitant rent, and making 8 bucks an hour in a city where a living wage would be more like 16. Is it possible to live in a dingy hole with 10 other people, work full time and somehow manage to keep your sanity while completing a degree part-time over 10 years? Sure. Is it realistic to expect the average joe to do so? Not really.

Edited, Apr 19th 2012 1:37pm by Olorinus