[On Jan 13 2024, I received a takedown notice on this post from 2015 regarding a supposed copyright claim by a service called "Lumen." This post is completely original writing with no images attached. Blogger.com did not identify the offending content, and gave me no option for recourse. I am therefore republishing it.]
Canada held an election in October that saw the son of our most famous Prime Minister follow in his father's footsteps. After almost a decade of rule by a secretive and regressive Conservative government that operated in the paranoid style of the Nixon administration, Justin Trudeau promised to bring back his father Pierre's open, transparent, and optimistic style of governance under the Liberal party. Upon being sworn into office, Justin (yes, we're on a first-name basis with the guy) launched his term with an open letter to Canadians laying out his vision. While I am a supporter of his style and some of his policies, there was one thing that irked me in his open letter. Since all my friends were spreading it on Facebook, I wanted to share with them (and anyone else who cares to read) what my response would be to Justin's promises to the "middle class."
Dear Mr. Trudeau,
I read your open letter to Canadians. Being a child of the 1970s (only a few years older than you), your father’s government set a tone in this country that shaped my identity as a Canadian. I have always looked back on his leadership with fondness and pride. The one characteristic I admired about your father was his openness and willingness to talk to critics and hostile journalists to engage in constructive debate. Even at his most divisive – the War Measures Act, the National Energy Program – he transparently made a case for his actions, keeping political discourse honest and vibrant. This enriched us as Canadians.
I am optimistic that your election is progress over where the country was heading under previous leadership. However, I was not a Liberal supporter in this campaign because I feel that corporate globalization and the declining ethics in which capitalism is practiced has damaged the well-being of far too many people in the world, including us in Canada. Taxing the “one percent” is not enough – we must eliminate the mechanisms that allowed them to become the one percent in the first place. Deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership will only exacerbate inequality in the world and between Canadians. The TPP seems unstoppable, but your support for it (not to mention Bill C-51) made me say “no thanks” to the Liberal party this time out.
However, your leadership, your personal ethics, your support for so many of the values that make me proud to be Canadian. Even if I never see my priorities enacted in policy, I am certain that you will leave this country in far better shape than the condition you found it in.
But there is one thing about your open letter to Canadians that offends me – your focus on serving the middle class and “helping those who work hard to join it.” Why should that be offensive? You are perhaps trying to appeal to someone like me. I was once part of the middle class, having worked for the federal government, in broadcasting, and in publishing. But I have been pushed out of the middle class. I have made every struggle to re-join, but in doing so, I have realized that many have been shunted out of the middle class because of values or choices they made in earlier parts of their lives, and will never be welcomed back.
It would be easy for me blame the economy for the fact that I now earn about $15,000 less than I did eight years ago. Indeed, the new and unimproved state of world finances is a major part of many people’s hardships. But I also had opportunities to remain employed in the middle class. I voluntarily left my secure job in the federal government, and a few years later I voluntarily left the publishing industry. In both cases it was because my own values conflicted with the workplace culture. Like your father, I could not bite my tongue. When asked to waste taxpayer money on unnecessary items simply to expend with “end of fiscal year” surpluses, I refused. When asked to abandon my ethics in journalism, I eventually walked away. When asked to work for free for several months for the slim possibility of getting a desk job in a multinational company, I protested.
Those examples are over-simplifications of complex and nuanced situations, but this is my point – there are some people who cannot fit into the middle-class in the way they could in your father’s era. In the same way your father got away with giving impromptu interviews without handlers or a communications team filtering his words, employees could once survive in middle-class jobs while being genuine human beings. Today, there is a game that must be played, and the rules have become so stifling and vague that there is a new class of people – those who are critical thinkers, those who might be creative problem solvers, those who have a wealth of experience, or who might be self-educated – who are denied access to middle-class jobs unless they censor the very aspects of their personalities that define them.
What offends me about the way you cater to the middle class is that there is no way to have a middle class without there being a lower class, such as the working class. You do not acknowledge the working class or the impoverished class, who will never, ever have the privilege of being middle class.
I now work in a warehouse. In my late 40s, I find myself having gone from middle-class Liberal supporter to being working class, but not sure about my political identity. The people I work with in the warehouse demonstrate the same (or greater) intelligence than those I worked with in middle-class offices. They are politically engaged, socially aware, emotionally intelligent, and have mature interpersonal skills. They are dedicated to their families, but in order to support their families, they must work excessive overtime and never get a long weekend, which denies them that precious time with their families. But they will never make it to the middle class because they’re not comfortable “disguising” themselves in suits and ties, they don’t care about keeping up appearances on social media, and they won’t bite their tongues when they see something wrong or unethical going on. Many of them don’t have university degrees (which are now required for many entry-level clerical jobs), not because they don’t’ have brains, but because of family or financial circumstances when they were younger. And yet they demonstrate all the personal qualities, and then some, that university is expected to instill in people.
I am now living with two other people in a two-bedroom apartment, a circumstance far unlike the independence I had a few years ago. One of my housemates is a socialist who loathes the Liberals and occasionally takes swipes at you. I always rise to your defence. He has made many references to a “class warfare” that both the Liberals and Conservatives have conspired in together against the working class. I found such statements to be histrionic and embellished.
However, all those references you made during your campaign about the middle class, and then again in your open letter to Canadians, really started to make me feel that yes, there is a type of class warfare happening today in our society, and I can’t help but reluctantly see you as engaging in it. You can grow the middle class if you want, but there will always remain classes of people who will be left behind by your plans. Homeless people will never be able to work in offices. Nurses will not suddenly be able to go to medical school and become doctors. Warehouse workers will not suddenly become accountants or middle-managers. Cab drivers won’t become airline pilots. ESL teachers will not become university professors. These are people performing jobs that keep our communities together, jobs that cannot disappear overnight because suddenly all the people doing them have joined the burgeoning middle class.
You talk very eloquently and optimistically about equality for all Canadians. That makes me proud and hopeful. If there is one thing that would truly make me feel optimistic about your leadership, it is this – stop talking so much about the middle class and acknowledge the classes below. Obviously, not everyone in the lower classes can prosper to the level of the middle class. But please help ensure the working class – and those who are even less well off than the working class, such as the impoverished and homeless – that they will be taken care of. That those who must work 12-hour shifts or on holidays that they won’t have to work so hard to pay the mortgage, and that they can spend Thanksgiving with their families instead of working. That those who don’t have homes will be guaranteed food and shelter.
To working-class people like us, the middle class is a privileged class that we feel exiled from. When you cater to them, you ignore us. What would help us prosper the most is to live in a country where we can be creative, open minded, respectfully critical, and politically engaged – like your father – without being shut out of the middle class. And for those of us who remain working class, that we will not be stigmatized or ghettoized for working in occupations that provide our communities with essential services.
“... bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity.” -- David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
Having an armed guard tear my ticket stub and direct me to “Theatre 2, on your left” altered my view about how we deal with policing and social problems in our culture. This was the mid 1990s, and I had been visiting San Francisco with a couple of friends. You might question why we couldn’t think of anything more interesting to do on a vacation than go to the movies, but nothing on that trip left an impression as indelible as the man with the gun taking movie tickets.
I didn’t doubt he was there for a reason. It was probably a bad neighbourhood, the theatre likely had some ongoing problems with violence, and this is what it came to. But I still treated this as a sociological benchmark of sorts: When a society needs armed men to take tickets at a movie theatre, that society is fucked up.
And of course, the subtext of that thought was: Thank god I live in Canada, where that kind of thing would never be seen.
Flash forward to 2005, and Vancouver hits that benchmark. Armed police start performing the routine administrative work of Translink, our transit authority – checking tickets on trains and buses. This caused me a bit of intellectual angst. I had to either adjust my benchmark and admit that there was nothing wrong with arming our civil servants to conduct bureaucratic work – that it was okay to threaten bus passengers with potential violence for not paying a $2.25 fare – or I had to admit that Canada was going down the toilet.
I ended up justifying the existence of the transit cops. I figured, well, sometimes there's crime on the train, and the police probably make the system safer for everyone. But I could never wrap my head around how non-payment of a fare of less than $3 necessitates being threatened with 9mm pistols, tasers, batons, and pepper spray – weapons carried by Vancouver’s transit police.
You might take exception to my use of the word “threatened.” After all, transit police don’t actually pull out their weapons during fare checks. But isn’t the mere presence of a weapon a threat? If your neighbour knocked on your door and asked you to turn down your stereo, and he made a point of drawing back his jacket to reveal a gun in his belt, wouldn’t that be a threat? Well, of course, the police are supposed to have weapons. But the fact that they have weapons is exactly why they are put on the transit system. It’s Translink’s way of drawing back their jacket and revealing a gun in their belt.
This isn’t to say that the transit police have no business patrolling our transit system. There are incidents on the system that require a prompt, effective response by the police. They do have a legitimate role in public safety. That said, when those moments occur when you'd want police intervention, it's certain they won't be present – you'd still need to press the emergency call button. When we do see police on the transit system, it's most commonly (always, in my observation) to check fares, not to perform safety patrols.
What I find disturbing is that unarmed civilian Translink staff can be seen on almost every train platform far more frequently than the police, but they mostly seem engaged in socializing with one another. These are the employees who should be checking fares on a routine basis. The fact that Translink has confidence in these employees to perform fare checks on rare occasions is evidence that there are no real concerns about the safety or efficacy of civilian fare checks. When you consider that Translink has the staff and resources to conduct ongoing fare checks on passengers before they enter the system (fewer police would also free up more resources for this as well), one might conclude that Translink is intentionally encouraging fare cheating as a form of entrapment, preferring the cheaters be engaged in police confrontations rather than be prevented from entering the system in the first place.
I don't believe this to be true. Translink is not willfully trying to entrap vulnerable people. It is simply that weapons are the most direct way to get results, whether you are a robber trying to take someone's wallet or bureaucracy trying to get someone to pay $3 for a service. One is criminal use of a weapon and the other is seen to be justified. But just because one is within legal means doesn’t mean it’s right. We don’t need the threat of violence to make us pay our taxes or put money into parking meters. So why is a violent threat required to put money into a fare box?
If fares were checked on the system by civilian employees who have the authority to deliver fines – in the same manner as a parking enforcement officer (“meter maid”) – we would have an equitable response to what is essentially a bylaw infraction. Should a fare evader run away from a civilian enforcer, then all we have is an individual who got away with a theft of a service worth pocket change – and a service at that, not a possession, not a theft that caused anyone a direct hardship.The chance that fines would even have to be doled out would be greatly mitigated by fare checks at station entrances.
Yes, this type of system would require more staff, yet it would also require fewer police officers, who are paid roughly three times as much as civilian Translink staff. But of course, the more staff you have on payroll and the fewer weapons present, the more difficult things become for administrators.
David Graeber is an anthropologist who has studied and written about bureaucracies and their relationship with violence and law enforcement. In The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, he writes:
“…violence may well be the only way it is possible for one human being to do something which will have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom they understand nothing. In pretty much any other way in which you might try to influence another’s actions, you must at least have some idea about who you think they are, who they think you are, what they might want out of the situation, their aversions and proclivities, and so forth. Hit them over the head hard enough, and all of this becomes irrelevant.”
Having civilians enforce fares and fines would require what Graeber refers to as "interpretive labour," the emotional and intellectual work required to understand a person's motives, habits, and circumstances. Weapons eliminate the need for interpretive labour on the part of everyone involved, from the civilian employees (who can carry on socializing with colleagues on the platforms) to the board of Translink (who are left with more streamlined budgets and black-and-white solutions to the politics of social problems that make their way onto the trains).
Bus drivers, on the other hand, must engage in great degree of interpretive labour with their passengers. Translink police very rarely make their way onto the buses, preferring to focus on the train system. Bus drivers use their discretion when enforcing fares. Based on my observations, my guess is that they refuse entry to about half the passengers who don't pay fare. With the other half, drivers make a judgement call and choose to allow the fare evader to board. Translink allows drivers to use such judgement, and they consider the loss to be a cost of doing business. Why then cannot Translink deal with a few more lost dollars on the SkyTrain? The budget for the transit police force is about $32 million annually. Eliminate fare checks and cut police by a third (it should be cut more, but let's start there) and we have $11 million right there that could go toward civilian enforcement and perhaps leave a million or so extra to make up for lost fares (which aren't really lost fares anyway – most fare evaders would simply stop using the system if they were prevented from entering without payment).
Weaponized fare-checks makes life easier for a great number of people at Translink, but at a great social cost. This heavy-handed approach ensures that innocent and non-violent passengers will be on the receiving end of violent take-downs. Take a recent example: 29-year-old Jordan Dyck was beaten and pepper-sprayed by two Translink police officers. His offense? Sitting on the steps of the station entrance while playing a game on his smartphone. The cops asked him for ID, he asked why, and the situation ended with Dyck in a hospital bed. If the officers had simply told Dyck he couldn’t sit on the steps and he should move along, he might have been more responsive. In fact, a civilian employee would have done that job with just the right amount of authority. Instead, the police went “full cop” on him for the simple act of being idle.
Dyck’s version of events was considered accurate after it was discovered the officers fabricated evidence to support their case. They were convicted of assault, but no penalty was issued for the fake evidence. The fact that the police were convicted and taken off duty may seem to negate my argument – justice prevails – but my point is that the assaults are made possible in the first place, and for every conviction there must be several other victims who choose not to press charges, or don't have the resources to do so.
Stories of police misusing their power are endless, and Translink is no exception. All police forces have growing files of encounters with officers that started over trivial matters and ended in violence; Translink's own records contain notes such as: “Subject became uncooperative and would not identify himself while being checked for fare on SkyTrain. During arrest subject became uncooperative and grabbed onto the platform railing and refused to let go. Taser was deployed after several warnings."
Knowing this, we are creating criminals and injuring innocent civilians to facilitate Translink’s indolence. This is the trade-off we have made: occasionally brutalize non-violent passengers in order to help a bureaucracy take the lazy way out of difficult decisions.
A point that should be covered in this discussion is a defense often used by the police when using heavy-handed tactics to deal with petty offences – that their sweeps often catch those who have outstanding warrants for arrest. I don’t doubt this is true, and it’s a positive aspect of the police fare-checks. But just because a certain practice might have some benefit doesn’t mean the practice is ethical overall. We could also use the police to check tickets at sporting events, concerts, and movie theatres to shake down any patron that looks suspicious. We'd certainly find criminals to legitimately arrest, but we’d also find such practices offensive, menacing, and perhaps unconstitutional. Are weaponized fare checks on transit any different, and why are we so tolerant of it?
This leads back to my point about a society reaching a “fucked-up” threshold when the threat of violence is used to enforce public behaviour or administrative matters. Let me turn to another quote from Graeber's book:
“Most human relations – particularly ongoing ones, whether between longstanding friends or longstanding enemies – are extremely complicated, dense with history and meaning. Maintaining them requires a constant and often subtle work of imagination, of endlessly trying to see the world from others’ points of view... Threatening others with physical harm allows the possibility of cutting through all this. It makes possible relations of a far more simple and schematic kind (cross this line and I will shoot you, one more word out of any of you and you’re going to jail). This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid.”
The preferred weapon of the stupid. Does that apply to Translink? They had and still have the choice between providing a Passenger Service desk at each station entrance, and fare-checks at all the station gates, but they opt to spend that money on police – the choice between "complicated" human relations and the "threat of physical harm" type.
And we can see where that stupidity manifests in other aspects of the organization. The fiasco over the newly installed fare gates in our SkyTrain stations comes to mind. The gates were installed in late 2012 with implementation planned for spring of 2013. It’s now two years later. After an overrun of $23 million and ongoing problems reported by beta-testers, the gates are still not in operation, and no date for a full roll-out is planned. The fare-card technology Translink is using is a tried and tested one, having been used successfully in most major cities across North America, Asia, and Europe for at least 15 years. No one can say that this is new, untested gear – it’s a system perfected by others after long-term use. A few bugs and minor delays should be anticipated when adapting the system to another location’s needs, but the problems Translink has been having are the kind of errors one would expect from an untried innovation – mostly regarding overcharging and card readers unable to detect the debit cards.
It might be harsh to call this debacle the product of stupidity, but it’s obvious this is an abnormal screw-up, the result of poor research and botched execution. This might have been predicted by the very fact that Translink currently relies on the threat of violence and arrest to collect fares, given that “violence is the preferred weapon of the stupid.” Any bureaucracy that needs guns to deal with $3 transactions probably doesn’t have the institutional smarts to implement a constructive, multifaceted alternative – the same way that the neighbour who needs the gun to get you to turn down your stereo doesn’t have the intelligence to negotiate a simple solution via diplomacy and human courtesy.
(I will qualify the above by recognizing that Translink has demonstrated intelligence and competence in most other areas of their operation, such as planning routes and delivering service. Their efforts on fare collection and enforcement, though, have always been riddled with huge lapses in judgement. Fares that sometimes cost more for shorter distances than longer ones, or cost more for crossing a non-tolled bridge, are part of a structure I have long considered unprincipled for penalizing passengers who live too close to arbitrary zone boundaries. Equitable distance pricing is another feature of the fare-gate technology that Translink won't be utilizing; willful negligence at the public's expense.)
Looking at this more broadly, consider the social class of those who get caught in Translink’s net. Let’s say someone steals a towel from a hotel room. The hotel notices. Do they send the police? No, they either forget about it or bill the guest’s credit card. Similar story when it comes to dodging $100 of freelance income on your taxes, or failing to put a dollar in the parking meter, or not tipping your waiter. If you’re caught evading the people who enforce these payments, you don’t find your face planted on the sidewalk while getting handcuffed. Nor do innocent parties get mistakenly brutalized in, say, a parking-enforcement crackdown.
The possibility of being fined by an unarmed civilian officer would be enough of a deterrent for anyone with a livable income, in the same way patrons reliably pay for restaurant service (via tips) when they have no legal obligation to do so. Those who have some social standing know that it’s not worth the risk, the hassle, or the shame just to save a few coins, whether the penalty is a fine or a scowl from wait staff.
The reason we use the threat of violence against the lower classes over a $2 or $3 fraud and not against the middle class for a $20 fraud is because enforcement without violence requires interpretive labour – communication, empathy, and knowledge of the community. A parking enforcement officer doesn’t need a gun to write a ticket to a car owner who didn’t drop a dollar in the meter. If the owner confronts the officer, both of them can argue it out because they are likely of similar social classes. They understand each other’s motives and needs before any words are exchanged.
Under no circumstance would that civilian officer be allowed to inflict violence on the offender for challenging his authority.
But a bureaucrat making between $50,000 and $150,000 a year (whether a Translink board member, a civilian staffer, or a transit cop) can’t identify with, and doesn’t want to identify with, the motives and needs of those who cannot afford cars, restaurant meals, or hotels, or those who don't have enough income to have taxes to cheat on. The larger the gap between social classes, the more interpretive labour it takes the higher class to understand the lower one. If you’ve ever changed the channel when one of those World Vision commercials confronts us with the faces of poverty, you can understand why the police don't negotiate with fare evaders. Brandishing a weapon is the easiest way for authority to "change the channel" on a class of people they have no empathy for.
If it ever became routine practice to taser those who ran away from a parks board officer or who argued with a "meter maid," there would be massive protests in various forms, threatening the rule of any government that allowed the practice. That's because the middle and upper classes can relate to those who own a car or who might open a bottle of wine on the beach. But we view public transport as the environment of a lower social class that we don't understand, even though the vast majority of those on the system are actually middle class. I once worked in an office of liberal elites who often referred to the bus as the "peasant wagon" and SkyTrain as "CrimeTrain", even though these were the methods about half of us used to get to work, without ever experiencing any crime or peasantry along the way.
Allowing armed personnel to do Translink’s administrative work should make us all question if this is appropriate for the kind of community we want to live in, and if their use is a sign of a cancerous stupidity at the highest levels of the Translink organization. Police checks of bus and train fare would have been unimaginable ten years before the practice existed. It would have been seen as an element of some kind of dystopian fiction. If we're so willing now to take the lazy and violent approach to disputes over a few coins in a fare box, what will we be willing to use the police for when tackling small social problems of the future? We should consider where to draw the line in utlizing police enforcement, and whether or not Translink has crossed it.
I recently spent four years in Vancouver looking for gainful employment. Vancouver is my home city, and it's not a job market I'm inexperienced with. I moved to Asia for a few years to broaden my skills and understanding of the world, and returned in 2011 with the assumption that finding work would be as easy as it had been in my younger days – perhaps easier, now that I was a more experienced, broadminded individual with a greater sense of Vancouver's place in the world.
What I discovered was a newly formed Human Resources culture that is surely the tenth circle of hell.
Let me go back a bit. My first job, in 1987, was at a video rental chain. I filled out an application at one of their stores and was called in for an interview with the district manager. No HR department was involved. The entire interview was conversational, talking about what movies I liked and how I'd make recommendations to customers.
I then pursued my interest in radio with random resume-drops to various stations in Vancouver. The program director of a talk-radio station called me in for a chat and hired me on the spot as a technical operator. In the two years I worked there, I was not aware of an HR department.
After graduating from BCIT in 1989, I dropped off an application at the reception desk at CBC Radio and a manager called me the next day. Again, purely conversational. My only contact with Human Resources – an open-plan office that welcomed interaction with employees – was to get enrolled in the proper benefits programs, and to answer my questions when I needed to utilize those benefits.
Even in 1997 when I went to work for the Canadian government (a body notorious for bureaucracy) I was interviewed by a woman in a small staffing office and I was assigned within days to Veterans Affairs, and later to Health Canada. I did not meet with HR until my first day of work, to complete the requisite paperwork for payroll and benefits.
Today, HR departments are massive and ubiquitous, yet more inaccessible than ever. During my time with the federal government in the 2000s, that local staffing department was closed down. Responsibility for interviewing and hiring went to the HR offices of individual departments. A few years later, our own HR at Health Canada was moved to a building several blocks away, behind a locked door, and only accessible with an appointment. The welcoming HR department on the second floor of CBC Vancouver (I will never forget the ever smiling, delightfully named Joy Cinnamon, who handled my timesheets) has been outsourced to Toronto and only reachable through a 1-800 number or a generic e-mail address.
From anecdotal evidence heard from friends and from what I've witnessed in my job search, this is the norm in most organizations – Human Resources offices generally don't welcome interaction with humans anymore, be they employees or job seekers.
Amid this bureaucratization, HR departments have somehow flipped from being the last stage of employment to the first. No longer can managers find new hires and send them over to HR to go on payroll. HR has now convinced the corporate world (in Canada at least, but I'm assuming this is true in the Western world) that managers do not possess the skills and qualifications to do their own hiring.
Take my recent experiences with temp agencies, for example. In the late 1990s, when I used these agencies between the CBC layoff and the government job, I was given assignments to employers based solely on my tested skills and my interview with the recruiter. In 2011, there was a strange twist. In one of my first contacts with a temp agency, I was given an assignment at a government tourism office. The next day, the offer was withdrawn. The recruiter said, “The HR rep thinks you're over-qualified.” Whoa. Why is HR involved? If HR is reviewing resumes, then why are they using a temp agency and not doing their own hiring? Many government departments, I discovered, have signed exclusive contracts with temp agencies that are more costly than just hiring term or casual employees at union wage – this in a time when governments and large corporations are slashing budgets and staff.
Using an agency is an excessive cost, about double an employee's hourly wage for the life of the assignment. An agency charges about $30 an hour, for which the employee gets about $12, when a temp could be hired directly for that same $12. Or in the case of a unionized employer, even $25 an hour would be less of a cost commitment.
The concept of temp hiring was originally to serve employers lacking in HR resources. But when agencies are utilized by HR departments themselves, the job-seeker suffers with a lower wage and elimination of benefits just to keep HR largesse within the family.
HR's involvement with temp agencies, I discovered over my subsequent encounters with agents, is now the norm. Even when I passed through the agency's interviews and technical tests, the client's HR rep still wanted to see my CV for approval, or meet with me for their own interview.
I would find my employment hopes quashed once HR got involved. In the case of the tourism office, I asked what was meant by over-qualified. “They're concerned you're not going to stay, that you'll just look for another job.” Which struck me as doubly odd. It was a 30-day assignment -- was I supposed to retire after 30 days? Were they concerned I would be doused with offers from other companies after seven days on the job? If the market had been that great, I wouldn't have been using a temp agency in the first place.
I heard “over-qualified” a lot. I was consistently told to “dumb down” my resume, which I did, but then it only left questions about certain gaps on my resume, or why, at my age, I hadn't achieved much.
There was a good reason I was applying at temp agencies for work beneath my qualifications. When I applied for jobs within my skillset – jobs in the areas of technical editing, publishing, communications – I could not meet the HR criteria of a perfect candidate, or beat the online systems used for sorting applications. The advice I'd get was to lower my expectations and take office work. When I did that, I'd then be deemed over-qualified, or lacking in self-esteem. These were judgments based on personality-profile characteristics that HR reps are trained to glean from applications – they are not conclusions based on an applicant's own wants and needs. Having lived in various spots in Asia, I came to accept that working in jobs beneath my qualifications was a trade-off I was happy to make for the opportunity to live in a city with civil liberties, an intellectually engaged population, and a healthy environment – and simply to be home. No employer gave me the opportunity to put that forward.
A bureaucracy that dehumanizes job hunters
I call the HR industry a bureaucracy because it has all the hallmarks of one. They are organizations that have grown into a monoculture of uniform rules, systems and procedures that serve their own needs and their own careers at the cost and detriment of the people they aim to serve.
The difficulty in defining or criticizing the HR industry is that you can't say who they serve. In reality, they serve the companies they are attached to. Their only obligation is to their employers. Does HR serve job-hunters? No, they have no legal obligations to us. But is there an ethical obligation? It's sadly ironic that a profession that was created to look after the welfare of people now treats humans like commodities, inanimate pieces on a chess board to be toyed with and knocked off at will.
Online job-application systems are the most obvious example of this dehumanization. They are cumbersome and full of redundancies, creating more work for a candidate (requiring new accounts, registrations, re-writing a resume each time in painstaking drop-down menus and data boxes, agreements to terms and conditions – try filling out one of those every day for a year and see if you stay sane). The software is then looking to eliminate candidates from a competition based on keywords. You might have called yourself a District Manager, for instance, but the system tosses your application because you called yourself an Area Manager.
HR departments will say these systems are necessary to deal with the hundreds of resumes and applications received for each job – there's no way the staff can deal with them all individually. But there's a simple solution. Post the job online, but don't give an option for online applications. State: “Interested applicants should deliver a resume and cover letter to our office at…” Only the most serious, best-qualified candidates will apply. HR would immediately eliminate the half-interested and the lookie-loos, those who would hesitate when he or she is required to address an envelope and buy a stamp.
Why must electronic applications be the only way to apply for jobs these days? Simply because the HR industry profits from multitudes of applications. The avalanche of resumes keeps HR professionals in business by increasing their budgets for software, equipment, and developers, it inflates their importance, and protects their jobs by creating work. Individual HR reps will surely disagree, but imagine how small and unsophisticated their offices would become – and how less stressful, less important, and redundant their jobs would seem – if they only received 10 or 20 serious applications (on paper) for each posting rather than 500 frivolous ones. HR reps would say they don't want to deter the “right candidate” from applying, but anyone who would turn down an opportunity because they don't want to take their hand off their mouse is not the “right candidate”.
Simplifying the process would not only eliminate some HR jobs, it would also decimate their budgets. As we've all witnessed in those end-of-fiscal-year spending sprees, bureaucracies fight to the death to protect their budgets from being slashed, even when the surplus is unneeded.
Questioning the questions
If you're successful at getting an interview, then be prepared for a bureaucratic Groundhog Day. In every interview I went to in the past four years, HR reps would ask the same questions, or variations of such. “What is your greatest strength? What is your greatest weakness? Describe a situation of conflict and how you resolved it. How do you handle stress and pressure? What was one of your accomplishments?”, etcetera. The thing is, these questions have become so stock that you can find books and internet sources to help you formulate the answers HR advisors are looking for.
This means that HR reps are no longer hiring people who know how to give authentic, genuine answers to relevant questions, or who can hold their own in an interesting conversation about their profession. There have literally become “right answers” for job interviews, which don't allow recruiters to consider informative answers that tell you something real and true about the person up for consideration. What this does is weed out the most creative individuals and only let through those who have blandly studied the qualities HR is looking for. Creative people are necessary in a workplace to find new solutions to problems, develop new products, and find efficiencies where others haven't looked. But creative people are also more likely to not give pre-scripted answers.
In addition to discriminating against creative thinkers, introverted personality types are also overlooked in favour of extroverts, who do much better at “selling” themselves and appearing to be a “good fit on the team.” Introverts tend to be good listeners, well organized, and lean toward productivity rather than socializing at the water cooler, so they have inherent value to an employer. What introverts are not good at, like creative thinkers, is putting themselves forward in the disingenuous, formulated way that HR practices demand.
Certainly, there are stupid things that a candidate shouldn't say in a job interview, and there are positive ways to spin negative answers. But the list of “wrong things” to say in an interview has become so suffocating that candidates are being coached to present themselves as a facsimile of an impossibly wart-free employee. For instance, the question, "What is your greatest weakness?" demands something positive for the employer spun into a negative for the employee. "I'm too ambitious and sometimes I stay in the office too long to accomplish everything I want to do." Since there's no way to give an answer that contains any genuine honesty ("I have problems being punctual," "I'm lousy at giving presentations"), the candidate is being forced to please the interviewer with a lie or a half measure. It's a question that shouldn't be asked at all because the candidate will be penalized for the truth and rewarded for being insincere, when an employee with the opposite values will do much better at fostering ethics in the workplace.
In my job search in the past four years, I have felt pressured against revealing my true values and work ethic. For instance, when asked to describe an instance of personal conflict at the workplace, I state the truth, that I avoid conflict by not engaging in it. In today's HR pop-psychology, avoiding conflict reflects poor judgment. Conflict must be dealt with and resolved. There is also a sense of disbelief that I never had an all-out blowout with a colleague. However, I stick to my guns. I explain that if a co-worker approaches me in a hostile manner, I try to respond to that person's concern rather than their tone. I listen to what they are trying to communicate. If I am offended by their approach, I might talk to that person about it later after the situation has calmed down. If the person continues to be a problem after all reasonable efforts, I speak with my manager.
Whether or not that's the best method of dealing with conflict, who's to say, but it's certainly not harmful or regressive. However, no matter how often I present my technique in job interviews, the HR advisor presses on. "What if that person doesn't respond to your approach? What if that person becomes physically abusive? What if the manager doesn't want to be involved?" The answer I've always wanted to give: "You hired these people. If you have a relentlessly abusive employee and a negligent manager, isn't this an HR responsibility? How does this become my problem to solve?" But if I ever gave such a response, the interview would be over. I've never been able to give a satisfactory response when HR questioning goes down the conflict rabbit hole. I believe that my approach is ethical and diplomatic, but it's not the one in the HR handbook.
The most absurd criterion I've been judged by is my handshake. I've been coached by recruiters that my handshake is too passive and that I should firm up. Well, I just don't do firm handshakes. I don't like receiving them, and I'm considerate of the fact that the person on the receiving end of mine might have a sprained wrist (or arthritis or such), and might only be extending a hand because in our culture you just have to. My inclination for soft handshakes, however, is judged as a form of weakness, rather than that of someone who is considerate or introverted (right there, they've eliminated the good listener and productive worker based on a weak grip). The handshake rule is the ultimate of the BS pseudo-psychology I've heard from the HR industry. The fact that someone doesn't give a strong grip indicates nothing about how well that person will function as a secretary, project manager, or an architect.
From there, everything from eye contact to body language is analyzed to determine if you will "be a good fit on the team." One common trope I've come across in various Linkedin articles and other sources for refining interview skills: "The decision to hire is made in the first six seconds. Give a firm handshake, smile, and make good eye contact." Generally good advice – basically, don't enter the room like a schmuck. But if hiring decisions are being made based on the first six seconds, HR is defeating their own raison d'etre of neutralizing bias in the hiring process. Of course, folks will inform me, "The six-second rule is subconscious, it's just human psychology." But if HR professionals are writing about it and it's become common knowledge in their trade, it's not subconscious anymore.
Body language should not be entirely ignored in a job interview, but far too rigid emphasis is placed on it. So what if you don't make eye contact well in an interview. This could mean you're shifty and not to be trusted, or it could mean you're from a culture where sustained eye contact is considered rude. And if you're applying for an accounting job, does it really matter if you're shy?
Bias and hypocrisy within the HR industry
The rules and procedures created by the Human Resources industry, as with any bureaucracy, have their roots in honourable intentions – to eliminate favouritism, nepotism, intuitive decisions, and unconscious bias in hiring decisions. However, in my encounters with Human Resources departments in the past four years, I found that they continually violate many of the ethics that their rules are meant to uphold. Age bias, for instance. If I left the year of my college graduation off my resume, HR would phone and ask for it. If I didn't list experience going back more than 15 years in order to keep my age vague, I would be verbally asked to list any other experience – "And what did you do before that?" – until they got back to high-school graduation. When I would get the inevitable “over-qualified” or “you won't be happy with this job” remark, I often took it to mean "too old."
As for intuitive bias, the "first six seconds" and body-language matters discussed above shows that they are aware of such bias, making it the job-hunter's responsibility for countering. Also, I often found that after applying for jobs at certain organizations, my Linkedin profile would have been scanned by an "unnamed HR professional" at that employer. We're told by the HR industry that Linkedin is a must-have in today's job market, and we're counselled to keep our social media profiles clean. I know, it's common sense. But I have to wonder, if HR pros in Western countries strive so hard to adhere to human rights codes, saying they will shred applications that contain photos and personal info in order to protect themselves from accusations of bias, why would they violate the spirit of the law and go looking for prejudicial material from other sources?
I was once asked flat out for my full date of birth (yes, including the year) by an agent at a global recruiting firm. I asked why it was important (surely that was noted as a sign of my belligerence), and I was told it was required by the client, a multinational insurance firm that was looking for a disability benefits advisor. So here we had two HR professionals violating HR 101. I gave her my birthdate because I wanted the job. The next day, the recruiter told me that the client had put staffing on hold. Whether that was the truth, or a way of eliminating me from the competition while mitigating their liability for age bias, I will never know.
In another instance, an HR department wanted me to sign a contract that contained an illegal clause – that I wouldn't work for their competition for two years upon completion of my assignment. Such clauses have been struck down by Canadian courts, because you cannot forbid a person from pursuing their livelihood. That type of clause can be tied to severance packages, but certainly not because a temp contract has expired. I pointed out the illegality of the clause and said I would sign the contract if it were removed -- after all, it was a four-month assignment, and if the company didn't see fit to extend me after that, I was going to make my living using every skill at my disposal. An hour later, I was told the company had a budget freeze on temp employees. I was stupid, I should have signed the contract regardless, since the clause couldn't be enforced.
But here's the thing: HR advisors are the ones who are trained to uphold employment laws. It's a fundamental pillar of their profession. In practice, however, HR professionals use their position not to uphold the law, but to find loopholes to subvert it. The clause in that contract for instance. HR likely knew the clause was illegal. They just threw it in there to intimidate the majority of employees who don't know any better.
All of the rules and systems the HR industry has put in place to protect themselves from bias have grown into a strangling bureaucracy for job seekers – a bureaucracy that allows HR to practice that bias under the radar.
The futility of reference checks
References have been a staple of the hiring process for time immemorial. But, in recent years, HR has elevated this to a wasteful art. One of my references was reportedly kept on the phone for 15 minutes, subjected to a relentless list of meticulous questions. He told me, "Sorry, but I had to end the call. I couldn't answer all of her questions. Hope this didn't hurt your chances." What it did hurt was my relationship with that particular reference. I sensed that he was implying, “Please don't give my name out again.” And in a broader way, it made me thereafter hesitant to even list my references on employers' paperwork. My references had been “bothered” too many times by agencies that would do such checks and then not offer work. I asked one agency, "Did I get a bad reference?" No, they were all glowing, but the HR people whom they forwarded my resume to kept saying "no" for various reasons. So as I kept applying at agencies in search of that elusive job, my references kept getting calls even when I was not being put forward for a particular job. Which, at a certain point, probably became a nuisance to them.
In the most extreme example, one employer wanted me to sign my rights over to a private company, in an unspecified foreign country, that specializes in reference checks – another layer of the self-serving HR bureaucracy. The form (click the image to read it) was very heavy on legalese, and the fine print authorized every employer I've had, whether listed on my resume or discovered in their own "background check," to hand over pretty much everything on my HR files. It was too invasive, especially since I had no way of knowing to which country or to which parties my vital details would be going. I called the HR rep and said I would be willing to sign it upon getting an offer – in other words, if I'm the successful candidate, "you can make a job offer contingent on my reference check being positive." Upon hearing that, the HR rep said, “We've actually offered the job to another candidate.” I think she made that decision about five seconds into my phone call. This is an example of how the HR industry has the power to impose unjust practices upon job hunters, who have no bargaining power in such situations, and are eliminated from gainful employment for exercising reason and caution.
In another case, I asked for a reference from a manager for whom I did a three-month assignment. She passed my request to HR, who said they would not allow her to speak on behalf of the organization. HR said that only they could give a reference. However, HR had no record of my performance because they hired me through an agency, who was officially my employer. The agency would not give me a reference because, alas, the person requesting it was from a competing agency.
Companies on the receiving end of reference requests are increasingly refusing to participate, partly because they don't want to exhaust their time and resources when there's nothing to gain. Another part of it is legal. Lawyers sometimes encourage candidates to sue former employers for vindictively untruthful bad references. Companies are more often protecting themselves by not responding to reference requests, or by only disclosing dates of employment, nothing more.
It's a defeating situation. Human Resources departments are asking for an increasing amount of information from former managers and HR reps, even when their own profession is telling them not to release that information themselves. HR plays whichever card suits them and punishes the candidate for the practices of the HR profession itself.
Pre-interviews
There have been many cases where an HR rep has called me to conduct a pre-interview in order to qualify for an actual in-person interview. Sometimes these calls have been unscheduled. Twice I was called on Sundays while I was socializing and completely unprepared. Another time during a scheduled pre-interview, the HR rep put me on speakerphone while she typed my answers. Her keyboard clattered in my ear while my own voice echoed back to me. It was so distracting that I got flummoxed in my answers and I flopped the pre-interview. Why couldn't I just be called in for a proper conversation?
I'm sure the pre-interview is another example of HR creating another layer of bureaucracy for job-hunters to pass. The circumstances of most of the pre-interview phone calls I received were unprofessional and did not give me a chance to prepare or present myself in a professional manner.
Posting jobs that don't exist
When I did a practicum recently at an international shipping company, a job came open and I thought I'd be an ideal fit. When I approached the HR advisor, she said the job was filled. “Oh, I suppose it's a glitch that the job is still posted?” No, she said. "I keep all the jobs posted for an extra month." Why? “Oh, you never know.” You never know what? Really, is it just to look like your department is active? To torment job seekers who are going to spend half the afternoon drafting a good application for a job that doesn't exist?
Many organizations stick all of their job postings up on their websites without indicating which ones are for internal or external applicants. The reason for this, I was told later by people in the know, is that they want to have extra applications ready in case the internal search doesn't pan out. But when you hear the common complaint from HR reps – “We don't have time to read all the applications, so we have to skim for key words” – why would they go out of their way to solicit work they can't handle? All this does is further exhaust the energy of job-seekers, who already undergo enough unnecessary anxiety as it is. It's one more phone call that doesn't come, furthering the sense of rejection and defeat.
Taking decision-making powers away from managers
At the top of this post, I recounted stories of my early job-hunting days, where my only contact was with managers, who also did my reference checks. When I speak about these issues with friends and acquaintances who hold management positions, they all talk about their own frustrations with HR. One problem that I've heard more than once relates to managers who have a position to fill on their team. They ask HR to see the resumes of applicants as they come in, but they are told no; HR will forward only the screened-in applications once the pre-interviews and background checks are done. The managers themselves want a greater role in the screening process but are denied. Hearing these stories has been upsetting to me as a job-hunter, as I know that there are managers who would like to hire me, but I'm being prevented from meeting them because I don't fit a bureaucratic personality profile.
Postscript
The position I've taken in this article was influenced by David Graeber's new book, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. I had been wanting to write an article about my hardships with Human Resources departments for a few years now. The awareness that something was different and wrong with current HR practices came about a year into my job search and snowballed as more time passed, but I found it difficult to articulate my experiences. Without any framework for understanding the kinds of walls I was hitting, my complaints sounded like a laundry list of self-pitying grievances.
A lightbulb went off when I watched an interview with Graeber on The Keiser Report (12:40 into the video linked here). An anthropologist and academic, Graeber describes our world as the most bureaucratic society in all of history, where the public and private sectors have become indistinguishable from each other, and capitalist economies have been built on enormous Soviet-style bureaucracies that have imposed unnecessary hardship, and sometimes poverty, on average citizens.
Graeber talks about this in terms of the global economy. For example, he cites how financial institutions have lobbied governments to impose rules and regulations on the banking industry, which allow them to increase their internal bureaucracies (and create more jobs for themselves) and in turn charge fees to customers. Yet, in front of the customer, the banks blame government regulations for all the “red tape” the customer must face -- red tape the banks themselves lobbied for. In another example, he mentions how the European Union, in response to the current recession, printed enough money to give every European about 760 euros a month for a year to every citizen in the union. He asks, why not just give every person in the EU 760 euros a month for a year? Well, because the financial institutions wouldn't get to move the money through their systems and justify their bureaucracies and fees. The bureaucracy becomes the purpose unto itself, rather than serving a purpose outside of itself.
Graeber calls this the "Sovietization" of capitalism. During the Cold War, it was the Soviet Union that was known for its Kafkaesque, punishing bureaucracies that looked for any reason to send citizens off to the gulag for not following rules that were opaque and unrealistic. Today we have capitalist systems that look to throw anyone under the bus if doing so creates wealth or expansion within those systems. One could cite the sub-prime mortgage scheme in 2008, in which the banks used the de-regulation they lobbied for to bankrupt some of America's most vulnerable citizens. Or the “debtor's prisons” that have popped up in America in recent years. These have trapped poor citizens who have paid fines or completed probation for municipal violations, but have been unable to pay the high fees charged by the private companies that were contracted to administer the collection of fines or monitor the offender. For non-payment of fees, these citizens end up with utilities cut off or, at worst, a prison term.
As Graeber and host Max Keiser dished about these issues, I couldn't help but see my own encounters with HR departments in the same light. The bureaucratization of the Human Resources industry is just part of a much larger, global trend towards bureaucratic expansions in all industries, in which a growth of red tape serves the administrators more than the purpose of the system.
As one academic whom I discussed this issue with told me by e-mail, "The problem [of HR] wouldn't exist if there were full employment, but since there aren't enough jobs, the system functions as a way of sending people off to the figurative gulag."
