Isn’t this the plot of Office Space?
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Didn’t he just say that children increased the index? and what’s with “breeders”?
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TL;DR: If this is true, it’s probably better for employees that the status quo.
I feel like this sounds worse than it is. If true it’s merely making rigorous something that every manager at every company is highly pressured to do. Look, you’ve got two employees, Alice and Carol, who do the same job, and are equally good at it. Alice is good at networking and self-promotion, Carol keeps her head down and puts in her hours. Alice is far more likely to get job offers from other companies. You have $4000 to give out in raises. Do you give them both $2000? That might be fair, but the reality is that if you give Alice $3k and Carol $1k, they’ll both stay, whereas if you divide up the money equally, Alice will quit. I don’t like it (and I think it’s short sighted) (and I campaign against it), but it weighs heavily on every manager I know.
I imagine having the “inverse flight risk” metric be systematic and consistent makes things more fair, because at least it allows the company to set an upper limit on what kind of pay inequity it’s willing to tolerate. When it’s ad hoc, you get some real bullshit going on.
But let’s not forget to complain that the millennials are narcissists! Jokes aside, I think a company that chose not to think this way would be rewarded by ending up with a reliable workforce. There are lots of people out there who don’t love the idea that somehow entrepreneurialism has become the primary attribute sought in every single job in the world (even desk jobs in the public service!). We can apply whatever rationalization we want for the behaviour, but the explanation is simpler: people get promoted when they act like people who already have power. The chain of power fills itself up with people who agree with the people above them. Narcissism is the thing our society values most right now, and so we pay self-important people more than people who aren’t self-important. We pretend it just makes sense and it’s unavoidable, but it doesn’t, and it isn’t.
Beyond that, the thing that is problematic about quantifying this kind of thing with an index is the question of what you put in the index? The report says, for example, people with kids are more vulnerable. That’s fairly obvious - they have families to think about. On the other hand, if TD systematically is discriminating against employees based on whether or not they have children then I would think their lawyers would be telling them to prepare for a class action lawsuit (at least in Canada). Not everything you could rate vulnerability on is an excluded grounds for discrimination, but a lot are. That’s why I was asking how reliable this information is. It could lead to massive lawsuits if true.
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I can’t believe there’s a company that actually does this! Oh. Wait… Nevermind.
That said, I know asking a job applicant about marital status, children and a few other of the “check boxes” on this list is illegal. Once the offer is tendered and accepted, I’m not so sure. Any legal eagles on this thread?
It’s Peter Effing Watts. If he doesn’t drip his contempt for sentient life in every sentence, he considers it a poor day.
From the aforementioned-author’s website.
I love reading Peter Watts (Starfish and Blindsight are my favorites). But one book a year is about all I can handle without wanting to pour Clorox and weed killer on everybody and everything I see.
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You left out then dousing it with kerosene and setting it on fire.
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I believe breeder is a gay slang for heterosexuals.
IANAL, but I believe the existence of such practices means you have nothing to lose if you lie when asked those questions.
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Fair enough!
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