Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
That said, if you recall the story we had here a while back [1] about how janitors used to work for the company and now they work for a contracting firm, this is very relevant. There are a lot of jobs at even a high tech company like Google or Apple that could be filled by someone with a high school degree and nominal fine motor skills, but those jobs are currently firewalled behind a general contracting company. That perversely misaligns the end employees motivations and the company motivations.
It was interesting to me to see the remnants of a system like this at IBM which had 10 "bands" of employment level, where band 1 was janitor level, and band 10 was principle engineer/senior manager type level. But it seemed like these days they only used bands 6 - 10 because that was where 'entry level engineer' started (band 6). Many if not all of the jobs in the lower bands were outsourced as far as I could tell. And a lot eliminated when they sold off factories or other parts of the business that had a lot of technician level labor.
I will be interesting to see if we could get back to a more reasonable way of managing these things.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-risi...
Would you mind elaborating on this point a bit? I have some notions of what you're suggesting, but I'd rather not assume.
So the worker knows the contracting company is squeezing them and they get into a sort of adversarial relationship.
Change some of these loopholes and the outsourcing overhead becomes far more significant. Though employing large numbers of part time workers works better at scale so the practice has some advantages.
There is a tremendous exposure to legal risk both for the contracting company and the company that hires the contracting company if they employ workers who do not have the right to work in the US. Having worked with IBM's legal department I'm pretty sure they run audits on any company they employ to insure they comply will all laws (they are really fussy about that stuff). In the New York Times article the Apple contract janitors weren't illegals either just under paid.
Now the 'gig' economy? Sure. People who hire day laborers from the parking lot of the home improvement store? No question. But running a contracting business? I've not seen anything that backs up that assertion, and certainly nothing that is 'significant.'
In practice that's very rarely an issue. One recent case had Target using a cleaning service that way paying illegal immigrants below minimum wage. The government did not care and the only impact was being forced to pay actual wages. And remember that's the worst case, which means sticking with minimum wage is safe.
Now, IBM/Apple/whatever may take steps to avoid illegal immigrants. But, the market clearing price does not have a simple illegal vs. non separation for jobs. So, companies bidding on work are faced with some hard choices.
PS: Now, if you can find examples of penalties for the big company side of things outside of the most blatant violations I would be curious.
That's why you layer it so the people taking the risk are little more than hourly employees themselves.
Big corp hire cleaning corp to clean. Cleaning corp hires local cleaner to clean. Local cleaner hires legal worker with plenty of contacts who aren't legal, gives them the cash to get the job done with what ever 'contractors' they want. While local cleaner could technically be found guilty, they'll always through the local legal employee under the bus and rarely ever get prosecuted. At worst they'll be shut down and then they'll just open up under another name. Cleaning corp is effectively immune and can always find a new local cleaner if the previous one is shut down. Big corp might not ever know what is going on, they are just paying someone who handles things for cheaper than directly employing the cleaners (at least cheaper on certain budget reports that they needed to make look better).
In California at least the SEIU union is all over employers and both well funded and well motivated to root out such abuses of the system. That they don't find them and there aren't big stories about companies they are taking to court, suggests to me that in all their looking they have yet to find this situation to actually exist.
I'm not saying they don't exist, I'm saying that I haven't seen any evidence that this is happening.
https://www.texastribune.org/2016/12/19/big-name-businesses-... Target is a ~45 billion dollar company.
It's all tiny local cleaning companies. So, sure it's not corporate policy to do X or Y nationally. But, they are not going to object to saving some money.
The issue instead was that their employer, Jim’s Maintenance, was failing to fulfill its obligations to keep proper records, including records of I-9 compliance. This failure to fulfill its contractual obligations ultimately contributed to Target’s decision to terminate its contract with Jim’s Maintenance.
So company offers services to Target, uses workers that are undocumented. Target severs the relationship as soon as they "know"[1] that the company is a bad actor which puts this company out of business.
This is how it is supposed to work, which is that people do things that are bad, they get discovered and they end up losing more than they gained from their bad behavior.
But to my original point, Target understood the legal risk of hiring a firm that hired people who were not authorized to work in the US, and once they were made aware of it they stopped. In California this is something the SEIU does, if they suspect a company is using illegal workers they will go tell people who employ them that what they are doing in a paper trail sort of way (registered mail etc). That forces the company to break that relationship. As a result, it is quite difficult to run this sort of thing and harder to make any money at it. All this has the appropriate chilling effect.
[1] I realize that clearly someone inside the Target stores knew this was going on, but in this case it is once the corporate entity knew. I'm curious if the store manager was fired or not.
So, sure when a huge lawsuit shows up Target is going to fire that company. But, notice the issue was not the workers bing undocumented it’s them making below minimum wage and then suing Target.
There are definitely industries in which hiring (suspected, but very likely) illegal immigrants is standard practice.
If you fail to do that, you violate the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) which was passed in 1986 and subjects the business to fines, penalties, potentially the loss of business licenses and prosecution under the RICO act.
Is it? A friend of mine works in documents at an old-school whiteshoe law firm and they converted all of their administrative staff to a 3rd party a couple years ago. He didn't get fired or laid off, he just works for the other company now.
I don’t want to get too specific in my role but I was able to go from a very entry level position at SpaceX, let’s say something along the lines of kitchen/cafeteria/janitorial/facilities staff, to a much more technical position working on actual launch vehicle hardware. I know I’m not the only one that’s moved up from those positions into our technician roles. It actually happens somewhat regularly. I can’t imagine this being the case if all of our lower level positions were outsourced to contractors.
1. A strong management system in place that's committed to helping folks succeed. 2. A willingness to honestly evaluate people and let them go if they aren't working out.
I've seen enough bad hires even in places that have well planned hiring processes that I'm having trouble believing this would be any worse.
I really don't think this can work. Whenever we post for a position, I get flooded with a bunch of garbage resumes from people who barely have an idea what programming is. We have work to do, and deadlines. We literally can't afford to turn ourselves into a technical training school.
A bakery, like in this example, seems like it could pull this off, since janitorial work at a bakery is straightforward but unlikely something you'd want to subcontract, and presents a natural place to interact with other workers in more specialized positions, through management or through learning more.
In software this is more difficult, because there's no longer a pipeline for things like data entry, assembly, or basic IT support (traditional inroads), especially at a smaller company, much less janitorial or food prep work that presents an opportunity to advance.
I think the hidden cost here, though, is that progression from one stage to another starts to resemble interviewing at a new company, with all the same biases and problems that result from hiring processes in general, with the possible exception that there's more direct information on personality and work ethic that can feed into the pipeline (for better or worse).
During the time I was there one guy turned out to be a genius and after a few years left to work for a big bank and another guy got enough experience to start his career as a dev somewhere else. The rest of us learnt a lot mentoring these guys and feel quite proud of them.
This was no more than 5 years ago.
That is exactly my story ('85 or thereabouts), with the added caveat that I didn't learn anything from the Cobol training program. The bank where I worked did not even have a way for mailroom people to get into IT, it was mostly because they got sick of my continued applications to IT jobs for which they though I wasn't qualified that I got the chance to do the course (with the qualifier that if I didn't succeed they never wanted to see me again).
So, I passed (and was the quickest person to complete the course) and ended up making a very rapid career in the IT department and after that started my own company.
Some observations:
- the entry level IT job paid four times as much as what the mail room job did
- work went from 5:30 am to 2 pm to 9'ish to 4'ish (ish because nobody ever checked who appeared when and when they left again whereas in the mailroom attendance was very strictly policed)
- in the mailroom you felt part of critical infrastructure, in IT there was zero pressure to perform
- bringing the mailroom attitude ('let's get some work done') to the IT department was not appreciated by the rest of the department
- the mailroom had zero office politics, if you stepped out of line you would get chewed out and that would be that, by comparison the IT department was a huge web of intrigue, and quite a few of the people there were downright mean and backstabbing each other all the time
- the mailroom was all guys, the IT department had exactly two women programmers on a total crew of about 120, the only other woman was a secretary to the head of IT
- There were a few talented people there but on the whole the talent level was rather low, but they were big on process and that really helped to get stuff out the door
IT pay is well-known for being better than average, so I'd bet you'd have people who can move a mouse trying to get entry-level IT work at a company known for hiring anyone.
I can only infer from this statement that you have never been in a hiring position in which you are receiving the raw resume submissions from the field. You either have never been in a hiring position, or you've only had the post-filter resume stream sent to you.
However, I'd argue that unpaid contribution to open source software as a way to build reputation is not absurd, because the value you are creating is still available for you to use and benefit from. Additionally, you are free to work on anything you like - something you can't do at an organization which is compelling you to work for free.
They pay minimum wage to the apprentices. I can see how a system like that would work. Just being able to show up and do the bare minimum to pass the apprenticeship period is more than an awful lot of low skill workers are capable of, whether due to life circumstances, low conscientiousness or other characteristics that make keeping a job difficult. The population of job seekers for badly paid, low skill jobs is full of the unemployable.
I do think that this sort of attitude could add value and blacken the bottom line if applied to many other types of industries (eg. construction, manufacturing, machining, food service and much more).
Based on the comments of others, I suspect this approach is most useful in a business where you have positions at a variety of skill levels. In IT and tech, the base skillset required can be substantial.
Not every person makes a good engineer. The US Army, with very good reason to train anyone who is willing, has decided that anyone with an IQ under 83 is not able to be trained to any position.
Edit: I didn't really address your question. While there would be little incentive, there would not be none. For instance
a better public image (like being an equal opportunity employer, but even more so)
I believe they would end up with a more loyal workforce (but this is debatable and even if true it would be difficult to quantify)
but...
They might also upset existing employees who were hired under a more traditional process
There would be less incentive to pursue higher education if this were common practice
In short...I am tempted to look for a way to make it work, but also torn because I know that the needs of the business take a backseat to philosophical ideals. I do, however, believe that this could be implemented in certain industries and be a net-benefit to all
I would love to see better tools and technical infrastructure for requiring authorization to touch sensitive data, so that people in companies can operate with access to "the information you need but no more." Something like that would both protect customer privacy and de-risk hiring at the entry levels.
It would most definitely make getting access to data tougher for lots of people, but as engineers who are often handling customer data, I think it's a generally more responsible (ethics-wise) approach.
I think SELinux addresses this problem pretty well, but there is no real requirement to give access to developers for a production database when a development database could be setup with test data. I'm not arguing that this is a great idea for IT, but trust has been an issue from the beginning and there are more than a couple of solutions with varying degrees of quality.
I think you raise a good point. If I were to phrase my wish better, I think it comes down to your implication that "varying degrees of quality" means some solutions do the job better (like SELinux) and some that do it worse. The more work it takes, the more you end up with startups where everyone has the passwords to the production database because it's just easier operationally. But when you do that, then you start to get into institutionalized risks like Uber employees stalking exes. I'm well aware that this is a case of engineering a solution to cover the 0.01% case, but when it comes to sensitive data, you're usually guarding against a tiny number of bad actors who could do a lot of damage.
As an example, let's say you want certain developers to have access to non-sensitive parts of a Postgres database, and you want to be able to temporarily authorize developers with worthy exceptions to touch sensitive data, and you want to leave an audit trail. Let's say you're doing it this way because of HIPAA. It's currently a pain to do, and you'll have to write a bunch of automation to make it work. Now let's say you also have some S3 stores or ETL pipelines using Kinesis, and you have potentially sensitive data in there too. In the ideal case, you could manage the roles and groups and elevations in a more central place, federate those identities over to the Postgres cluster, SSH permissions, etc. That way data and privacy controls could actually be lightweight, which I think would be an overall win for the industry.
A non-felon might not share my (perhaps) paranoid view, but I have a family now and need to pointedly avoid any possible controversy or scandal especially related to security and access. To that end, I feel the need to push for sensible and workable solutions.
> People who are given a job start off as apprentices, during which they go through a 10-month job training and life-skills course.
I found the part about life-skills pretty interesting. I have long thought that occupations keep specializing and populations keep growing the way the have, that some people will no doubt miss out learning about things that others may take for granted / learn from their own life experience.