Still Trying To Figure Out How The World Really Works

I used to know this guy who was out of work for a while, mainly due to a particular wanna-be christian community being neither a community nor particularly christian. He ends up out of work with a wife and kid. Wife's job has to pay the bills for a while.

So, eventually, he takes up temp work. The temp agency puts him with some company making what sounded like armored rooms- mostly bomb proof things you could drop down in Iraq or whatever.

The company likes him and eventually he gets hired there permanently.

So, when he told me this story, I ended up thinking, 'oh, this is how they discriminate now.'

No doubt this company has the full tilt P.C.C.Y.A.H.R. dept.

But on certain jobs they don't have to open it up to everybody. They can use the temp agencies, probably with real justification that they need someone now, but they can churn through a lot of people, until they find an earnest young man with a real work ethic that just happens to be white.

Could he have gotten in through H.R. in a more formal hiring process? I don't know.

I am pretty sure he was looking pretty hard, and signed up for the temp agency mostly because there wasn't much he could find out there sans temp agency, and temp work is better than no work.

I suspect, from a business point of view, this type of work around is necessary so that they don't become dysfunctional and die, but you can see the inefficiency- a person has to get desperate enough to go to a temp agency. How many people are underemployed because they find something else, something less, and it never occurs to them to go to a temp agency in the first place?