Recent articles in The Washington Post describe co-worker hostility faced by veterans working in federal agencies, purportedly because of federally mandated hiring preferences. Some ascribe this hostility to cultural differences between military and civilian workers. Combat vets, who are used to making and responding to rapid decisions, have little patience for the bureaucratic process, where decisions travel up and down the chain of command for submission and approval. Alternatively, civilians accuse the vets of “blind deference to authority” and their only real skill is knowing how to kill people. However, like many workers elsewhere, the vets complain that they are accepting jobs where they do not make full use of their talents and abilities.
A big problem is the perception that the veteran workers may actually be unqualified and were hired only because of the federally-mandated preferences. In essence, the dynamic is similar to the conflict raised by arguments about racial and gender discrimination and the backlash of so-called “reverse” discrimination. Women and racial minorities tend to be more sensitive to traditional patterns of discrimination, while white males are more sensitive to patterns of reverse discrimination (aka affirmative action). While these groups have historically been mutually suspicious of hiring and promotion decisions based on “illegal” motives, it is also not historically unusual for these groups to be suspicious of each other. But veterans? When did “thank you for your service” become “what are you doing in my job”?
What many people do not realize is that persons who are hired pursuant to preferences must nonetheless be minimally qualified. That is, they must possess the skills, education, and experience necessary to perform the essential functions of the job. Where the ambiguity arises is whether or not they are the “best” qualified. This judgment often depends on more subjective criteria which cannot be either proven or disproven objectively. These types of decisions involve less measurable concepts such as person-job fit and cultural compatibility. That is, even the person making the hiring decision really has no way of knowing with absolute certainly who the “best” candidate actually is without giving each and every qualified candidate a chance to prove themselves. When there are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of minimally qualified applicants for a single position, the hiring authority may welcome preferences as a way to simplify the decision process.
Michael Sattinger, a professor of economics at the University at Albany, has developed a model of the job market represented by a group of n dogs presented with a batch of n bones delivered by a dump truck. Assuming that each dog can only receive one bone and that the bones can be assigned a value, equilibrium is established when every dog has a bone that is not desired by any other dog that could take it away, and each dog prefers its own bone to any bone it could take away from another dog. In this model then, the “value” of any dog’s bone is a function of both the assortment of bones available and the individual dog’s ability to compete for them.
Analogized to the job market, an individual’s wages (and by extension, job quality) are thus a function of both the jobs that are available and the individual’s ability to compete in the market. However, in the “real world” job market, there are many more dogs than bones, and many of the bones are of lower quality than even a junkyard dog would be willing to accept under more normal circumstances. The predictable outcome is that the dogs will fight each other over the bones rather than question the adequacy of the source—a source which is out of their sight and beyond their ability to effect. At least, not without coordinated, strategic, collective action.
Instead of suspiciously eyeing our co-workers or consulting an attorney about suing someone who has made a hiring or promotion decision against us, perhaps we should direct some of that energy to finding out why there aren’t enough decent jobs to go around. All of us are fighting each other over the scraps that seem to get more meager and distasteful as time goes on. This is not only unsustainable in the long run, it can destroy our sense of common humanity.
