Needed: A Job Applicants' Bill of Rights

By Raanan Geberer
About 10 years ago, I had an interview with a well-known financial news organization as an editor. I won’t tell you its name, but I will tell you that its offices were here in Hudson County.
Anyway, I must have impressed them on the interview, because the woman in charge invited me back for a test. After the test, she said, "Well, there was one section you didn’t do so well on, but you did so well on all the other sections, we’ll overlook it." She scheduled a three-day try out a few weeks away, and I thought I was on my way.
The big day came. Because of my relative inexperience with the PATH train, I got confused by the directions and I got there late, but I did get there. I was prepared to apologize for being late – but I never go the chance. I was kept waiting for about a half hour. Finally, the person who interviewed me emerged.
"There’s been a staff crisis," she said, "and the people who were supposed to supervise you aren’t here. Why don’t you go home and we’ll call you." I smelled a rat, but was willing to give them a chance.
After I still didn’t hear from them in two weeks, I gave her a call. "Well," she said, "we’ve had a change of plans and have decided to look elsewhere." Stunned, I asked what the problem was. She just mentioned that one section on the test – the section that she earlier said she would be willing to overlook.
A few days later, I wrote a letter addressed to her, several executives in the company and their human resources office, telling my story and demanding an apology. And I got one, although it was written in rather vague, tepid language.
Recently, I wondered what would have happened had I engaged a labor lawyer and put the screws to them so that they would have to give me another tryout. I asked several attorneys and they were unanimous – nothing. In the U.S., one lawyer friend said, employment "at will" is the rule. This means that, other than in those instances where a particular company policy or union contract specifies otherwise, the employer has the right to hire and fire people at will. If this is the case for actual employees, he continued, it follows that job applicants also have few rights.
Just about the only time that an applicant can challenge a decision in the job-hunting process, this lawyer told me, is when that applicant suspects that he or she was excluded because of race, religion, age or disability. Another exception in which a "reasonable argument" can be made – and only in certain states – is if that applicant leaves a job upon the promise of another job, only to have the second employer cancel out at the last moment.
But these exceptions, as necessary as they are, leave out the majority of instances of lack of simple politeness or honesty on the part of employers. Already, according to an article I read online recently, fewer companies are even bothering to send out letters to candidates who didn’t get the job once they’ve made their choice. This can wreak havoc upon a person who has his heart set on a certain job, and only wants to apply for other jobs when he knows for certain whether this particular job was taken or not.
The whole job application process resembles a plantation, where one party holds all the cards and the other is forced to plead and grovel. That’s why I’m proposing a Job Applicants’ Bill of Rights in this country. Among its provisions might be:
A) If an employer says, "I’ll let you know in two weeks," he would have to give the applicant a progress report – within two weeks.
B) The employer, on request, would have to let the applicant know where he stands in the process – whether he’s one of two, one of three, or whatever. There would also be a deadline by which the employer would have to let the applicant know his status – possibly, within a month.
C) The employer would have to let the applicant know as soon as possible when someone else was hired.
D) If someone else has been chosen, but the employer says, "We’re impressed with your credentials, and we’ll keep your resume in case something else turns up," the employer would have to specify how long he will keep that applicant’s resume, and if an appropriate position turns up within that period of time, he would have to let the applicant know and ask whether he’s still interested.
E) If the employer promises the applicant a second interview, a test or a tryout, he would have to give that applicant a second interview, a test or a tryout, except in extenuating circumstances.
F) These provisions would not apply to an applicant who has never been contacted as a possible candidate – but once contact has been made, the wheels would be set in motion.
None of these provisions would require any more than a negligible expenditure on the part of any company, especially a large corporation. At most, they would require a little more bookkeeping, which would be easy given today’s computer programs.
I call on all municipal, state and federal elected officials! Come on! Who will be the first to introduce the Job Applicants’ Bill of Rights?

Dad and His Diners

By Raanan Geberer
(first published in "Smith" online magazine)

Ever since my wife and I got married, my father, when he met us, would only eat at diners. And he would only order three things: a tuna fish sandwich, a mushroom omelette or a cheese omelette. He’d make a big show of going through the menu, then summon the waiter or waitress and declare: "Ummm, I think I’ll have a cheese omelette!"
Sooner or later we got tired of this, and we suggested other places. We first suggested an Italian restaurant a block away. Dad got upset. "I don’t like spaghetti!" he said. Then we suggested a Chinese restaurant nearby. This made him even more alarmed. "Seventy-five percent of what you get in a Chinese restaurant is pork!" he declared. Dad wasn’t strictly kosher, but eating pork and shrimp was where he drew the line, and he would never take a chance on eating something new that turned out to be pork. We reassured him that the Chinese restaurant had many chicken or vegetable dishes. We ordered for him – pan-fried noodles with vegetables – and surprisingly, he liked it. "This is very tasty," he beamed. But after that, he went back to his diner-only regime. Every time we saw him, he would repeat over and over, "I’ll go anywhere you want," but "anywhere" usually turned out to be either the Regal diner, the Moonstruck diner or the Chelsea Square diner.
This continued until the time took us out to one of the People’s Symphony Concerts, a series of low-cost chamber music concerts held at a high school on Irving Place on the East Side. My wife had recently been to Irving Place, and was excited about the prospect of going to one of the interesting-looking restaurants on that short but historic thoroughfare before the concert. There was a Northern Italian restaurant, there was a place with the evocative name "Friend of a Farmer," there was a European-style coffeehouse that served sandwiches, and there was the historic Pete’s Tavern, which had been there since 1864. At last, we would have something different! She was elated.
The big day came. We told my father that there were several restaurants we were interested in near the school. But before we had the chance to mention them by name, he smiled conspiratorially and said, "I knew a place. It’s right nearby. It’s a secret. Follow me!"
"It’s a secret?"
"Trust me!"
We kept walking, with my father saying "Trust me!" every few seconds and chuckling. Suddenly, he stopped. "Here it is!"
"Oh, no!"
In the middle of this street of exciting restaurants, my father had managed to find the one diner.
"It’s got everything!" he enthused. "You can get pancakes, omelettes, sandwiches, soup, hamburgers, you name it! OK?"
"Well, I guess so," my wife said in a low, disappointed voice.
"I knew you’d like it. See, I told you I’d go anywhere you want to go!"
Well, we suffered through the diner, which wasn’t bad as diners go, and went to see the concert. We finally got the chance to go to one of those Irving Place restaurants a few months later – on our own. And my wife must have gotten over it, because she was one of the last people to see my father alive when he was in the hospital and was glad about that.
Now, when go out to eat, we go to a Chinese restaurant, a Thai restaurant, a burrito place, a pizza place – or a diner. And when we go to the diner, it’s because we want to go, on our own terms.
We tell this story a lot, with a slight laugh. And we hope that wherever Dad is, there are old-fashioned New York diners with tuna fish sandwiches, mushroom omelettes and cheese omelettes.