MK Menachem Eliezer Moses on Thursday morning, 21 Kislev, spoke with Kol Chai Radio hosts Betzalel Kahan and David Chacham, addressing the issue of chareidim wishing to enter the workplace yet many are unable to find jobs or are too often told they are not qualified.
Moses explains the chareidi parties must do what it takes to amend state laws that demand one has a bachelor’s degree to enter civil service and many other positions. He feels in many cases, a chareidi female who studied in seminary or a former kollel avreich are more qualified for a post, but their certificates and years of study are not recognized. He insists that there are some in positions of power to made the college degree a prerequisite to keep chareidim out, citing years ago one might easily find a chareidi women working as a clerk in one government office or another, doing fine and performing on a more than acceptable standard but today, this is insufficient.
Moses feels the laws must be amended to compel the state to recognize the seminary degrees as well as factoring in years of kollel studies.
Moses referred to the qualifications as the “state’s Sodom laws”, insisting they are simply to keep chareidim out of the mainstream. He explained that on the one hand the shouts emanate from Knesset expressing a desire to bring chareidim into the workplace but in reality, and he cited a number of cases, when it comes to hiring “someone who looks like me” he added, the applicants are told “This place is not suitable for you. You might wish to look elsewhere”.
“What will chemistry do for a clerk in the treasury or another office” he decried, insisting there are many chareidim whom are qualified for available work but they will never be given a chance for they are viewed as ineligible.
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
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3 Responses
I didn’t know that there are “state laws that demand one has a bachelor’s degree” for many areas of work. This sounds a bit crazy, since people should be judged on their abilities. I don’t know if it’s reliable, but I see online that 60% of workers in the US federal government do not have a college degree.
All this said, if I am hiring, and for each job I have a hundred applications, and those with college degrees generally have many more skills (they are familiar with government, science, etc, they have experience writing, for example) than those without, then I’d probably hardly bother reading applications from those without degrees. Maybe I’d skim them but maybe not.
A person hiring someone at Goldman Sachs, for example, probably has 500 applications for each position. If they can easily look through 50 applications just from Harvard and Yale and Stanford graduates, do you think they’ll spend too much time looking through graduates of DeVry Online University, or someone without a degree altogether? Probably not. There is a limited amount of time they have to look through resumes, and digging very deeply does not pay off frequently enough to make it worthwhile.
Mr. M: If you wrote your post 15 years ago it would have made sense. Today no one in Goldman Sacks reveiws even 10 CVs for a job. Today the job applicants do computer tests to judge their skills & aptitude. E.g. a multiple choice question asking you “If you found $10,000 on a desk at work & there was no one around the workplace & there were no cameras, would you take the money ?”. Every applicant would choose the answer “I would take it to make sure it is returned to the owner”, however the honest people will answer the question quicker than the dishonest people, who need to take the time to think of the answer. This is how the private sector works.
The government still looks at CVs and in the government there is no such thing as efficiency.
Requiring a BA is not an act of discrimination against Charedim – it’s a bottom line indication of skills & knowledge.