Discriminating against the middle classes is economic suicide
There are awkward cocktail parties to attend, endless forms to complete, and you might struggle to devise sincere-sounding reasons why you have always had a burning ambition to embark on a career in the accounts office of a widgets manufacturer in Warrington.
But now there is an additional obstacle on the “milk round”. Those coming to the end of their time at university, who were privately educated or whose parents earned anything approaching the upper tax bracket, may find some companies will now no longer even consider their application.
A job advert for new graduates posted on sites Gradcracker and Prospect by a company called Sigma Labs does at least have an refreshing honesty to it. As well as requiring a 2:1 university degree, and the right to work in the UK, it sets out the “economic eligibility” for candidates to apply for its graduate scheme.
Apparently between the ages of 11 and 16 you must have met one of the following: “grown up in a household with less than ￡43,000 income”, “attended a non-selective state school”, been “eligible for free school meals”, or “received local authority care”. Those who received university benefits will also be “considered”.
It could hardly be more clear about its intentions. Anyone who grew up in a regular middle-class family should forget about applying.
This is, frankly, crazy. Even leaving aside the ethical argument about whether it is fair to judge people by what their parents may or may not have done, actively discriminating against the middle class is surely tantamount to commercial suicide. Companies dabbling in social engineering certainly deserve to fail.
Young middle-class men often suffer most from such discrimination. Anecdotally, many have given up even applying for jobs at large or even medium-sized companies on the milk round.
After all, what is the point of spending a whole day filling out forms, listing qualifications, describing ambitions and goals, if an AI bot will bin the application the moment it is submitted? Rejection letters can be hard to stomach at the best of times, but this takes it to a new low.
Everyone agrees that businesses should hire from the widest possible talent pool, and traditionally they did just that – rewind half a century and while it may have been the case that at certain law firms, regiments or banks the old school tie counted for as much as the natural talent or an appetite for hard work, industry was always wide open to everyone regardless of background.
John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett’s 1966 “Class” sketch from The Frost Report – look it up on YouTube if you need a laugh – was only one side of the story.
So it is a big step to start actively excluding applicants who can even be vaguely described as “middle class”. On a social level, it is hard to understand how it meets any reasonable test of fairness.
Since when was a decision by your parents to accept a higher paying job, or to send you to a private school, reasonable grounds for turning down a candidate? Is a 12-year-old meant to stop their mother from accepting a slightly higher paying promotion, or at least persuade her to wait until they turn 16, because it will limit the kind of jobs they can apply for when they graduate?
Consider the ways in which people might game this: working fewer hours as their child approaches graduation, with all the economic harm that could bring. And yet, even leaving that aside, it is a foolish decision on purely commercial grounds.
There are two big problems. First, perhaps most obviously, it means that companies will miss out on many good candidates. Talented young graduates will come from all sorts of different backgrounds, with all kinds of different qualities and experiences to offer a potential employer.
It seems odd to close off applications from graduates who may well be bright and conscientious because of their parents’ economic status. If a company refused applicants based on their colour, their religion, or their gender, we would conclude that it wasn’t going to end up with the smartest people it could possibly find. Why is class any different?
Second, it is not as if all those middle-class graduates are going to disappear just because certain companies won’t consider hiring them. They will almost certainly end up working for smaller companies or start-ups that haven’t yet been taken over by meddling HR officers more interested in social engineering than in filling vacancies with the best talent.
Over time, those companies will out-compete everyone else, simply because they don’t discriminate against anyone and are stuffed full of clever young people who work hard and put customers first.
A final point: if ￡43,000 is perceived as “too wealthy” to apply for certain jobs then our attitudes to wealth and success are even worse than I previously feared. If companies want to start dabbling in social engineering – not to bring down those at the very top but to limit the prospects of the middle classes – that is up to them.
But over time they should expect to be pushed out of the market. The sooner the better.
