Robert rIGGS

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Static Page Comments

• February 7, 2001, on Welfare Reform:

  Information Technology has the unintended consequence of creating a new class of almost unemployable persons, many of whom can work. Now, using the Internet, hiring corporations can very easily access past work and other records. Many now easily accessible records employers now use to screen out applicants. Any worker can now easily suffer the fate of being screened out universally, for any of many possible reasons. Examples: Geting fired for alleged misconduct (rightly or wrongly) or for poor performance (even if caused by extenuating circumstances such as a prolonged mild flulike illness), financial problems resulting in bad credit, a criminal arrest (whether conviction results or not), on the job injury and a Worker's Compensation claim, a positive drug test result (whether true or false), high medical expenses, and (worst of all) incorrect and erroneous adverse information. This problem will become much more severe when the next recession occurs, when there are many more appli...

• March 25, 2001, on Avoiding Litigation:

  On the "Engineers and Scientists" hyperlink web page is found a paragraph with a photo of an apparently homeless man beside it: Albert, PhD Electrical Engineering and Computer Science MIT '84 relaxing on 15th Street in New York City. "I had a tenure-track position at Carnegie-Mellon but after seven years they said it was unfair to keep me from the great opportunities outside the university." When a person becomes unable to earn a living at all due to a recurrent generic dispute with employers; then how does such a person maintain a "zero litigation" lifestyle? The alternative is to eventually die on the streets of America, as seems to have happened to the engineer cited above. "Taking the lumps" can make sense when luxuries are at stake, but is this realistic when physical survival is at stake?