Work Today

Tom Berryman knows how to put young people in some pretty sweet blue-collar jobs. Graduates of the two-year auto-mechanics’ training courses he oversees at Lawson State Community College’s campus in Bessemer, Alabama, all get work at auto dealerships, most with starting salaries in the high-40s. If they’re lucky enough to end up at a Toyota dealership, they make over $60,000. That’s in a state with a median household income of $44,765.

“My guys are much more successful than a lot of four-year students after spending $14,000 for a two-year degree,” Berryman told me. Still, getting enough students to sign up can be a struggle. “If you can get me in front of the parents, I can get the kid here. But if the kid has to go home and explain it to the parents — good luck!”

This was a recurrent theme during my visit to Alabama a few weeks ago. It was recurrent in large part because I happened to be talking to people involved with vocational education in the state. Still, it seemed telling. I met a bunch of people whose job it is to train workers for blue-collar occupations. And one of their biggest challenges is persuading enough young people (and their parents) that pursuing such work is a good idea. “It goes back to World War II,” said Jeff Lynn, the new head of workforce development for the state’s community college system. “Everybody wants their kid to get a four-year degree and become a nuclear physicist.”

It isn’t hard to see where the parents are coming from. This is from a recent report on “America’s Divided Recovery” by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce:

College graduates had an OK recession. Those with only high school degrees or less had a terrible one. Those with the associates degrees awarded by community colleges fell somewhere in between. The lesson would seem to be that getting at least a bachelor’s degree is a really, really good idea.

Still, there is a kind of blue-collar work that (1) doesn’t require a bachelor’s degree, (2) pays reasonably well and (3) shows no signs of going away. That would be skilled technical work, often focused on maintaining or fixing machinery. Here’s how auto mechanics and three other skilled blue-collar jobs categories have fared since 1997.

The 2015 average annual wage in these job categories was:

• Automotive service technicians and mechanics: $40,070
• Electricians: $55,590
• Plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters: $55,100
• Welders, cutters, solderers and brazers: $40,970

The average annual wage for all occupations was $48,320.

By comparison, software developers made an average of more than $100,000 a year, and their numbers grew from 496,630 in 1999 to 1.1 million in 2015. But software development and other tech jobs make for an interesting comparison, given that it appears to be possible to train people for them without going through the time and expense of a four-year college education. The online learning startup Udacity, for example, unveiled an initiative this week to line up recipients of its “nanodegrees” with tech internships.

Meanwhile, old-line blue-collar jobs have been changing, too. At Lawson State, which offers training for electricians, plumbers, welders and HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) technicians as well as auto mechanics, “the programs have shifted to much more high-end technological skills,” said longtime president Perry Ward. I visited a classroom for manufacturing workers there that was focused entirely on robot programming and maintenance.

Employment isn’t exploding in any of these fields. But it is growing in most of them, and lots of baby boomer plumbers, electricians and the like are nearing retirement age. Succeeding at these jobs takes skill, training and commitment. It just doesn’t require a four-year college degree.

She cried when she heard she’d soon be eligible for overtime. They weren’t tears of joy.

She’s a producer for a public radio station who asked that I not use her name. She loves her job but struggles to stretch her “paltry” paycheck to cover rent and other living expenses. She’s exactly the kind of dedicated white-collar worker the Barack Obama administration sought to help with a sweeping new overtime regulation. In May, the Labor Department declared that, as of Dec. 1, most salaried workers earning less than $47,476 a year, or $913 a week, would have to be paid time and a half for anything more than 40 hours a week. (A few occupations, such as teaching and law, are excluded.) The rule more than doubled the existing salary threshold.

Last Tuesday, however, a federal judge in Texas issued a preliminary injunction against the new rule. The final decision still awaits, but U.S. District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III, an Obama appointee, looks likely to agree with the states and business groups suing to block the increase. His ruling suggested that the new standard violates the underlying law by allowing pay alone to trump job responsibilities in deciding who’s exempt from overtime rules. “If Congress intended the salary requirement to supplant the duties test,” he wrote, “then Congress, and not the Department, should make that change.”

The last-minute hold, which came right before a long holiday weekend, leaves employers wondering what to do now. The Obama administration can appeal the injunction, but the Republican Congress and incoming Donald Trump administration have several ways to block the mandate. One is a bill sponsored by U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander that would raise the salary level gradually until it reaches $913 a week in 2020. The measure would also require a study of the first-year impact to determine whether nonprofit organizations and governments should be exempt from future increases.

Regardless of the eventual outcome, the mandate illustrates an all-too-common blindness to the diversity and nuances of employment arrangements. Not every workplace is, or aspires to be, the civil service. Not every worker longs to be on an assembly line. And not everybody is working entirely for money. One size does not fit all.

Just as Trump imagines he can give industrial workers job security by canceling trade agreements, the Obama administration thought it could give managers more money or shorter hours by decree. The overtime rule assumes that employers have a big pot of money somewhere that they’re keeping for themselves instead of paying their hard-working staffs. It also assumes that rigid time-keeping that forces people to work 9 to 5 is a good thing. Announcing the new rule, Vice President Joe Biden called it part of “the basic middle-class bargain that used to exist.” Nostalgia for the Organization Man is a bipartisan affair.

For the radio producer, however, clocking hours just means more paperwork. The new setup also comes with a biweekly, rather than monthly, paycheck, disrupting her household cash flow. (That financial stress had a lot to do with the tears.) And the rigid structure simply doesn’t match the nature of her job: In journalism, things come up and are last-minute and time-consuming, she wrote in a text message. If she has to stay late and that time isn’t approved, who takes that hit — a colleague who isn’t considered hourly? To her, it doesn’t feel fair or equitable. She’d rather simply have a higher salary, even if it isn’t all the way up to the Labor Department’s magic number.

Supporters pooh-pooh such objections. “It’s not workplace flexibility employers seek, but the ability to continue to exploit low- and moderate-salaried workers,” opined the Los Angeles Times in response to the injunction. In businesses with great market power, there may actually be a pot of money somewhere, if only in customers’ willingness to pay higher prices. But companies facing stiff competition have no such luxury. If they jack up prices, customers will go elsewhere, which is why restaurants and retailers have objected so strenuously to the mandate.

The overtime rule has particularly roiled nonprofit organizations like the producer’s public radio station. “Cutbacks in essential services are predicted by the Salvation Army, youth services providers, home health care services, and blood centers throughout the country,” saidU.S. Senator Susan Collins, speaking in support of fellow Republican Alexander’s bill. Nonprofits stretch their payroll dollars by attracting people who are willing to take smaller salaries because they believe in the cause and draw personal satisfaction from the work.

Enthusiastic young graduates put in 12-hour days visiting high schools and reading applications for their colleges’ admissions offices. Museum development assistants schmooze donors at opening night receptions. Biology postdocs monitor experiments at all hours. At the YMCA in Greenville, South Carolina, employees build floats in their spare time so children in a special-needs program can be in the local Christmas parade. “They have a passion for that, they love to do that and want to be a part of that, but they may not be able to now, because that would mean paying them overtime,” says Scot Baddley, the Y’s president and CEO. (Disclosure: My sister-in-law works for the Y.)

Putting such employees on a time clock is not just a burden. It can seem like an insult. Scott M. Fitzgerald, the director of human resources at Otterbein University, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that he’d had staffers at a previous institution cry in his office when told of the change. They saw the shift to hourly pay as a demotion. At the Y, says Baddley, the emotional response has been “intense.” For professionals who’d never before punched a clock, “it was upsetting.”

Or take church employees. You don’t have to be a pastor to see your job as a religious vocation. “For those who work in professional staff positions within congregations, it certainly is viewed as their employment. But in the church, it’s viewed as so much more. It is a ministry,” says Dorothy “d’Rue” Massey Hazel, who advises congregations on human-resources issues as the canon for congregational development and administration for the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina. Although she knows firsthand how demanding and low-paid such jobs can be, she worries about the psychological effects of punching a clock. “It’s going to shift the culture to such a point that people are going to feel like it’s no longer a ministry,” she says.

Because so many church employees are also congregants, drawing a line between work hours and volunteer time can get especially tricky. Is visiting a church member in the hospital work? How about typing the newsletter? Organizing a food drive? “Now people are having to stop and think: Before I say yes to this volunteer opportunity, I’ve got to think back to the boundaries of my job description,” says Hazel. To make sure everyone is available on Sundays, churches have begun putting formerly salaried workers on weekly schedules that start that day so that they won’t hit the 40-hour limit too soon. What happens on Good Friday remains to be seen.

Employers, like most people, tend to trust their intuitions. But when employers decide whom to hire, they trust those intuitions far more than they should.

Suppose that you are considering two candidates for a job in sales, Candidate A and Candidate B, and have interviewed both. You and your colleagues were far more impressed with Candidate A, who was dynamic, engaging, and immensely likable — a natural, especially for sales. By contrast, Candidate B was a bit awkward and reserved, and so seemed to be an inferior “fit.”

One of your colleagues points out that both candidates have taken an aptitude test that relates to the job; their personnel files also contain their scores on a general intelligence test. On both tests, Candidate A was just OK; Candidate B performed superbly.

Which applicant will you choose? If you are like a lot of people, the answer is still Candidate A. After all, you met both in person, and part of your job is to be able to assess people. Maybe Candidate B tests well, but Candidate A knocked your socks off.

A lot of evidence suggests that in cases of this kind, employers will stubbornly trust their intuitions — and are badly mistaken to do so. Specific aptitude tests turn out to be highly predictive of performance in sales, and general intelligence tests are almost as good. Interviews are far less useful at telling you who will succeed.

What’s true for sales positions is also true more generally. Unstructured interviews have been found to have surprisingly little value in a variety of areas. For medical school interviews, for example, they appear to have no predictive power at all: in terms of academic or clinical performance, those accepted on the basis of interviews do no better than those who are rejected. In law schools, my own experience is that faculties emphasize how aspiring law professors do in one-on-one interviews — which usually provide no information at all about how they will do as teachers or researchers.

In the abstract, most people in human resources are fully aware that objective measures are helpful. Yet the overwhelming majority of people in these positions believe that executives “can learn more from an informal discussion with job candidates” and that it is possible to “read between the lines” to see whether a candidate would do well in the job. In general, that’s wrong.

In fact, some evidence suggests that interviews are far worse than wasteful: By drawing employers’ attention to irrelevant information, they can produce inferior decisions. For example, people make better predictions about student performance if they are given access to objective background information, such as grades and test scores — and prevented from conducting interviews entirely. (In some fields, of course, specific aptitude tests don’t exist, but general intelligence scores are often available. And if candidates have a previous track record, it makes sense to rely on it.)

So why do employers, managers and administrators continue to give so much weight to interviews? The simple answer is that people trust what they see and hear, and rely on their own feelings even when they shouldn’t. But as Yale University management professor Jason Dana and his collaborators have shown, there’s more to it than that. Interviewers actively fool themselves, finding ways to learn from interviews even if there’s actually nothing there to learn from.

Dana’s central finding is that interviewers work very hard to make sense of whatever interviewees end up saying. If you are conducting an interview, you will quickly form an initial impression of the candidate, and you will be inclined to assess his or her answers — whatever they are — in a way that fits with that initial impression.

To confirm that point, Dana instructed interviewees to give literally random answers to questions — answers that had nothing at all to do with their natural response. Even then, interviewers said in post-interview surveys that they received valuable information.

Dana’s explanation was that interviewers had made sense of the answers they got by weaving those answers into a coherent (and to some degree fabricated) narrative about candidates. In other words, interviewers, thinking that they are good judges of people, ended up confident about the usefulness of the interviews even when the responses were deliberately worthless.

There’s a related problem with interviews: They can give effect to biases, conscious or unconscious. If interviewers are prejudiced against women or Hispanics, for example, a face-to-face interview will predictably result in discrimination. Reliance on tests, or on actual or past performance, can promote equality.

For business, government, and education, the lesson is clear: People ought to be relying far more on objective information and far less on interviews. They might even want to think about scaling back or canceling interviews altogether. They’ll save a lot of time — and make better decisions.