2.3 Million Applicants Fight for 368 Menial, Low-Wage Office Jobs in India

There’s been a lot of talk of unemployment here in the U.S., with overqualified, college-educated people falling out of the workforce because they’ve been searching for a job for so long and others working two part-time minimum wage jobs just to make ends meet at all.

Many of us worry over a future where it is predicted that eight out of the top 10 jobs that employ millions of people in this country are soon to be replaced by robots in the coming years.

So, is this what the future will look like?

When the government of Uttar Pradesh in India recently announced openings for 368 low-level, low-paying office jobs, the kind where people run basic errands or fetch coffee, they received an astounding 2.3 million job applications, completely overwhelming the system.

Hundreds of thousands of respondents were overqualified with college degrees to apply for a job that requires not much more than a fifth grade education. Two hundred thousand people who applied held graduate-level degrees. Over 250 candidates even held doctorate degrees. The job itself only pays $240 a month. If Uttar Pradesh interviewed all of these people, it would take four years.

What’s worse is this is being done on purpose. It has nothing to do with “overpopulation”. Normally a growing population should drive economic growth, and preparing for a drop in the population is actually devastating to the economy. This is forced austerity… and it’s spreading.