Argument 241

TOPIC: ARGUMENT241 - The following appeared in a memo at the XYZ company.
"When XYZ lays off employees, it pays Delany Personnel Firm to offer those employees assistance in creating resumés and developing interviewing skills, if they so desire. Laid-off employees have benefited greatly from Delany's services: last year those who used Delany found jobs much more quickly than did those who did not. Recently, it has been proposed that we use the less-expensive Walsh Personnel Firm in place of Delany. This would be a mistake because eight years ago, when XYZ was using Walsh, only half of the workers we laid off at that time found jobs within a year. Moreover, Delany is clearly superior, as evidenced by its bigger staff and larger number of branch offices. After all, last year Delany's clients took an average of six months to find jobs, whereas Walsh's clients took nine."

WORDS: 486 TIME: 00:30:00 DATE: 2008-4-8 21:34:22

In this argument, the verdict is that Delany Personnel Firm is superior to Walsh Personnel Firm in training employees who are fired by XYZ company. To substantiate this conclusion, the arguer compares the situation of Delany and Walsh, and further argues that the number of staffers of Delany outnumbers those of Walsh. However, close scrutiny of evidence unveils that this argument actually suffers from several critical blemishes as discussed below.

To begin with, the fact that last year those who used Delany found jobs much more quickly than did those who did not might not necessarily induced by Delany. Alternative explanations do exist, which would weaken the conclusion. A possible case is that fired employees who turned to Delany were originally much more talented than those who did not. Moreover, the proportion of staffers who used Delany and quickly found jobs is left untended by the speaker. If the percentage is merely 2%, which is not a particularly large number, Delany indeed offered little to their participants.

Secondly, to strengthen the culmination, the arguer also cites that eight years ago Walsh poorly helped workers laid off by XYZ company find subsequent jobs in a short time--a year. However, this fact which lacks sufficient evidence may not be as powerful as the arguer assumes. After all, the time of eight years is quite a long period, in which everything might change considerably. It is highly possible that Walsh corporation now is extremely competent and much more experienced in vocational training than that enterprise was eight years ago, which is not obviated in this statement. In addition, subjective situation might be a paramount factor too. Perhaps the job market eight years ago was not as prosperous as it is today, which may lend support from the speaker's reasoning.

Thirdly, the arguer is too cursory to arrive at the ultimateness that Delany is better than Walsh by simply taking superficial factors--number of crews and branch offices--into account. These two numbers can not represent anything which could be used to evaluate the two companies. Perhaps greater size of corporation may ironically imply lower efficiency of management. In the last of this statement, the arguer says that Delany's clients took an average of six months to find jobs while Walsh's customers took nine last year, which is also unconvincing. Even though clientele of Walsh took longer time to seize jobs than those of Delany, perhaps the jobs found by Walsh's customers were much more promising than ones caught by Delany's clientele.

In summary, this argument indeed suffers from a few vital fallacies as discussed above. To better solidify the culmination, the speaker would have to demonstrate that Delany's clientele find jobs much more quickly and professions are better than Walsh's, and prove that Walsh corporation has not developed a lot during the past eight years. Consequently, without considering and ruling out potential explanations aforementioned, the speaker's conclusion would otherwise be weakened.