There is an entire movement in the US to prohibit employers from considering an applicant’s criminal history when making hiring decisions.
Do you have a cash handling position? Why not hire someone who has been convicted of embezzlement? Daycare center? Why not hire a pedophile? This is the dumbest shit I have heard this week, but to be fair, it’s only Wednesday.
That doesn’t matter to many employers- they are all in. The city of Lakeland, Florida has done it (although they are excluding police and fire departments from that policy, because hiring criminals to be policemen and firemen is against state law).
The state of Maine is the newest one to jump on this bandwagon. It is now unlawful in Maine for an employer to enquire about an applicant’s criminal history until after they have been offered the job, unless otherwise required by law to screen for criminal history.
So now we have a situation where the left is saying that I can’t get a job if I am a gun owner, or if I have ever opposed gay marriage, abortion, owned a gun, or any other ‘icky’ thought crime, but employers should be forced to hire criminals who have committed actual crimes.
Trump signed it into law, so he wasn’t the panacea that many on the right think he was.
1 Comment
it's just Boris · August 4, 2021 at 7:40 am
I heard something about the “ban the box” movement on NPR’s financial shows a while back.
Seems the BtB movement was started as a racio-economic justice thing. Problem was, it seems it generated greater hiring disparities because employers were on average “playing the odds” and not hiring people from socio-economic groups statistically more likely to have criminal backgrounds.
Who’d have thought?
The cognitive dissonance of the reporters was also kind of interesting, as I recall they wound up lumping implied blame back on business owners. Shocking, I know.
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