Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Making the Workplace Friendly for Felons

By James Bovard


Should it be a federal offense for businesses to refuse to hire felons? Yes, according to new rules issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) intended to browbeat businesses into changing their hiring standards to benefit criminal offenders.

The EEOC is dedicated to boosting employment of “protected groups.” The agency’s “Enforcement Guidance on the Consideration of Arrest and Conviction Records in Employment Decisions,” released last April, notes that the imprisonment rate for black men “was nearly 7 times higher than white men and almost 3 times higher than Hispanic men.”

Since blacks and Hispanics have higher crime rates, the EEOC has uncorked more than 20,000 tangled words to sway businesses to forgo criminal background checks on job applicants. Even though most businesses perform those checks, the EEOC has made that practice far more legally hazardous — and far more likely to provoke a federal lawsuit alleging discrimination.

John Hendrickson, a top EEOC attorney in the Midwest, told the Chicago Tribune: “I would suggest to businesses that they think long and hard about why they think they need to do a criminal background check.”

Read the rest here.

5 comments:

  1. This is interesting....gov't is throwing so many people in jail for petty reasons and plastering them with felonies as a result that it's probably a main driver behind why they want to force business to hire them...they've actually managed to help stifle their income stream through their own policies.

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  2. Since the average American commits 3 felonies a day, methinks the background check may soon be useless...

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  3. Of course the "need" for such a "law" would be dramatically reduced if the federal government weren't so busy creating felons in the first place, what with all its drug wars, raw milk was, coin collector wars, etc.

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  4. Last time I heard no one with a felon can work for the CPS schools here in Chicago. But, background checks are mandatory.

    http://www.isbe.net/pdf/guidance_chr.pdf

    OK for the Government to work long and hard about doing criminal background checks. Of course, the state does not need to "think long and hard" about why.

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  5. The disproportionately high rate of felonies among minorities is a problem created by government.

    If they really wanted to fix the problem, they'd close shop.

    But we know how likely that is going to happen.

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