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Originally Posted by (1VB)compforce
Simple... Civil liabilities and a litigious population. Those boxes have nothing whatsoever to do with federal regulations (in most cases) and everything to do with corporations not wanting the liability of hiring someone that has shown in the past that they have a lack of morals. If a person was convicted of burglary and gets a job at a company installing burglar alarms, do you think the person whose house was just robbed might have a lawsuit if that person robbed them using insider knowledge from the installation?
Ban the box is a bunch of bullshit. I want to know specifically whether the people I trust to work in my company *can* be trusted. For me, the small business owner, everything I own is on the line. If an employee makes a simple mistake, it can literally cost me everything. Why in the world would I want to hire someone that I didn't know anything about? As the business owner, the criteria that I use to hire should be up to me. If I choose to hire someone with a criminal past, that is MY decision, not the government's.
The current anti-discrimination laws can be clearly seen at work in the VA system and Government in general. The government gives hiring preference to minorities to the exclusion of everyone else (technically Veterans are treated as a minority class in the Government system). Ban the box is another one of the same group of rules. We can't discriminate against people we know we can't trust, right? Let's just pile some more disfunction on businesses. Regulatory and compliance costs only account for 8% of the GDP... it won't matter if we pile on another $10B to cover the people we have to hire but can't trust with actual work http://logic.stanford.edu/POEM/exter...f_c_138098.pdf |
I hear you, and as a business owner myself (all be it outside the US), I have the same concerns. However, here's a counter argument.
Looking at the big picture, it is hugely more beneficial for our nation if these people are reintegrated; the cost of disenfranchisement is huge compared to the relative risk.
If it’s across the board, no one company gets a competitive advantage.
To mitigate its effect on disproportion impact on small business, do something similar to the common "exempt companies fewer than 20 staff" kinda thing.
Allow criminal checks for certain crimes for certain jobs. People with those crimes will avoid those jobs, problem solved.
As ‘nanny mummy pandering’ as it sounds, we have to stop disenfranchising this group; not for their shitty benefit; screw them; but for ours, it simply is costing too much to continue the status quo.