San Francisco and the federal government are grappling with the question of whether private employers should have the right to discriminate against job applicants with criminal records.
The Reentry Council is urging San Francisco to bar private employers and landlords from discriminating on the basis of a persons arrest or conviction record. The proposal would allow employers to consider criminal records when they are directly relevant: schools would not have to hire sex offenders, for example.
San Francisco’s Human Rights Commission has joined the Reentry Council in calling for reform, because it has become increasingly tougher for ex-felons to find employment. High unemployment allows employers to be highly selective, and any brush with the law can be a disqualifier. About one in four adults in California has an arrest or conviction that shows up on a criminal background check.
Employers are far more likely to do criminal-background checks than they once were. According to the Society of Human Resource Management, 92 percent of employers did some kind of pre-employment background check in 2010, up from 51 percent in 1996, according to Time magazine.
San Francisco was among the first to acknowledge the rights of gay people, and it has passed a law making it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of height or weight. “San Franciscans are finding ourselves at a familiar moment, looking at a population differently than other people do,” says Jessica Flintoft, reentry policy director of both the Reentry Council and the public defender’s office.
Some states, including Hawaii and Massachusetts, already have safeguards for former inmates. San Francisco is still drafting legislation and having public hearings.
San Francisco’s decision to consider making ex-prisoners a protected class has been causing controversy and raising hackles among many conservatives. Fox News recently announced that the idea was fomenting “outrage” and declared that critics were calling the plan “a crime in itself.”
The idea of giving protection to ex-felons, however, also has some law-and-order backers, including San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón. He insists that helping ex-prisoners obtain jobs and abandon their lives of crime makes the city safer. “These people are in the community regardless,” he says. “Do we want to marginalize them and keep them on the edge?”
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EECO) held a hearing last month in Washington, D.C. The subject was whether existing federal law allows employers to consider job applicants’ criminal histories.
The EECO says the use of criminal records in employment matters can constitute racial discrimination, because minorities are more likely than whites to have criminal records. The commission has long-standing guidelines saying that employers must take into account the age, seriousness and relevance of a person’s criminal record before they consider it in a hiring decision.
