Is This Discrimination? - Granite Grok

Is This Discrimination?

From the nice folks at Yahoo News, we are asked to consider if screening applicants based on a past criminal record should be considered a form of discrimination?  Employers, having a massive advantage in available workers, are coming under scrutiny for what might otherwise go unnoticed if there were not five potential employees for each available job–this according to Yahoo News.  With so manyJob Ap people out of work any kind of screening becomes news-worthy.  So screening out ex-cons may be discriminatory and a waste of natural resources.

According to the article one in four Americans has a criminal record, a problem which , and I quote,  "…effectively mak(es) more than one quarter of the American workforce unemployable (and) may be an unsustainable policy for the economy as whole." 

The article suggests another problem.  "Because discriminating against those with criminal records disproportionately hurts African Americans, the practice may violate the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits race-based hiring discrimination." 

The questions should probably be "why do more African Americans have criminal records–and how can we fix that,"  not "can we file discrimination lawsuits against employers because they do not want to hire ex-cons who may happen to be black.

I don’t think you can force an employer to hire someone with a criminal record.  Any equal application of that rule would require all employers to treat anyone with a conviction the same way instead of in a manner relative to the job itself.  This assumes no safety or security concerns can exist that might exclude candidates and that is simply not the case.

All this does is invite lawsuits, which drain a business of resources it might have rather used to give someone a job besides some lawyers.  But is there, or should there be, a point at which a case for discrimination can be made?

 

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