Elizabeth Warren’s bold new crusade: Keep employers out of your credit history

[Autumn]

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/18/elizabeth_warrens_bold_new_crusade_keeping_employers_out_of_your_credit_history/

Decrying a “rigged” system and the long overhang of the 2008 crash, Sen. Elizabeth Warren Tuesday introduced a bill to ban mandatory pre-employment credit checks. “This act is about basic fairness,” the Massachusetts Democrat told reporters on a Tuesday call. “Let people compete for jobs on the merits, not whether they already have enough money to pay all their bills.”

Warren’s bill, the Equal Employment for All Act, would make it illegal for employers (outside national security jobs) to require that job applicants disclose their credit history. Warren’s Senate bill is co-sponsored by six Senate Democrats, including Vermont’s Patrick Leahy and Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, and is based on a bill Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., introduced in 2011 in the House. “A credit score,” Warren argued, “should not be used as a way to cut people out of the job market."

“Pre-employment credit checks disproportionately hit minorities, students and seniors,” Warren told Salon, “because these groups are likely to be hit hard by bad credit scores.” She told reporters that her bill addresses “a problem that’s become even more acute in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis,” where many “were hit really hard financially, and now they’ve got credit scores that, the bad information will persist for seven years, or in some cases longer.”

Echoing advocates, Warren noted a study suggesting a fifth of consumers, when given the chance, could find at least one inaccuracy in their own credit report, and argued there was “little or no evidence or any correlation between job performance and a credit score.”

[cantbeserious]

1. Right On Liz

eom

[reformist2]

2. Rejecting applicants because they are in need of money is discriminatory and cruel.

[DirkGently]

3. Yes. Nor should being out of work a long time

be held against job applicants. Some mega-corp (Sony?) got attention during the worst of the Wall Street Recession for stating in a job ad that people out of work for longer than some set period of time would not be considered (!).

We magnify marginalization. All is well if you've had decades of good fortune, with fine credit and an unbroken job history. Blow that, by bad luck or bad health or anything else, and very quickly you lose access to good jobs, housing, transportation.

We don't need to shut people out of jobs on the basis they don't have enough money.

THAT'S WHY THEY NEED THE JOB.

[smirkymonkey]

4. I love my senator!

She puts so many of these greedy, useless other do-nothings in congress to shame.