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February 03, 2010
Just Because Your Credit Score Is Poor Doesn't Mean You Suck
Many Oregon employers would be prohibited from using a job applicant's credit history as part of the pre-employment screening process if a bill being considered by the Legislature becomes law.The Senate Commerce and Workforce Development Committee held a hearing Wednesday on Senate Bill 1045, which would limit employers' use of credit checks unless the information is relevant to the job.
It's nice to see some sane talk in Salem these days. Maybe it'll delay our arrival at a place where they actually have to build poor houses.
The apparent response from the business lobby is rather predictable. You can fill it in yourself.
There may have been a time … long ago … where a person's credit performance might have shed some light on how they might have made judgment calls or how they might have performed on the job.
Maybe.
But those times have passed. I watched with some horror the things that people talked themselves into to convince themselves that the rather horrid bankruptcy reform was a needed thing. That people in bankruptcies just wouldn't be there if they'd been smarter, not spent beyond their means, weren't obviously trying to get out from under their responsibilities.
I also remember the dudgeon still being so thick that one could cut it with a sharpened credit card even after it was pointed out that it wasn't, in the main, irresponsibility that was creating all those bankruptcies but things that couldn't be controlled or even completely adequately planned for – medical bills that nobody can foresee or know the size of going in, or losing a job in some declining living-wage industry only to find the only jobs available pay barely over minimum-wage. Any sane commentator pointing toward that was either mocked or ignored.
Simply put, checking a credit score or history these days to prove employment worthiness is about as accurate as asking Punxsutawney Phil how the weather's going to be through mid-March. Ain't necessarily so.
And given that most people who have a bad credit history these days are more likely honest folks who have credit cards that were rode hard and put away wet and a house that's on the edge of foreclosure because the money's gone through no fault of their own, the whole idea these days is manifestly unfair.
Unless the idea of a permanently-poor underclass in America is your idea of what America should look like.
And if you still, after all this, think people on the skids deserved their fate … well, you just keep whistling past the graveyard, kids, and hope that your economic dice don't come up snake-eyes on the next throw.
Posted by The Chinuk at February 3, 2010 06:43 PM
