In 1989, the
Supreme Court was asked to decide whether the railroads had the right to
ask their workers to go into a room and piss in a cup. There had been accidents
before, drugs were found to be the culprit, and so the railroads decided to
check for drugs via urine testing.
Did it ever
make sense?
Of course
not. If you smoked a joint on Saturday night, you were spilling metabolites in
your urine on Monday—but you weren’t under the effects of the drug. Conversely,
if you snorted cocaine on the way to work, you were soaring like a kite, but
not spilling metabolites.
Then there
was the problem of all the over the counter drugs like Sudafed which gave false
positives—sure, more sophisticated tests were available, but unsurprisingly,
they were also more expensive.
It was a period
of drug hysteria—remember dear Nancy Reagan peering out of the darkness that
was presumably drug addiction and whispering
hamishly (in the manner of a ham, computer—lump it!), “just say no!?” Remember
Bill, who smoked
but didn’t inhale?
Of all
people, Antonin Scalia got it. Here’s what he
said:
The
impairment of individual liberties cannot be the means of making a
point…symbolism, even symbolism for so worthy a cause as the abolition of
unlawful drugs, cannot validate an otherwise unreasonable search.
Right—knew
we had to agree on something….
So I was
prepared, when Wal-Mart wanted me to come work as an English teacher, for the
ordeal of taking the bus out to a clinic, pissing in the bottle with the
bathroom door six inches ajar, not washing my hands until after I had given the
bottle to the apologetic technician. She took it, stuck a thermometer in it,
and then let me use the sink.
Full
disclosure: I last used marijuana in—was it the eighties? Nineties? You get the
point….
So I knew
about that. What didn’t I know?
47% of
employers routinely
do a credit check on job applicants.
Well, you
can imagine the snort I made—even Franny, my beloved mother resting quietly in
the afterlife, couldn’t have done better.
Consider
the case of Alfred
J. Carpenter, a shoe salesman in New York City who got laid off. Not a
problem, he thought—his resume was good, he had worked for some high-end names
like Ferragamo and J. M. Weston. And since he was healthy, he didn’t need to
get health insurance, he reasoned.
Wrong—he
tore two ligaments in his knee playing roller hockey. And so the bills piled
up, and he was struggling to pay them. A friend thought he could work at
Bergdorf Goodman; he applied and all was well. But then that went sour, too;
soon he was in bankruptcy. But he kept applying for positions, and even took to
disclosing his poor credit with prospective employers. No luck, and no dice.
Down to his last 200 dollars, he’s now on welfare and food stamps.
The irony
of it is that the company has to ask your permission to check your credit. But
if you say no? Is there anyone out there who seriously thinks that if you way
no, that won’t be held against you? If so, please contact me at once, since I
have several really nice pieces of real estate—including bridges—to sell at the
moment.
I can hear
you—what possible reason would an employer have to check your credit? Well, The
New York Times says this:
“Employers
are looking for a sense of responsibility,” said Richard Mellor, a vice
president at the National Retail Federation. “They want to see that an
individual pays their bills on time and takes responsibility for what they
buy.”
There are
several problems. First is the obvious one—anyone in this economy looking for a
job is probably not going to have the best credit. Here’s The New York Times
again:
“Someone loses
their job,” Ms. Wu said, “so they can’t pay their bills — and now they can’t
get a job because they couldn’t pay their bills because they lost a job? It’s
this Catch-22 that makes no sense.” It can also be a kind of backdoor job discrimination,
Ms. Wu contends, given the numerous studies that demonstrate that those black,
Latino or simply poor are more likely to have lower credit scores than those
who are white and have means.
Obviously,
Ms. Wu gets it. And she goes on to say:
To Ms. Wu
and others, a credit report says more about a person’s economic circumstances
than his or her moral character. “Some people can go to daddy and say, ‘I can’t
pay my bills, will you bail me out?’ ” Ms. Wu said. “And others can’t.”
The other
problem? Often, the credit agencies’ reports are incorrect, and everybody who
has ever had to deal with these agencies knows—it’s a nightmare. Somehow, the
mistake that you corrected in January appears regularly in February.
The
solution? Well, nine states have laws regulating or prohibiting the use of
credit checks by employers recruiting personnel. But it should be at the
federal level—not the state level.
So it was
the snowball effect, just as Scalia—probably—feared. First it was just pissing
into a cup, then it was giving up your credit privacy, and now? It’s having the
government get your telephone / Internet history, if not listening in on your
calls or reading your email.
It was
Vonnegut, I think, who observed that the
Star Spangled Banner is the only national anthem that ends with a question.
Remember? We sing it at every baseball game….
And does
that flag still wave, over the free and the brave?
