I can remember a time when, if you wanted a criminal in government, you had to get him elected. Not anymore. An executive order signed by Joe Biden in 2021 now encourages criminals to be hired.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued two reports this month pointing out that prior to Biden’s executive order, a task force was formed to identify vulnerable workers and find ways to better help them.
Government agencies are now being told to “widely publicize” that they are “hiring persons with criminal conduct issues in their background checks.” Since Biden penned this executive order, applicants with questionable histories have rarely been eliminated from the hiring process for government jobs. The EEOC is saying that employers should take a holistic approach with special consideration for mitigating circumstances.
This is such a liberal tactic that it makes me cringe. The thought process here is that more blacks and Latinos are incarcerated, so these considerations should go toward those racial profiles. That may not be spelled out in the written word, but that is exactly the intent. The left only judges diversity on skin color. The depth of their judgment is truly just skin deep. So by leaning toward people of color and minorities with crimes in their backgrounds, they are eliminating whites with no criminal history as well as whites with criminal histories. The left has never understood this concept. If you want to achieve true equity, simply hire the most qualified person, regardless of color. That is true equity. What have you accomplished if you require a department or corporation to hire someone based only on skin color and not skill set? If someone is still being discriminated against, that is not equity or proper inclusion.
Before anyone thinks that I am saying not to hire someone who has committed a crime, I’m not. I honestly think everyone deserves a second chance, but no, I do not think that someone with a criminal record should be chosen over another equally or better-qualified person just for that reason.
Another leftist term that they throw around constantly is disproportionate. In a bizarre attempt to justify the increased hiring of people of color, the agency said that in years past, the agency also made background checks related to arrest and conviction records among its “national substantive area priorities because African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately incarcerated.” Yet they are incarcerated because they committed the crimes. If there is a disproportionate number incarcerated in proportion to the percentage of the population, that is an irrelevant statistic. Does it highlight issues that need to be addressed in other areas? Yes, but many of those issues need to take place within the social confluence of the race itself.
Now, in one of the classic examples of nonsensical double-speak, listen to this word salad, where the EEOC attempts to justify the “timing” of when a background check is accomplished.
The first EEOC report, titled “Second Chances Part I,” explores how likely people with prior arrests or convictions are to work in the federal sector and whether the laws that govern the timing of background checks during the recruiting process better protect applicants from discrimination: “This report presents evidence that, from 2003 to 2017, the Federal sector may have had higher barriers to employment for formerly incarcerated workers than elsewhere in the economy.”
Get ready, ….
The agency discovered that the government’s policy of “delaying arrest and conviction record inquiries in the hiring process” has helped greatly and offers the agency more opportunity to protect applicants with criminal records. “So-called ban-the-box policies, which generally prohibit criminal background checks until after a conditional job offer is made, led to significantly more meritorious complaints per month.”
For example, the EEOC states that “Black men, in particular, are arrested and incarcerated at rates disproportionate to their numbers in the national population,” thus providing the EEOC with a basis to launch disparate impact investigations. No, not a basis, an excuse—liberal justification to promote and push DEI at every opportunity, using any excuse that can be developed in the Twilight Zone that makes up the liberal mind.
The second part of the report is imaginatively titled “Second Chances Part II.” In this section, the report analyzed how often applicants were turned down as being unsuitable for a position. Between the years of 2018 and 2020, approximately 22 percent of civil service jobs applied for had applications that contained a criminal history. However, only two percent had negative recommendations that would disqualify the applicant from a civil service job.
“In cases with criminal conduct as an issue, over three-fourths of determinations were favorable, allowing the candidate to work in the Federal Government,” the report explains.
That said, the EEOC has decided that this is not enough and that the federal government needs to employ more criminals. That is why they suggested that the “Federal Government widely publicize this report’s finding that Federal agencies are hiring persons with criminal conduct issues in their background checks.”
“With certain exceptions, a hiring agency may not make specific inquiries concerning an applicant’s criminal or credit background in oral or written form unless the hiring agency has made a conditional offer of employment to the applicant,” the report reads. “Persons with a history of arrest, incarceration, or criminal conduct who have rehabilitated and present a low risk for recidivism need opportunities for stable employment. Employment in the Federal Government may help address some of the barriers that persons with past criminal conduct face and ease their reintegration into society.”
That’s correct, and it all sounds good… except that the woke liberals pushing this can’t ever be trusted.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are all positive-sounding words, but there is nothing positive about ignoring the real social issues. Race is one small part of diversity. Ignoring everything else except that does not create equity; in fact, it causes division and prevents inclusion.
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