Ban the Box?

Since 2007, eleven states have enacted bans on checking a job applicant’s credit score. The aim is equality and fair hiring – since someone with low credit would more likely be black, poor, and/or young. Yet when two economists (Robert Clifford and Daniel Shoag) studied these bans, they found hiring more racially biased.

Why so? Another well-intentioned liberal utopian idea whacked by the law of unintended consequences. It seems that when employers cannot see applicants’ credit scores (often a good predictor of reliability on the job), they give added weight to factors like educational attainment and experience – on which young, poor, and black people do even worse.

The Americans with Disabilities Act similarly aimed to help a disadvantaged class, by giving them a litany of on the-job-protections — enforceable through litigation. Thusly turning disabled workers into lawsuit bombs, making employers wary of employing them at all.

Well, you may say, what’s wrong with requiring employers to treat disabled staff fairly, and penalizing them if they don’t? But even an employer with all the goodwill in the world would realize that what she considers fair, someone else might not, and in today’s litigious culture, that’s a big risk.

Some lawyer sharks make their livings by cooking up dubious ADA cases and shaking down businesses for settlements. (The ADA was a bigger boon for lawyers than for disabled people.)

It’s all part of a trend to see businesses as enemies of society. As if people should provide you with goods and services with no profit, selflessly, as a public service. A friend of mine constantly whines about supermarkets making profits, asking why they can’t just give up some profit and cut prices. But she likes being able choose among thousands of products in one store. Supermarket profit margins average around 1%.

Now we have the “ban the box” movement – referring to the job application checkbox, “have you ever been convicted of a crime?” As though it’s somehow unfair for an employer to know this about a job seeker. Applicants do have rights; but don’t businesses have some rights too? Isn’t it, indeed, unfair to require a business to hire someone without knowing their credit rating, or criminal record? Those tell something about the person. And while people with bad credit or jail time deserve some consideration, are they entitled to be treated as though those facts about them aren’t facts?

And I’m dubious anyway that “ban the box” would actually help the intended beneficiaries – let’s face it, mainly young black men. Who, percentagewise, have a greater likelihood of criminal justice encounters. Businesses know that. If barred from learning whether a black applicant has a clean record, a common response would be wariness about hiring him – making it harder for black men to get jobs. Just like with credit scores.

Sometimes the “unintended consequences” are not even a surprise. Sometimes they stare you in the face. But that never seems to daunt liberal do-gooders in their effort to repeal reality.

After I wrote this up, an article in The Economist reported on another study, showing states with “ban the box” laws, sure enough, do experience lower black hiring.

And now Massachusetts has banned employers from asking job applicants what their present salary is. Fairness to women is the stated aim.

Why not just go for total fairness and require businesses to hire workers knowing nothing about them at all?