[brighteyes]

> I suggest that by remaining in his position he took very few consequences, and that in almost any other walk of life a person with less privilege would automatically lose their job after being convicted of sexual assault.

Is this actually true? If, as a random example, a waiter in a restaurant were convicted of sexual assault on the subway (as in the story here), how would the owner of the restaurant even know about it to fire him?

I think things work exactly the opposite of how the author of this piece does. The person under question here had his career end because he was famous in his field. But 99% of people are not famous. Rather than "privilege" shielding him, being rich and famous was his downfall.

[ggg9990]

A waiter would miss work a few times for court proceedings and be fired without knowing the reason. He’d fail his background check when he next sought employment.

[brighteyes]

Shift workers lives can be hard, but you're exaggerating that first part. Yes, the person would need to work around court proceedings, but those are known well in advance. The much bigger risk for getting fired as a shift worker is unexpected stuff like your kid waking up sick that morning or your car breaking down.

The second part is valid, I agree - background check could be a problem in later jobs. But that wasn't the question here: the author claimed that "in almost any other walk of life" a person would lose their current job. That just seems totally false.

[lainga]

Through the increasingly popular (and unreliable, and hard-to-dispute) background check service that SV has created.

https://checkr.com/

[codingdave]

Background checks have been around for a long time, and a new service has little to do with their availability to employers. The actual answer as to how an employer would know if their employee had gotten in legal trouble is the time they would miss as they got arrested, jailed, bailed, and then worked through the legal process.

[brighteyes]

Being jailed or otherwise detained for any amount of time, sure. But otherwise, working through the legal process wouldn't be something a regular employer knows about. You would have more errands to run than usual perhaps, that's about it.

Another example: as a programmer, if I run into legal trouble with the IRS and they sue me, or if my neighbor sues me for damage to their property, how would my employer know?

(I'm not saying it's good that employers might not know this. I'm just baffled by the article taking it as a given that practically all employers would.)

[irrational]

That kind of think really worries me. If you don't have a social media presence will it flag you as a problem? Or is it just using public records?