[afiori]

> It should be illegal for anybody to access resolved criminal records if they don't have a direct reason pertaining to the safety or security of others.

> It's not your job as an employer or hiring manager to judge someone's mistakes, only their aptitude to perform a job.

I have no horse in this race, so my opinion is mostly out of ignorance, but I believe that this formulation isn't entirely correct. In a sense employers should be allowed to make stupid decisions; the problem is when too many employers make correlated decisions leaving out a innocent chunk of the population.

[ManBlanket]

So what is your take? In the same sentence you've both advocated and dissented on the issue of employers discriminating against resolved charges not pertaining to the job. Is that what you mean by, "no horse in this race"? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ so to speak.

[afiori]

My take is that it is not about whether the employers have a right to do background checks or not, rather it is about the effect that practice has on society.

If few employers do background checks that ex-convicts have easy to access alternatives it is not a problem, if enough employers use that a new social class of unemployable people is created it becomes a serious problem.

I like the idea of forbidding discrimination based on unrelated offences, but am not particularly informed on the topic.

[afiori]

said another way my claim is that we should have strong anti-discrimination laws for ex-convicts, not for a-priori or theoretical reasons but because they absence is causing a problem.