Background Checks Costing Jobs

The night Donald Ade was busted for buying a bag of
marijuana, he spent six hours in jail, paid a $1,000 fine and immediately
tried to push that "little trouble with the law" out of his mind.

BY ADAM GELLER
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

That’s where it stayed, until pharmaceutical maker Eli Lilly & Co. began
doing criminal background checks this year of everyone with access to its
facilities, and unearthed the Indianapolis sheet metal worker’s 1993 arrest
record. Lilly barred Ade from its property, and he lost his construction job.

"I could see if I’d been convicted of making bombs or being a member of
the KKK or something . . . but God, I liked to smoke pot 10 years ago," said
Ade, who was out of a job for more than four months and blames the
financial pressures for the breakup of his marriage. "They [Lilly] have
destroyed my life and it’s like, tough luck."

Complaints such as Ade’s are becoming more common, a side effect of
stricter security by many companies following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Many employers have begun scrutinizing the past of workers and job
applicants, in an effort to protect their facilities and personnel from being
attacked from within. But some workers say companies are going too far,
invading their privacy by digging up information with little if any bearing on
security and using it as grounds for dismissal or discipline.

"It doesn’t seem proper for an employer to be going through your dirty
laundry," said Gary Shults, president of a Transport Workers Union local in
Dallas, which has filed suit against Southwest Airlines for the way it
conducts background checks of ground workers.
"I’m all for safety, but there’s got to be a line drawn somewhere. Your
privacy has to be worth something," Shults said.
Conflicts over background checks are flaring up in more workplaces.

At Lilly, which has done background checks on its own employees since
the mid-1990s, new scrutiny of suppliers, construction workers and others
with access to its sites led the company to bar 194 people from its property.
In the months since, the company has reversed its decision regarding 13 of
those workers.

Privacy advocates say broad checks are unnecessarily invasive. Clearly,
there are instances where a person’s record is critical to whether they
should be allowed on a job, said Lewis Maltby, president of the National
Workrights Institute, a Princeton, N.J., group focused on employee rights.

It makes sense, Maltby said, to bar someone convicted of drunk driving
from driving a school bus. The problem comes if employers ban anyone with
such a record from any job, he said.
Companies say they are trying to strike a balance, sometimes as the
result of law, between two important but conflicting sets of interests.

"Employers are not a bunch of peeping Toms," said Dan Yager, general
counsel for the Labor Policy Association, a group representing corporate
personnel executives. "If anything, they’re just being very sensitive, very,
very careful, and they’re just trying to protect people."

But others say that by screening out people for offenses unrelated to their
work, employers are abdicating a larger responsibility.
"We have people who are told to do your time . . . and you can return to
society as a normal citizen," said Kent Markus, a professor of law at Capital
University in Columbus, Ohio, and an expert on background checks. "Yet
we now are going to emblazon many of these people with a scarlet F [for
felon] that they must carry with them forever."

http://www.sltrib.com/06222002/business/747437.htm