----
Of course, a much more charitable explanation would be that there's an "efficiency wage" effect behind background checks. For good jobs, the job itself is good enough that employers assume you'd be stupid to somehow jeopardize it by stealing or committing a crime. In contrast, shitty retail jobs are bad and everybody knows it—the company assumes that your loss from the job wouldn't be big enough to offset the gains you might make from stealing. This could be a similar explanation for why immigrants commit fewer crimes: they have more to lose.
All it can be said to do is to weed out poor people or conversely allow terrible employers to pinpoint candidates that they can easily abuse because they are so far in debt.
That is very different from being proven useless.
This seems overly-dramatic. The reality is that there is a lot of petty crime with people who handle cash, compared to those on a white collar career path. Petty crime happens so often its not even reported, and white collar crime is so rare it makes the news, so you may be skewed to think that casual stealing from retail employers is rare, but it certainly is not.
On top of it, the kinds of people most likely to work with a cash register are those who are largely unknowns. Yes, I do trust the guy with 15 years experience in finance more compared to the teen getting his first or second job to better handle money. Also criminality goes down with age. Experience tells me 15 year career guy has made it this far without getting arrested and has a lot of skin the in the game. Its not "classist" to think so. Its basic risk analysis. Just because something seems distasteful to you doesn't mean its wrong. I wish more people understood this simple concept.
That said, I've gotten background checked at every white collar job I've had. Companies need a CYA for new hires and that's how its typically done. This has been the standard in my field for decades. Not sure where the idea that white collar people are immune from background checks comes from. It certainly isn't common in my peer group.
It may also be that a lot of entry level retail jobs are mostly from large corporate employers who have top-down policies regarding background checks. Sure, Walmart did a check on you but your uncle didn't for a summer job filling out TPS reports at his company. That's not a sign of a conspiracy, but different values/risk assumption from two different organizations.
You are making a strong claim about the frequency of unreported events. Where does your data come from?
> Experience tells me 15 year career guy has made it this far without getting arrested and has a lot of skin the in the game
What experience are you talking about? It sounds more like you are making a logical argument, rather than an experiential one: the while collar must be more trustworthy because he has more money to lose. It is obvious to you that the more money you are making, the more honest you must be. That's a logical conclusion at best, not an experience.
She asked what I meant so I spelled it out more directly "Why does a file clerk role require a background check, credit check and drug screen but this role here, a Senior accounting role asks only for relevant job history?" She admitted she didn't know.
I wish I could say this was limited to that company, but I saw it so much over the course of about 3 months that I started to really wonder what the hell is going on..
There's probably no conspiracy, just generalized classism.
It takes a lot of empathy (something that is actively selected against in our corporation dominated workforce) to bypass that.
Add into that the gravity of money (ie, rich get richer) and political corruption (money buys power) and you have a basic framework for classism.
If I want to farm your labor, I need to find you, make sure you are going to work long enough at a site for me to make money, and I have to hope that you wont do something that will sour the relationship I have with "my" customer (the business I am renting you to.)
The margins for staffing places are actually pretty small per person, so its not so much unjustifiable as it is dehumanizing.
I worked temp out of college in the dot com bust. I lived out of a borrowed car. I was desperate for work and had relevant skills, but many temp agencies wouldn't touch me. It was stupid and dehumanizing, but it was also pretty unjustifiable.
So maybe that is the logic, but it's specious logic.
I've gone through tons of background checks / drug screens for federal and state governments, and financial companies. But I've never had a Facebook search...
Is that even legal?
"I'm sorry, I don't use Facebook as it seems an invasion of personal privacy"
or
"Ok, here's my Facebook account" and then give them some uber-sanitized account that just has photos of kittens and messages on your mom's wall about her cookies.
It works best if you're actually in California, but even if not, it might give them pause.
Later, I worked on some of their creepy background checking software. Essentially, without the login, they can still get all the information about me they need.
4. You will not share your password (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.
It's not iron-clad, but it may dissuade the nosy.
I have to check my Facebook every few months to find out what sort of content is now visible to a new group of people that was hidden by me in the past.
Work with military data was by far the most extensive (required approved clearance). Government positions were the most varied, with one being very thorough (not quite as bad as the military), and an other being the least intensive. Financial institution were middle of the road.
But everywhere where I had database access required a background check and only one place didn't require a drug test. The lower income positions I worked required neither.
One thing I did notice from my friends is that smaller shops are less likely to have institutionalize policies. A small startup is less likely to background check you than a fast food chain likely has a policy requiring it. But this applies to any large organizations, not just lower income positions.
To give a specific example: Work in a fast food place handling small amounts of cash and they'll background check you. Work in a company handling SSNs, Credit Cards, and medical records and they didn't even ask me if I had a criminal record (I don't).
So I cannot help but wonder if ex-convicts are going to suffer more while getting a low end job than they would if they were applying for high end positions. I guess the assumption is if you have a degree that you are somehow above crime...
I guess that's why so called "white collar crime" often goes undetected for longer and is often more successful overall.