These still exist in the modern era, primarily in industries with high turnover like the restaurant industry, farm labor, and other unsavory industries such as meat processing.
The jobs left are largely just the ones where the finished product can't be put on a container ship for 2 months.
If globalization unravels due to rising geopolitical tensions and continent spanning supply chains buckle and break we will likely be quite surprised at how much unskilled labor is suddenly in demand at home.
If I were running a meat processing plant, and there was:
- Sexual harassment
- Racism
- Violence
- Etc.
I'd have a huge liability on my hands. Unfortunately, prison convicts would be much more likely to expose me to those types of liability. If an employee catcalls another employee, that places a lot of burden lands on the employer.
This happened largely due to progressive reforms. I'm not claiming to have any solution here, or to even have a semblance of idea of cost/benefit. People need jobs. People deserve to be safe.
That put things in perspective for me, because I had thought that the back of the restaurant was a hard dangerous s*** job - - in fact the hood fans and ac didn't and work, the food thermometer in my shirt pocket regularly read above 110F, and I was generally surrounded by sharp things, hot things, greasy floors and boiling oil, and the shift manager chest bumped me and screamed in my face. But for that guy it was a promotion.
That was in Texas, which is a "business friendly" state, so those progressive reforms might be more... incremental than the average hn reader might wish.
> his remarks on your other areas of concern would be ill suited to this forum
This isn't a kid's show. Your comment is really interesting to me, and I'd like to hear what he said about these issues.
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My apologies, that's hilarious.
Not sure what that word is that you don't want to say, but if it's a racial epithet then I have to admit I won't say any of that shit either. I try not to even think those words, lest they become part of my internal monologue that becomes not-so-internal when I get old and demented. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite when I accuse others of self-censoring.
Your friend sounds like trash. I have some super trashy friends and acquaintances, and I can just hear them talking through your description. Trash white people are a tribe, and there's hardly anything trashier than the kind of grifting that painter did to you.
I love that Johnson quote, and it seems ever more prescient now that trash whites are a distinct voting bloc.
That quote applies just as well to black trash. There seems to be a resurgence of black nationalism now, with multitudes of black revolutionaries talking pan-africanism, reparations, and utopian black socialism. Moors and whatever the fuck else. I was reading about a group of these characters that briefly set up shop down in the far corner of my state. Black Hammer, they call themselves. They got a bunch of suckers to gofundme them to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, saying they'd liberate some land and start some sort of black-supremacist commune. Surprisingly it didn't work out and the leaders have since moved on to more mainstream BLM-type activism. And they kept the money obviously.
Maybe that would work with construction, but they also hire a lot of exconvicts due to turnover and pay.
A job for teenagers and aspiring actors.
>farm labor
Okay, but we specifically import people to work for low (often illegally low) wages. Work for an adult, maybe, but not much of a living.
>and other unsavory industries.
Same problem as with farm labor, except now it's "unsavory" instead of "honest work".
It's not right to have a bimodal distribution of "high class professional jobs" and "unsavory jobs with low trust requirements". You need a lower-end but respectable place for people to be that's better than criminality, and you certainly can't say "go work in one of those unsavory industries" if you want them to think its better than being a criminal. In American culture we GLORIFY criminality, and loathe low-class "unsavory" work. Why would anyone choose unsavory work over being a criminal in the current environment?
I often wonder what the impact of these jobs is on the humans that are doing it. Half the reason I'm avoiding (supermarket) meat is that I feel bad about keeping these jobs alive. (The other reason is the animal suffering ofc.)
Day labor like roofing, sheetrock, landscaping, etc. also typically have similar representation. Any temp agency for factory work will have a threshold or types of conviction that they will overlook, but they may be even more hostile towards their workers.
> I don't really check who's building my websites or little tools I purchase.
How do you sleep at night? Honest question. I want to know the assumptions and reasoning that leads to one being comfortable with this decision.
I’m probably more worried than I should be, but every time I look at my puny little openBSD webserver’s log, I find about 2 to 5 new attempts to scan my server for various exploits a month. Each attempt is a relentless scans looking for all sorts of holes with hundreds of potential exploits. The first time I read those logs, I swore I would never move from openBSD + httpd ever.
The internet is outright hostile to any computer with an ip address and a port open to the internet.
I’m sure there are some companies out there that provide hosting solutions that do a good job at keeping things updated - but even they are defenseless against things like the recent log4j vulnerability (and that’s just the stuff the good guys caught). At the very least, I would want to know who is building my websites and what their track record is.
I am far more worried about the air quality that floats into my home than a website that's hosted somewhere else and isn't connected to anything but its own content.
I buy software from the app store for sure. But I do not pull down .apk binaries from the darkweb and run them on my phone - especially if I don't know who the author was. I doubt most sane people would download and run binaries from random websites (darkweb or not) even today.
> You host everything on your own hardware?
No I don't. I trust my hosting provider, and they have a track record of reputable service, I have a business relationship with them. I would say I know who is hosting my website.
I'm sure convicted hackers or white collar criminals have trouble finding work that suits their skill level but probably able to do so at a cut/lower level. The one convicted white collar criminal I know is working again.
This is an area where I think regulation would be helpful/necessary, in that when doing a background check that the employer needs to enter business and job scope, and then the law would define which types of criminal background would be relevant and potentially disqualifying by job type.
A weed possession charge as a minor is the type of thing that I think regulation should disallow as a disqualifying factor for all types of jobs. The idea would be that I would ask a background check service "I am hiring for a CLERK at CONVENIENCE_STORE", and I would just get back a response "No disqualifying convictions found" if all you had were a weed conviction.
I work for a financial services company, and we have pretty clear guidelines about what is or isn't disqualifying. But why should I even have the right to know, for example, if someone was convicted of a DUI 10 years ago? But I absolutely do think I should have the right to know if someone was convicted of theft 2 years ago.
it’s actually pretty privacy focused way to accomplish things.
But honestly, in the beginning of "Noise" they start detailing some cases Marvin Frankel reviewed:
Frankel did not provide any kind of statistical analysis to support his argument. But he did offer a series of powerful anecdotes, showing unjustified disparities in the treatment of similar people. Two men, neither of whom had a criminal record, were convicted for cashing counterfeit checks in the amounts of $58.40 and $35.20, respectively. The first man was sentenced to fifteen years, the second to 30 days. For embezzlement actions that were similar to one another, one man was sentenced to 117 days in prison, while another was sentenced to 20 years. Pointing to numerous cases of this kind, Frankel deplored what he called the “almost wholly unchecked and sweeping powers” of federal judges, resulting in “arbitrary cruelties perpetrated daily,” which he deemed unacceptable in a “government of laws, not of men.”
Like those check fraud cases are crazy and having that on your record forever? That's some yellow passport shit. Over damages that could be settled trivially. If we did some criminal law reform, yeah I totally agree with you, but I think it's more complicated than just barring results. I'll grant you it'd be better than it is now, I guess, but order of operations I think would be pretty important, but that's an aside for another day.
I'm going to be honest here: if I'm hiring for a CFO or corporate treasurer, I don't want to hire anyone who has intentionally passed a counterfeit check. The fact that they probably have enough cash in their pocket to cover their fraudulent check is entirely irrelevant.
My point was more the fact that over what, in the worst case, a day's worth of labor can not only earn you fines, time, but also the record.
Check fraud, by my estimation is basically theft. How many employers are going to want a theif?
But here's the thing, that may well have been a one time thing. Homeboy isn't necessarily a theif, but rather he committed at least one singular theft. And one of such minor magnitude I can only assume it was an act of desperation. But any "theft sensitive" employer is going to red flag him. Maybe he's a Thenadier, maybe he's Josef K. You just don't get the granularity necessary to make the determination. And the Court isn't solving moral dilemmas, but simply determining whether or not someone is guilty.
Add in complications like degrees. Somebody gets in a precarious position in their life and steals $1k or something comparably petty, does time, reparations, et etcetera but now they're permanently barred from practicing their specialization.
There are legitimizable crimes.
Don't put that on businesses.
I'd be *much* more leery of hiring someone convicted of possession of addictive drugs than someone convicted of possession of recreational drugs. Recreational use can be done only in appropriate situations. Addictive use likely means they come to work impaired.
For the rest of their lives? There’s a time dimension here that implies being clean for five years.
Employers for most common jobs will not have a right to request these records.
The police will then filter the criminal records, if any, so that only relevant entries are listed.
This allows employees who have a genuine need reject potential candidates on legitimate grounds, while giving people a reasonable chance to start over in case they do something wrong.
[1]: https://www.politiet.no/en/services/police-certificate-of-co...
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/which-jobs-will-come-back-a...
>DOLEAC: So, we found that, on average, across the U.S., in places that ban the box, employment fell by 5 percent for young black men who didn’t have a college degree and by 3 percent for young Hispanic men who didn’t have a college degree. And so the next question is, who are they hiring instead? And we found, on average, the people who benefited were older men of color. So if you’re trying to avoid people who are actively involved in crime, older people are a pretty good bet. Criminal activity tends to decline with age.
>DUBNER: And what about young under-educated white potential employees?
>DOLEAC: For young white men who had the same level of education, we saw employment increase for that group. What seemed to be happening was that employers were substituting from young men of color to young white men.
Utterly ban "have you been arrested".
The highest offense I have been convicted of is: xxxxxx
In special cases I would permit highest offense in certain categories.
If the chance of me doing embezzlement is the same after I come out of prison than if I had never been to prison, what is the basis for caring whether or not someone has been to prison?
This assumes a justice system that works, at least in the sense that if you commit a crime and get prosecuted, the following actions are sufficient to prevent or deter you from doing it again, which given things like plea deals, etc. is not.
If we just want to reduce our justice system to a social credit verifier and background check database maintainer, or if this is really the best that can be dne, fine, let's admit that so we can try to do it a lot more cheaply than what we're doing now.
1) Employment history: Ban putting dates on a resume and in general make it a prohibited question. You worked there X years, not from YYYY to ZZZZ. The current approach is obviously looking for whether you were fired, but ends up tainting you if you're ever laid off in a bad market, or even if you simply chose non-employment activity for some reason.
2) Address likewise should be removed. Phone & e-mail is all they need.
Is the answer to not allow any sort of background checks? I would say no, but it also seems like there is a lot of room to improve our current system and find it in our societal heart to not perpetually punish a person for a past minor offense.
The shift away from unskilled manual labor towards higher-skilled, higher-impact jobs, raises the trust bar, locking out those with criminal records, leaving them few opportunities to re-integrate with the mainstream economy, and an incentive to fall further into the criminal economy.