As ‘Ban the Box’ Spreads, Private Employers Still Have Questions
But big cities including Philadelphia and Los Angeles now have strict ordinances for private businesses,
and last month, California became the 10th state to make banning the box, and in some cases banning any discussion of past criminal infractions during job interviews, a requirement for private businesses, too.
“I did an informal survey of employers in the Boston area — Boston was one of the earliest cities to ban the box —
and I saw how unfamiliar hiring managers were with ban the box,” said Devah Pager, a professor of sociology and public policy at Harvard who studies racial discrimination in employment
The movement’s centerpiece, “ban the box,” meaning the box on job applications
that asks whether a candidate has a criminal history, already has a legal foothold in 29 states and 150 counties or cities.
The one enacted in Los Angeles last year, for example, requires employers to notify applicants in writing
that a job offer has been withdrawn because of their criminal history, and to include in that notification why the criminal history is relevant to the position.
What have you done since you were incarcerated?”
Among the companies that Dave’s Killer Bread Foundation works with is Checkr, a 2015 San Francisco start-up
that does background checks for businesses including Uber and GrubHub.
She is the executive director of the Dave’s Killer Bread Foundation, which spreads the gospel about second-chance employment as a platform for Dave’s Killer Bread, an Oregon company
that produces one of the country’s top-selling sliced organic breads.