Sex-Abuse Report
Governments recently adopting such programs include Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, which moved last year to continuous screening of its employees after previously doing checks every two years. The Chicago public school system was stung last month by a Chicago Tribune expose on sexual abuse in schools and is responding by rechecking the backgrounds of 45,000 employees and thousands more vendors and volunteers by this fall. Periodic screening will follow, spokeswoman Emily Bolton said,
The Chicago Teachers Union supports the idea, but is concerned that administrators could use the results to punish members who might show up in a background check for their involvement in things like civil protests, said union spokesman Chris Geovanis.
Employment lawyers and worker advocates are urging caution because of the inevitability that erroneous information will show up in periodic checks, and stressing that previous crimes don’t always predict future bad behavior.
“If you’re doing continuous monitoring and you’re putting all this information in the hands of some HR person who doesn’t know where it came from, hasn’t been trained on what it means, they just see some scary words on a piece of paper that can have life-altering consequences for people for no good reason,” said E. Michelle Drake, who heads up the credit reporting and background checks practice at the law firm Berger & Montague PC.
The Fair Credit Reporting Act, which governs how and when companies conduct background checks, requires employee consent, and if a company plans to discipline or fire a worker based on the findings, it must give the employee an opportunity to review the data for errors or explain any mitigating circumstances.
“There is a bit of a catch-22,” said Jonathan Segal, managing principal at the Duane Morris Institute, the education unit of the employment group that provides training to company human resources executives and in-house counsel.
‘Security Theater’
“There are legal risks in doing background checks, but there also can be negligent-hire risks in not doing them," he said. "So what most employers do is they look at a balance, and they need to figure out where the balance is. Theoretically you could be checking every employee every week, and still miss something.”
Uber is planning to reveal its process for conducting continuous background checks on its drivers, one of the first large companies to go public with such monitoring plans. Uber particularly is under fire from local governments to better keep tabs on drivers’ criminal records and traffic infractions following accounts of sexual misconduct. The new technology it’s investing in will tap data sources covering most new criminal offenses and send Uber a notification when a driver is involved.
“Our new leadership has made safety the top priority at Uber and we are committed to ensuring drivers continue to meet our safety standards on an ongoing basis,” Uber spokeswoman Brooke Anderson said in an email.
Thirty-one states have adopted some form of “ban-the-box” policies, which prohibit government agencies from asking about criminal records on an initial job application, according to the National Employment Law Project. In 11 of those states the laws are even stricter, also barring private employers from asking about it until later in the hiring process, in the hope that candidates will get a fair chance at a job.