I think there’s a reasonable middle ground, which is: employers can discriminate based on record only if that crime has a direct relationship to the nature of the employment and the position provides a clear opportunity for abuse in the same fashion as the original crime. Ie people who commit fraud can’t work in financial services, people who hurt children can’t work in education/childcare, people convicted of corruption can’t become cops, etc. But there should be a process, over time, to cleanse even these records (although perhaps in practice there would be carve-outs for particularly heinous offenses...). This doesn’t seem particularly limiting, from my perspective, but protects against the extremes you outlined.
Sure, I kind agree. But- as an employer, am I mandated to hire a pedophile for my software developer job? I just object morally, and the company is my private property. Is this really a good use of state power, to compel me to hire an evil person?
Anyways, it'd be impossible to enforce, because I could just say the pedophile failed my coding test. Even if he sued me, it'd be very unlikely to prove his case, and he's probably starting at a deficit with a court.
The issue is that people here are confusing levels of analysis- 'society' should help ex-offenders find gainful employment, but I am not 'society', I am just one company. Society should also clean up pollution, but that doesn't mean that I'm personally obligated to scrub a Superfund site myself
No one's calling for any mandate, given that the system is currently so stacked against former felons that this worst-case scenario you've posited would require a complete 180 swing into the opposite direction. We're talking about any action that would nudge the status quo, not flip it on its head and introduce dramatic new problems.
> but that doesn't mean that I'm personally obligated to scrub a Superfund site myself
No, but you should probably pay your taxes that go into such efforts, and corporate philanthropy does become a (socially) obligatory activity for companies that reach a certain size and success.
