Who’s riding that snowplow?
As we’ve had occasion to mention before (Sept. 24, 1999; Reason, Dec. 1999; Jan. 17, 2001), the supposedly progressive position in employment law has for many years been that employers should not be at liberty to take into account job applicants’ criminal records; the only conceded exception comes when a past conviction is closely related to a high risk of serious re-offense, as when an embezzler released from prison seeks a job handling money at a bank. Very much in the spirit of that progressive stance, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino “authorized a new policy two years ago eliminating questions about criminal convictions on all city job applications and dispensing with criminal background checks for applicants for jobs that don’t involve working with children or the elderly or accessing residents’ homes.” How well did this new policy work out, you ask? Well, when Joseph M. MacDonald, a 26-year-old resident of South Boston, applied for a job with the Boston public works department, city
