According to a front-page New York Times article last week, employers are using credit checks to discover the level of personal debt held by job applicants, and sending those who owe considerable amounts of money to the bottom of the applicant list. So people who incurred debts from being jobless won't be able to pay off their debts because they can't get a job to pay them off with!
Digging out of debt keeps getting harder for the unemployed as more companies use detailed credit checks to screen job prospects. ...Once reserved for government jobs or payroll positions that could involve significant sums of money, credit checks are now fast, cheap and used for all manner of work. Employers, often winnowing a big pool of job applicants in days of nearly 10 percent unemployment, view the credit check as a valuable tool for assessing someone's judgment.
But job counselors worry that the practice of shunning those with poor credit may be unfair and trap the unemployed -- who may be battling foreclosure, living off credit cards and confronting personal bankruptcy -- in a financial death spiral: the worse their debts, the harder it is to get a job to pay them off....
The rest of the article is at Another Hurdle for the Jobless: Credit Inquiries, by Jonathan D. Glater - but first, please read on! While these credit checks by employers consign increasing numbers of jobless Americans to continued debt and poverty, being poor in public is increasingly dangerous to their freedom:
It's too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it's almost illegal to be poor. You won't be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you're well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life -- like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. City officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about the ordinances that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the '80s and '90s. "If you're lying on a sidewalk, whether you're homeless or a millionaire, you're in violation of the ordinance," a city attorney in St. Petersburg, Fla., said in June, echoing Anatole France's immortal observation that "the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges."
In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty. So concludes a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which found that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with ticketing and arrests for more "neutral" infractions like jaywalking, littering or carrying an open container of alcohol....
Read the rest: Is It Now a Crime to be Poor? by Barbara Ehrenreich, and add a new crime to the list that starts with DWB (Driving While Black): LWB - Living While Broke.
A national video on a tent city in the Seattle region, Inside a Tent City Near Microsoft, shows a fragile but viable alternative to homelessness in harsh economic times. More on homelessness, etc., is at FreestyleVolunteer.