http://www.zdnet.com/...Senator Blumenthal (D, CT) drafts a bill prohibiting employers from asking applicants for their Facebook password.
And thank goodness Senator Blumenthal has done so.
When I first heard about this new "hiring practice", a few days ago, I became livid, once again, at the sheer audacity and OVEREACH of Corporate America. With true unemployment hovering at 16% (including all the 99ers, of which I am one, and all the people who have stopped looking, and all the people who are grossly under-employed, of which I am also), they're now putting up yet another barrier to keep people from getting hired. And for what....because THEY don't like what THEY DEEM is inappropriate content posted by a prospective employee???? You might as well attach a copy of the key to your front door to your application.
It was outrageous enough that employers were conducting credit checks, at alarming rates, AFTER the crash of 2008. Finally, after about two years of this insane practice, a small handful of U.S. Reps and Senators got the message, and started drafting some legislation to prevent this from occurring. But of course, in a Congress that has a Republican-controlled House and not a 60-Democratic-vote majority, it all just sat there, for about three years. At least some individual states are wising up to the insanity of this practice, and have drafted their own legislation to prevent employers from running such checks. But I don't know how well they've been enacted. In my own state of IL, where this practice is supposed to have been rendered illegal, I still see many, many applications, as I apply online, that say that the IL-based company will run credit checks. Does this mean that I have to waste precious time outing each and every one of these companies to my Attorney General? It already takes, in many instances, forever to finish just one application....typing, typing, typing the name of every damn company at which you've ever worked, employment dates, responsibilities, titles, company names, supervisors' names, their titles, their phone numbers, all your education, your skills, questions pertaining to your ability in meeting key requirements of the job to which you're applying, your EEOC information, and then, of course, tailoring your resume each and every time, for each position, and writing a targeted cover letter...and finishing up by uploading both of those documents. And now, I have to keep a running tally of every company illegally asking me for this information, every day, and contact Attorney General Lisa Madigan to tell her that ABC Company is asking for something that is illegal on their applications? I'll do it...but once again, the onus is on the victim (the job seeker) to reverse quite an ugly trend in Corporate America.
And now, the powers that be of Corporate America got it in their fascist minds to start a new trend by sucking a little more blood out of their future employees by asking for their Facebook password. Asking a stranger for their PASSWORD to anything is a little egregious, don't you think??? This is a Saturday Night Live skit...playing out in real live theatre of the absurd. How much more do we minions have to take? Well, the more people just quietly take it, the more they'll throw our way, no doubt. I've been out of a full-time permanent job for so long, I'm getting angrier and angrier by the minute. I have to act very enthusiastically about every company I visit (and there aren't many positions, at my level, for which I've had interviews), of course, but deep down, after listening to and reading the news, and watching Congress on C-SPAN "work" (e.g., stall, roadblock, and obstruct) for too long, my ire has risen to the point of having absolutely no respect for and certainly no trust in any company, ever, ever again. So, I hide my ire, very, very well (acting classes in the past have helped me feign high enthusiasm for, for example, marketing a means of artificial intelligence which creates written stories out of data...the business of one company at which I recently interviewed). But out here, reading and listening about the changes in our national landscape that take place every day at the hands of Corporate America, deleteriously affecting the lives of every citizen, every employee, and certainly every already-defeated, out-of-work prospective employee, I get very, very depressed. There really is no end in sight. Congresses at the national and state levels have to waste precious time on writing legislation to combat these types of fascist practices because we have too many Republicans in power who believe in laissez-faire to the nth degree. There are too many Republicans who believe that no corporation can do any wrong...until, maybe, I don't know, there is a gigantic oil spill in the Gulf. So corporations' unfettered, incessant invasion of our private lives, which I believe is in major part due to the poor example set by the Patriot Act, is left completely unchecked for too long. I wonder how many people have already been denied a job because they relinquished their FB password, the employer used it, didn't like what they saw, and decided to pass on the candidate. Or, how many candidates jumped out of the running instantly for refusing to relinquish the ever-private FB password?
People have enough to worry about without having to worry if their prospective employer doesn't like what their job applicants happen to "Like" across a myriad of usually mundane topics, such as products they like (oooo, you might like a competitor's products....bad!), POLITICS (you're denied a job if you're a Democrat, unless you're applying to work for Obama), movies....and whatever else people talk about on Facebook.
P.S., I have already largely protected myself from employers invading my political and other views by creating a completely separate FB account, under an alias. But I still worry that they might hold the few innocuous comments and "Likes" I've posted on my real FB account against me, and find yet another untold reason for which not to hire me. Being in marketing, I have to show that I actually USE social media sites, and like using them. So, I post, in my name, from time to time. This will be hard for me to do, out of sheer principle, if Congress doesn't enact something very quickly regarding the illegality of companies to invade yet another area of our privacy.