Once shunned, people convicted of felonies find more employers open to hiring them
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But the company had a problem: finding enough workers to fill all the new orders.
That’s where U.S. Rubber’s long practice of hiring former felons paid off as people like Thomas Urioste came into the picture. In March, the 50-year-old Wrightwood man was released from federal prison after serving nearly 10 years. He was living in a halfway house and, like many former prisoners, finding it hard to get a new start.
So when he heard that U.S. Rubber was hiring, he hurried to apply. And instead of being rejected as those with criminal records often are, he got hired practically on the spot.
Six months later, with his salary bumped up to $17 an hour, Urioste can hardly believe how far he’s come. “They took a chance on me, gave me some responsibilities pretty fast. They let me run this [$200,000] machine,” he said last week. “It feels pretty good because they trusted me.”
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In response, a growing number of companies are beginning to tap into a huge, largely ignored labor pool: the roughly 20 million Americans, mostly men and many unemployed, who have felony convictions.
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At Honest Jobs, Blakeman said, he hired seven people this year, most of them with criminal records, including a woman who applied for an executive assistant position that required handling finances. But her past included two fraud charges, he said, so she was instead offered a job working with employment applicants.
“I told her I cannot give you this job in particular because it’s too risky. That’s good business sense. But what happens is, the person with the fraud charge applies for a warehouse job and gets weeded out. That doesn’t make sense,” Blakeman said.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-10-05/labor-ex-felons
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