How Elizabeth Warren Is Trying to Keep Employers from Digging into Your Credit Score

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http://www.alternet.org/how-elizabeth-warren-trying-keep-employers-digging-your-credit-score

Decrying a “rigged” system and the long overhang of the 2008 crash, Sen. Elizabeth Warren Tuesday introduced a bill to ban mandatory pre-employment credit checks. “This act is about basic fairness,” the Massachusetts Democrat told reporters on a Tuesday call. “Let people compete for jobs on the merits, not whether they already have enough money to pay all their bills.”

Warren’s bill, the Equal Employment for All Act, would make it illegal for employers (outside national security jobs) to require that job applicants disclose their credit history. Warren’s Senate bill is co-sponsored by six Senate Democrats, including Vermont’s Patrick Leahy and Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, and is based on a bill Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., introduced in 2011 in the House. “A credit score,” Warren argued, “should not be used as a way to cut people out of the job market.”

“This is one more way the game is rigged,” said Warren. Whereas rich people “don’t see their credit scores go down 150 points” when they get divorced, Warren argued that “For millions of working families, a hard, personal blow translates into a hard financial blow that will show up for years in a credit report.” In a 2012 California Law Review essay, the University of Texas’ Angela Littwin wrote that “As consumer lending has permeated American life, violent partners have begun using debt as a means of exercising abusive control, making the consumer credit system an unknowing party to domestic violence.”

“Pre-employment credit checks disproportionately hit minorities, students and seniors,” Warren told Salon, “because these groups are likely to be hit hard by bad credit scores.” She told reporters that her bill addresses “a problem that’s become even more acute in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis,” where many “were hit really hard financially, and now they’ve got credit scores that, the bad information will persist for seven years, or in some cases longer.”