Reply #22: I wish more people would refuse. [View All]

[Gormy Cuss]

I do. I have watched the erosion of privacy in the workplace over the course of my career. It isn't a good trend. Employers have become accustomed to asking and getting far more information on their employees with little regulation.

It's against Federal law to ask me for my age(other than to ascertain that I am at least age 18)or to ask for marital status or whether I have children prior to hiring but through the largely unregulated background checks potential employers can develop proxies for these based on credit report data and other background checks. Potential employers can then exclude applicants based on illegal grounds but couch the refusal in other terms. Such exclusions have always happened but applicants had ways to short circuit these (shortening work history and omitting graduation years were common ways to obscure age.) Now such attempts to level the playing field would be viewed as lying.

Employers hold all the cards. Federal intervention in the past has made the workplace snap back to a reasonable position. For example, the Americans with Disabilities Act was supposed to be the ruin of business if you listened to their lobbies but the reality is that it works. We need Federal privacy legislation to effect similar changes in the workplace on this issue.