Pol Wants to Ban Discrimination Against Jobless

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said Sunday that he plans to lobby the City Council and state Legislature to ban the practice of requiring that a job applicant at a hiring company already have a job, and in some cases, a good credit score.

"It's a shameful and discriminatory practice that must be banned," said Stringer, according to the Daily News.

That the job-seeker must already have a position, and sometimes also a good credit score, has been an increasingly common application requirement, according to the Daily News. With New York State’s unemployment rate at 8% in September (and ), these practices have sometimes made getting a paycheck harder for the city’s jobless.

George Wentworth, a senior staff attorney with the National Employment Law Project, was quoted in the Daily News saying that the screenings for employment status and good credit history are “lazy human resource practice.”

According to the Times, President Obama has included a proposal in his job’s bill to ban employment status discrimination, calling it an “an unlawful employment practice” to not hire a person simply “because of the individual’s status as unemployed.”

The proposal has received criticism from Republicans like Representative Louie Gohmert, of Texas, who said the proposal would deem the unemployed a “protected class," according to the Times.