As ‘Ban the Box’ Spreads, Private Employers Still Have Questions<br />But big cities including Philadelphia and Los Angeles now have strict ordinances for private businesses,<br />and last month, California became the 10th state to make banning the box, and in some cases banning any discussion of past criminal infractions during job interviews, a requirement for private businesses, too.<br />“I did an informal survey of employers in the Boston area — Boston was one of the earliest cities to ban the box —<br />and I saw how unfamiliar hiring managers were with ban the box,” said Devah Pager, a professor of sociology and public policy at Harvard who studies racial discrimination in employment<br />The movement’s centerpiece, “ban the box,” meaning the box on job applications<br />that asks whether a candidate has a criminal history, already has a legal foothold in 29 states and 150 counties or cities.<br />The one enacted in Los Angeles last year, for example, requires employers to notify applicants in writing<br />that a job offer has been withdrawn because of their criminal history, and to include in that notification why the criminal history is relevant to the position.<br />What have you done since you were incarcerated?”<br />Among the companies that Dave’s Killer Bread Foundation works with is Checkr, a 2015 San Francisco start-up<br />that does background checks for businesses including Uber and GrubHub.<br />She is the executive director of the Dave’s Killer Bread Foundation, which spreads the gospel about second-chance employment as a platform for Dave’s Killer Bread, an Oregon company<br />that produces one of the country’s top-selling sliced organic breads.
