There are excellent recommendations for further federal action in a new report from the National Employment Law Project, a research and advocacy group. It urges Mr. Obama to issue a presidential memo directing federal agencies to rewrite confusing, nontransparent or flatly prejudicial hiring guidelines that unjustifiably shut out those with convictions. It also calls for an executive order that would require federal contractors to postpone criminal background checks until a conditional job offer was made and to use the considerations laid out in the E.E.O.C. ruling. These measures would bring the federal government much closer to becoming “a model employer.”
Read the full editorial in The New York Times.
