The Booming Economy

Jobless benefit rolls have hit an all-time high:

The Labor Department reported that, for the second week in a row, more than 600,000 US workers filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week, bringing the total number of continuing claims—those drawn by workers collecting benefits for more than one week—to a record high of 4,810,000. Continuing claims have risen by more than 2 million over the past year, reaching the highest level since the government began keeping track in 1967.

Initial claims for jobless benefits totaled 623,000, slightly less than the upwardly revised figure of 631,000 for the previous week. The latest weekly figure was significantly higher than analysts’ expectations of 610,000 claims. New jobless claims have nearly doubled from a year ago.

The four-week average of claims jumped 24,000 to 607,500, the highest total since November 1982, when the US was in its most severe recession since the 1930s.

An additional 1.5 million people are receiving benefits under an extended unemployment compensation program approved by Congress last year, bringing the total number of jobless pay recipients to 6.3 million.

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It's a vicious circle: Before you can get many jobs, especially those in the finance industry, they require a credit check, and of course if you have had financial problems, your credit is down the tubes. But if you want to get out of debt, you need a job, and yet employers can deny you the right to be employed and get out of it.

It's truly sick and twisted, just like questions asking whether or not you have ever been fired from a job, but in the latter case, applicants do not have to disclose it and there is no way for employers to find out without the previous employer risking a major civil rights/wrong termination lawsuit. But with credit checks, it's very easy for employers to do.

The real reason they do these checks is simply to screen applicants out. It has NOTHING to do with "security."

It should be made illegal for companies to do credit checks; it is supposedly illegal to discriminate against workers because they have filed for bankruptcy. The law needs to be expanded to ban credit checks.
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