Who are you?

If you are a small business owner, or the person who interviews people for a medium or large business, they that is the question you repeatedly try to find an answer to throughout your hiring process.

Can this person read a clock? Are they lying about their previous experience? Or their educational history? Do they have a harassment history? Or a criminal history?

Every single employee that a business has to hire carries with them a certain amount of liability to the company. Even the best of the best employees.

However, in most cases, their liabilities are far outweighed by the benefits they bring to the company.

Some folks in the Obamanation want to make getting the liabilities answer even more difficult than it currently is.

Companies using criminal records or bad credit reports to screen out job applicants might run afoul of anti-discrimination laws as the government steps up scrutiny of hiring policies that can hurt blacks and Hispanics.

A blanket refusal to hire workers based on criminal records or credit problems can be illegal if it has a disparate impact on racial minorities, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The agency enforces the nation’s employment discrimination laws.

“Our sense is that the problem is snowballing because of the technology allowing these checks to be done with a fair amount of ease,” said Carol Miaskoff, assistant legal counsel at the EEOC.

With millions of adults having criminal records — anything from underage drinking to homicide — a growing number of job seekers are having a rough time finding work. And more companies are trying to screen out people with bankruptcies, court judgments or other credit problems just as those numbers have swollen during the recession.

Just ask Adrienne Hudson, a single mother who says she was fired from her new job as a bus driver at First Transit in Oakland, Calif., when the company found out she had been convicted seven years earlier for welfare fraud.

Hudson, 44, is fighting back with a lawsuit alleging the company’s hiring practice discriminates against black and Latino job seekers, who have arrest and conviction rates far greater than whites.

Then the Latino and Black communities and families need to instill in their children and young adults that getting rolled up by Johnny Law has lifelong punishments beyond just jail time and to keep their fucking noses clean.

One of the larger parts of First Transit’s operation are contracts with school districts. She was very likely a school bus driver. Do you want criminals driving your children to school? Probably not. And neither do the school districts who contract with First Transit.

Tough shit, lady. Maybe if you had thought about how stealing tax dollars for your personal benefit might hinder future job searches before committing the crime, you wouldn’t be where you are now. You made your bed, now sleep in it.

My employer has taken to using a temp agency to find a few of my new coworkers. They put them to work doing menial data entry jobs to see if they can show up on time and work within our rather outdated system for a few months before actually hiring them. So far, we’ve avoided a semi-professional forger, a drunk, and a guy who couldn’t find his very large ass if I twisted his head around and told him it was what my foot was sticking out of.

In 2000, I went through a previous employment check, a criminal background check, a credit check and more than a couple tests. Miraculously, though I think it is more that I’m competent and didn’t lie to my prospective employer, I was hired and have been their over a decade.

Something in that formula worked.