Quote of the Day

"How do you get out from under it? You can't re-establish your credit if you can't get a job, and you can't get a job if you've got bad credit."—Matthew W. Finkin, a law professor at the University of Illinois, on the increasingly popular habit of companies weeding out potential employees by looking at their credit reports.

A human resources director quoted in the article justifies the trend by saying: "If I see too many negative things coming up on a credit check, it's one of those things that raises a flag with me. If you see a history of bad decision-making, you don't want that decision-making overflowing into your organization."

Leaving aside the questionable logic that being bad with your money will make you bad at your job, the rationale would still only be reasonable if bad credit were always a result of bad decision-making. Which, y'know, it isn't. Bad credit can be the result of many things having nothing whatsoever to do with bad decisions, like getting laid off, or a family illness yielding exorbitant medical bills, or identity theft.

And I guess I don't need to point out to this crowd that the practice will disproportionately exclude minority applicants, who are more likely to have bad credit as a result of the predatory lending practices that flourish in minority communities, and/or female applicants, who are typically left with comparatively smaller savings after layoffs, thanks to the wage gap to which they're still subjected.