City Council Prohibits Popular Means Of Candidate Assessment
The New York City Council overwhelmingly voted to ban most employers from performing credit checks for job applicants. Thursday’s 47-3 vote will make New York City the country’s 12th municipality to implement a ban, and Councilman Brad Lander (D-Brooklyn) heralded it as “the strongest bill of its type by far.” Labor unions, left-leaning activist groups, and other backers of the measure celebrated it as a win for the city’s working poor. The measure contains a number of exceptions that allow the continued use of credit checks for jobs involving law enforcement, national security, and the management of third-party assets in excess of $10,000. Unlike most of the similar bills passed by ten states and the city of Chicago, the new ban does not offer blanket exemptions to banks and other financial institutions. Queens Councilman Mark S. Weprin defied most of his fellow Democrats to vote against the measure, saying the exceptions were “still not good enough,” and that the law was “a little bit too much of the nanny state.” Conversely, Councilman Vincent M. Ignizio, a Staten Island Republican, voted in support, saying the bill would allow applicants to “prove their worth based on their talent, not on past mistakes or a credit score that could be low for many reasons.”
What Happens Next
Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to sign the measure into law, as he has long supported a ban on applicant credit checks.
What This Means For Small Business
While many employers do not rely on credit checks, the measure restricts the flexibility that small businesses use for assessing job candidate. The narrowed list of exceptions means that the measure will apply to industries that commonly use such checks due to their employees’ ready access to company money.
Additional Reading
News outlets covering the Council vote include the New York Times and Capital New York (NY).
