It should be illegal for companies to advertise themselves as being an equal opportunity employer if they have an employee who is a member of “a protected class” and has been convicted of a crime associated with that class

The “protected class” in question would have to be specifically defined by law, which would be the biggest challenge if this were to be proposed as legislation. There are many protected classes, and intersectional classes if you will. So for instance it would be very hard to define what constitutes a “non-binary” identity, though we could just use the working definition that the Department of Labor uses in their description of what “sex” means.<br><br>Race would be much more cut and dry though, and we already have laws in place that ban discrimination based on race. And if a company advertises itself as being an equal opportunity employer, which is to say they don’t discriminate based on race…<br><br>Then it should be illegal for them to employ somebody who is a member of a protected racial class and has a criminal conviction associated with that class. The perfect example of this being a white person who is a convicted felon due to a racial hate crime.<br><br>It goes dead against the spirit of being an equal opportunity employer to hire somebody like that, and it is a conflict of interest for them to hire somebody who is likely to treat people of “the other races” in the workplace unfairly. It is also a selfish and greedy thing to do, because it poses a potential threat to your other employees.<br><br>And it wastes resources and money to hire somebody like that, and train them, only for it to turn out that they treat other employees unfairly due to their prejudice. As well as the legal backlash of hiring somebody who might harass other employees. Which is a very real risk when you hire somebody who has a criminal history of doing so.