President Obama Still Needs to #BanTheBox for Federal Contractors

In November 2015 in Newark, N.J., President Obama announced a series of measures designed to help the re-entry process for formerly incarcerated people. One of the measures, which will open up federal employment opportunities, involved Obama directing the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to explore modifying its rules to delay criminal history inquiries until later in the hiring process. Obama also called on Congress to help by passing the Fair Chance Act.

“We agree with the President that Congress must pass bipartisan legislation that would ban the box for federal hiring and contractors. Absent that, the President must issue a strong, comprehensive executive order that will ban the box and give millions of Americans a fair chance at employment with the federal government,” said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference, back in November. “Today’s announcement shows that, while the President is with us in spirit, his administration is not yet ready to make an executive order a reality. Congress must act, and if it fails to do so, we urge the administration to issue an executive order.”

The Fair Chance Act, introduced in September by Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, is bipartisan in both chambers of Congress. In the Senate, the bill actually passed unanimously out of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in October.

But nearly six months after Obama called on Congress to act, they’ve done nothing.

That’s why 136 organizations and 64 individuals today sent a letter to President Obama asking him to extend ‘ban the box’ and fair chance hiring to the nation’s government contractors by immediately issuing an executive order.

Why today?

Last month in a blog post, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch designated this week (April 24–30) as National Reentry Week, saying that “Addressing the challenges that formerly incarcerated individuals experience is a vital and pressing task.”

Lynch is right: It is pressing.

In fact, 23 states, 100 cities and counties, and major employers — like Target, Starbucks, and Koch Industries — already have these policies in place. And seven of those states (Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, and Rhode Island) have policies in place for private sector employers. As today’s letter to Obama says, “abundant precedent exists to help pave the way for a federal executive order regulating the nation’s private contractors.”

Seventy million people in the United States have a criminal record, and federal contractors employ nearly a quarter of the nation’s workforce. Tell President Obama now: Ban the box.

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