"if your chances at a career are gated behind criminal background checks that you're destined to fail"
That's a great point that I haven't seen discussed in the media. When I was young, only "Fortune 500" type companies could afford background checks, so you had a fighting chance at getting a decent job.
Now, anybody can buy a instant background check online, and you can get not just felony data, but misdemeanor data, and even "just arrests, not convictions". And it's dirt cheap to do so. So, job prospects are dim, and even simple stuff like renting an apartment is difficult as well.
I'm sure there's more in play, but the concept of "At Will Employment" we have in the US creates an environment where only very specifically legally defined discrimination counts as such (race, gender, etc). Outside of that you can fire, or not hire, anyone, for any arbitrary reason you want...even for "no reason given".
So in the US there are rules around court data being public so companies scoop up that data and basically package it as a background check. This data is also enriched with voting data which is also public in most states which includes the people living in your home and other info. The company ADP which deals with paychecks also sells your income information to third parties so someone running a basic background check can actually know where you live, who you live with and how much you make.
Luckily the french did give us a tool to fight against this bullshit, it is called the guillotine?
Neither of those things need to be "done by the government". Unionization covers "protection of the job", and mutual aid covers "social protection".
Though yes, if the state is to exist, the least it should be doing is providing for its people - in my opinion via UBI + single-payer healthcare at minimum.
Socialism as a concept is super wide. Many Western European countries are socialist democracies (France, Sweden, ...) and proud of it. We actually like what we have (but we always protest anyway).
It seems to be the same in Australia from what I can see. We have "police checks" where the police certify that you have not been involved in any crime specific to the job you apply for. So if you have committed fraud, you could not get a job at a bank. And if you are a sex offender, you could not get a job with kids. But as far as I know, a fraud can get a job at a school and a sex offender can get a job at a bank and the employer would not know anything.
What makes this potentially complicated in the US is each state being a different jurisdiction. While states aren't really anything like "countries" in the European statehood sense of the word, they keep separate records by design, and there are often no interoperable systems for exchanging data. This is why there is no "USA marriage certificate" in the US, there's simply no nation wide record of marriages.
I'd guess the industry built around background checks and the like is partially a response to this. There isn't a national registry of crimes, at least not all kinds, so you could game the Australian system by just crossing state borders. Hence companies selling collections of people's (technically) public record. A solution may be to just create more national registries, but this seems antithetical to the US's idea of statehood. Maybe it'd be for the best, though...
It seems to be that the US ends up with the worst of both systems. States are not separate countries so they can not deny access like another country would deny a rapist from immigrating but they are also not unified so they can't take any collective action.
Seems to be the core of the covid situation too. There is no unified plan and guidance but states doing well can't shut borders to continue doing well.
> There is no unified plan and guidance but states doing well can't shut borders to continue doing well.
Can't or won't? If California can get away with its agricultural checkpoints without running afoul of e.g. the Commerce Clause, then it seems like restricting interstate border crossings is at least hypothetically possible.
In practice, it's pretty trivial to bypass those checkpoints if you really want to smuggle produce into the state (e.g. the I-80 checkpoint, where you can take the Hirschdale Road exit and follow Glenshire Drive to 287, then get right back on I-80). I highly doubt COVID checkpoints would be any harder to bypass.
That's a great point that I haven't seen discussed in the media. When I was young, only "Fortune 500" type companies could afford background checks, so you had a fighting chance at getting a decent job.
Now, anybody can buy a instant background check online, and you can get not just felony data, but misdemeanor data, and even "just arrests, not convictions". And it's dirt cheap to do so. So, job prospects are dim, and even simple stuff like renting an apartment is difficult as well.