[lbo-talk] Blacklist or bad economy?

[kelley at pulpculture.org]

At 05:02 PM 3/29/2004, jeffrey fisher wrote:
>On Monday, March 29, 2004, at 04:57 PM, Chuck0 wrote:
>
>>I suspect that the thing that tripped me up for this most recent job was 
>>the fact that this company requested my permission to do a credit check. 
>>My credit sucks, given what I've gone through as a result of being 
>>unemployed. But isn't this just a form of economic blacklisting? How is 
>>my credit report relevant to my abilities to do work for a company?
>i'm curious for responses to this. i've seen a lot of stuff recently about 
>prospective employers doing credit checks on prospective employees, the 
>logic being that it's a measure of ir/responsibility. of course, that 
>doesn't really take into account some of the things that can happen to you 
>when you lose your job and go unemployed for a long time. insurance 
>companies do credit checks for the same reason -- it's not just whether or 
>not you'll pay; they check your credit to establish rates.
>
>just another reason to keep yourself out of credit card debt when you're 
>young. when you're getting older it's awful hard to fix, especially in a 
>downturn.

the reason: security. if you're applying for a tech job, they want to make 
sure you don't owe a lot of money or have a history of owing a lot of money 
or have a history of owing a lot and then quickly paying it off....

if you fit the profile, you're a bad risk because you may be more likely to 
rip off the company using you're hax0r sk1llz so you can pay off your debts 
or finance your desire for champagne on a (hee) Genny Screamer budget.

See, all the hoohah about hax0rs is just like all the hoohah about 
shoplifting. Companies lose more to insider-based crime than ev1l hax0rz or 
shoplifters. But, they don't want to deal with that directly, so they 
*pretend* that they're worried about outsider crime to get the monies to 
deal with insider crime. Not to mention scare the willies out of the 
insiders who might be thinking about ripping them off.

i just spent a year and a half doing on an IT security--Physical security 
integration project for a BigA$$ Bank of 'Murika. It was rilly rilly funny 
to see the two cultures collide. IT security people haven't really thought 
of themselves as Private Sizzlean -- until 9/11, Enron, HIPAA, and 
Sarbanes-Oxley have forced the two departments to integrate.

As my wise bud Joe(Budge No Onan) said to me long ago when I got into this 
business, "It's all about control, girlfriend; it's all about control"

Kelley