Another year, another failed Democrat attempt at passing the ill-conceived “ban the box” legislation. This bill sought to force Colorado employers to leave any field that would indicate a felony conviction off job applications. This week it failed to get out of the Senate State, Veterans, and Military Affairs Committee on a party line vote.
Dubbed the “chance to compete” bill by Senate Minority Leader Lucia Guzman, the measure put convicts ahead of our businesses. Democrats are either completely clueless about the time and effort that goes into the recruiting and hiring process at private sector businesses, or they simply do not care.
If a business does not want to hire felons, that is its absolute right and no trickery in the application process is going to circumvent that. The notion that a forced omission of this element of a job application will do anything other than waste both the applicant’s and the employer’s time betrays how drastically detached Democrat policymaking is from the fundamental risk-reward tightrope that businesses walk every day.
A small business owner has the absolute right to protect his or her business, and there are few things more important than the people hired to interact with customers or produce the goods and services that the business takes to market. Ultimately, this attempt is little more than symbolism over substance, much like other wastes of our time like the “rolling coal” bill and the forced paid leave measure.