Ford driving hard for jobs bill

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

Life is full of irony.

Back in 2007, when Rod Blagojevich was our governor, the Illinois General Assembly sent him a bill that he promptly vetoed.

Today, as a convicted felon, he arguably could use it.

You never read about this particular veto. It didn’t hit the evening news. It just wasn’t the kind of item that could compete with a flood of other, sexier stories.

But state Rep. LaShawn Ford, a Democrat from the West Side of Chicago, was its sponsor and worked it hard. He managed to win over a narrow and reluctant majority of his colleagues to vote for it.

It was, to be sure, a different kind of jobs bill. One aimed at helping ex-offenders.

Called “Ban the Box,” it would eliminate the check-off box on employment applications that job seekers are told to mark if they ever have been convicted of crime.

Ford’s aim, and the aim of nine other states that already have passed this law, is not to allow a job seeker to deceive an employer on an application, but to allow the jobseeker to get to the next level — the interview phase — before having to reveal that information.

“Studies have shown . . . that ex-offenders stand a much better chance of getting hired if they reach that stage, when they can explain their past problems with the law in person,” reports Kenneth J. Cooper, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who writes about criminal justice.

Important limitations are built into Ford’s bill, which he was pushing again this week: It applies only to state jobs, excluding law enforcement jobs, and only to ex-offenders who have committed non-violent crimes.

“If the state doesn’t take lead on this, who will?” asked Ford on Tuesday as we stood under the dome of the state Capitol.

In an e-mail appeal to his colleagues a few days earlier, Ford wrote, “I am hoping the bill will pass, but there is push-back from other members and state agencies. Funny story: I pass this bill with just the 60 required votes needed in house in 2007, and the Senate did as well, but Blago vetoes the bill!!! Guess who needs the policy change now!”

State Sen. John Millner, a former Elmhurst police chief, is convinced Ford’s bill may do more harm than good.

“If we take the box away and the person is accepted . . . but had been convicted of a series of thefts,” he asks, “why give them false hope when you’d never hire them with this kind of criminal history?”

At his inauguration on Monday, Blagojevich’s successor, Gov. Quinn, called jobs “our foremost mission . . . the No. 1 civil right . . . best way to fight crime, to fight poverty, to keep families together. A J-O-B.”

But will Ford’s jobs bill pass?

As I began writing this column Tuesday afternoon in Springfield, the Illinois Senate and House were engaged in debates on some momentous issues.

Sen. Kwame Raoul had just finished an impassioned plea to abolish the death penalty and — with one vote to spare — he ultimately was victorious. Down in the committee rooms, the debate was fierce over whether to raise the state income tax.

All of this is important. In some cases, urgent.

But there are millions of forgotten people in this state. Some of them have committed crimes, done their time, and need some chance, some way, to begin again.

As deadline approached for me Tuesday night, Ford looked like he had the votes to get his bill passed, having succeeded in making the point that if we don’t help ex-offenders we only hurt ourselves.