Ex-convicts find more employers open to hiring them

In the 25 years that U.S. Rubber Recycling in Colton, Calif., has been grinding up old tires to create new products, its sales have never ballooned so fast as during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As countless fitness centers closed, and millions of people began exercising at home, demand for the company’s rubber mats soared.

But the company had a problem: finding enough workers to fill the orders.

That’s where U.S. Rubber’s long practice of hiring former felons paid off, as people like Thomas Urioste came into the picture. In March, the 50-year-old Wrightwood, Calif., man was released from federal prison after serving nearly 10 years. He was living in a halfway house and, like many former prisoners, finding it hard to get a new start.

So when he heard U.S. Rubber was hiring, he hurried to apply. Instead of being rejected as those with criminal records often are, he got hired practically on the spot.

Six months later, with his salary bumped up to $17 an hour, Urioste can hardly believe how far he’s come. “They took a chance on me, gave me some responsibilities pretty fast,” he said last week. “It feels pretty good because they trusted me.”

All across the country, as the economy surges and employers struggle to find workers, former prisoners like Urioste are finding a sliver of a silver lining in the dark cloud of the pandemic.

This summer, U.S. employers reported an unprecedented 10.9 million job openings. That was equal to more than one job for every unemployed person in the country.

In response, a growing number of companies are beginning to tap into a huge, largely ignored labor pool: the roughly 20 million Americans, mostly men and many unemployed, who have felony convictions.

A tiny fraction of businesses, including U.S. Rubber Recycling, have long made a point of hiring exconvicts. And in recent years, some states have sought to remove some of the discrimination against these job candidates by banning employers from directly asking applicants about criminal records.

But the laws have proved easy to get around. Employers now make background checks for criminal records and probe gaps in applicants’ work histories. Once past problems come to light, the door slams shut.

Things tend to get a little easier during times of very low unemployment. What’s different this time is that the nation’s jobless rate is not close to rock bottom; it was 5.2% in August and 4.8% in September.

And yet today’s labor shortages, reflecting both short- and long-term forces, seem to be allowing opportunities for ex-offenders.

Harley Blakeman, chief executive at Honest Jobs, an Ohio-based company that matches employers with people with criminal records, said that in the last few months, seven Fortune 500 companies have signed on as partners, including manufacturer Owens Corning, packaging giant Ball Corp. and the distribution firm Arrow Electronics.

Blakeman said a key challenge is revamping how background checks can disqualify those with convictions without regard to the job. At Honest Jobs, Blakeman said he hired seven people this year, including a woman who applied for an executive assistant position that required handling finances. But her past included two fraud charges, he said, so she was instead offered a job working with employment applicants.

“I told her I cannot give you this job in particular because it’s too risky. That’s good business sense. But what happens is, the person with the fraud charge applies for a warehouse job and gets weeded out. That doesn’t make sense,” Blakeman said.

At U.S. Rubber Recycling, where about half of the company’s 65 employees are exfelons, Chief Executive Jeff Baldassari says the turnover rate for those with convictions is about 25% higher than others without such criminal records.

“They stack up very well when it comes to skills,” he said. “Where the gap lies is the attrition rate. The challenge they have with emotional stability in their lives is critical.

“Many don’t have life-skill lessons — how you deal with relationships. You can’t control their family life and who they hang out with,” he said.

Baldassari tries to use the eight hours these employees work for him to provide a lot of training. The company works closely with staff at halfway houses, and he has hired a psychiatric rehabilitation counselor.

Baldassari says his hiring practices have been good for his business, especially now when the competition for labor is stiff