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Sandy Noble will tell you she has a solid work history.
When she graduated from high school, she went right out and found a job. Eventually she was hired on at the old McJon Camera, in time moving into a management position at the company’s photo-finishing operation on Wells Street.
That business was eventually taken over by Fuji and then sold to another company. Through it all, Noble worked there, being paid for 45 hours a week although she sometimes had to put in as many as 60 hours a week, especially during the holiday season, when film came flooding in to be developed.
It was a good job, Noble says. That’s where she met her husband, a truck driver. And the job lasted 30 years.
In the spring of 2005, though, the business closed, and Noble found herself out of work. It came at a bad time. She had leased a Dodge Durango four years earlier, and, unable to find work, she found herself unable to make the $605-a-month lease payment.
So she gave the Durango back.
Walking away from a lease isn’t that easy. The bank demanded $18,000 for breaking the lease and sued her.
So Noble filed for bankruptcy. She’s not proud of it, she says, but she had no choice.
Noble did find another job, but she was later laid off from that position. Today, she’s still without a job, and with unemployment benefits long ago exhausted, she has no income. Her husband was laid off last spring from his job at a dairy farm, a position she thought would be secure because people still need milk. Now his unemployment benefits are nearly exhausted, too.
Still, she looks for jobs. She’s applied for dozens of positions in the past few months but has had no luck except for one offer to sell vacuum cleaners.
She was told to submit a list of 10 friends and family members as potential customers. She turned it down.
One could write up Noble’s job-search troubles to the hard times, but an e-mail she got from an online job-search site makes her wonder whether that’s the real answer.
The message said that she should check her credit report to make sure it is accurate because a poor credit score could prevent her from getting a job.
To her, it’s just not right. Yes, she has that bankruptcy on her record. She’s not proud of it, but it happened because the company she worked for went out of business and she lost her job.
Now she can’t get a job, possibly because she has a poor credit score, but that happened because she lost her job. It makes no sense to her.
Everyone is reviewing people’s credit scores, too.
“They want to know if you’ve had any government help or food stamps,” Noble says. “Even a gas station had me sign a form saying they could do a background and credit check.”
The background check is one thing, Noble says. Whether a person has a criminal history is a relevant concern, particularly if that person is going to be handling money. In her 30 years at McJon she handled a lot of money and never stole a cent, Noble says.
“It’s really depressing,” Noble says. “Just before (she got the e-mail), I got two turndowns.” She wonders what role her bankruptcy played in that.
Authorities will tell you that credit checks are routine these days and that whether a person has good credit – whether he pays his bills – is an indication of how responsible and reliable he is.
With unemployment at 10 percent and with foreclosures still exploding, though, it makes one wonder how many people who have run into financial difficulties are in danger of being labeled bad job risks, all because they’ve lost their jobs and fallen on hard times.
