Workers With Dark Pasts Find Sunny Days

Steal the copy machine? Grope a subordinate? Point a loaded Glock at the sweaty brow of your immediate supervisor?

Maybe you just bungled the big account. Maybe it was all just a terrible misunderstanding, but you had to hit the street anyway, stuck with a stigma and forced to convince potential employers that your past won’t be prologue.

“It’s haunting me,” said Steven Laros, a Pennsylvania truck driver who was dismissed after failing a drug test, then arrested after he was accused of threatening to shoot some supervisors.

“Probably the most horrible experience of my life,” said Jerold MacKenzie, a former Miller Brewing Co. executive in Milwaukee who was let go after he told a female co-worker about a suggestive episode of “Seinfeld.”

Yet employment purgatory has become a less permanent place than it used to be. With companies having a tough time finding new workers, labor experts say this has become the era of the second chance, the comeback. In the land of 4.5% unemployment, at a time when corporations are dangling free BMWs in front of hot prospects, people with a past are finding it easier to burst from the burial ground of blown careers.

Though some large companies insist they haven’t downsized their hiring standards, headhunters say the market in general is indeed far more forgiving, especially if workers with a calamity-filled curriculum vitae are willing to settle for less. Particularly in the technology sector, the amount of baggage someone can drag into a new job these days is considerable.

“Anything short of murder,” said Richard Meissner, head of permanent recruiting at United Staffing Systems, a Manhattan firm that specializes in high-tech staffing. “And even then, I have candidates who have manslaughter charges against them. I have them out working.”

The reason? The deeper employers dip into the shrinking prospect pool, the more polluted it seems, according to employee background firms.

“Employers are getting to the point that if they are breathing, they will hire them,” said Barry Nadell, president of Infolink Screening Services in Encino, which runs background checks for companies like the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Los Angeles Times.

Although some companies are compelled to swallow hard and bring aboard the besmirched, many are less likely to even find out about a career-crippling faux pas from the past. A Supreme Court ruling in 1997, which held that an employee could sue his old company for defamation because it gave him a bad reference, helped limit what information a prospective employer is able to pry from a past employer.

Employers are likely to do little more than confirm the job title and dates of employment because they fear getting sued if they say something negative. “You can’t say ‘Hey, he’s a thief. You should see his expense report,’ ” said Craig Pratt, a human resources consultant in Alameda.

Bad Deeds Often Go Unrecorded

Complicating matters is the fact that companies are likely to merely fire somebody for, say, theft, rather than prosecute them, said Peg Thoms, a Penn State researcher who studies employee theft. She said they are unlikely to even keep a written record of a theft, let alone pass the information along during a reference check.

Yet even when companies do find things out, the urge to fill a slot can be tempting.

“We had a guy a day before yesterday--56 counts of misdemeanors and felonies. I kind of laughed when I saw what was on his record,” said Merri Mai Williamson, who runs an employee investigation firm in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Despite a string of thefts and assaults, batteries included, that suggested a personality skewed postal, the factory considering the applicant hired him anyway. And Williamson said a financial company in the area decided to retain a recently hired high-level employee after it learned she had embezzled several thousand dollars from her past employer.

“The employer said, ‘Well, that’s nice to know,’ ” she said. “Their reaction surprised me.”

The worst thing somebody with a blot on his background can do is slink ashamedly away from society, said Victor Karcher, a successful real estate agent in Annapolis, Md. After retiring from the Navy as a captain, the Vietnam War combat pilot eventually became the chief financial officer of a biomedical firm that sold and serviced instrumentation used in AIDS and cancer research.

Three years later, however, he was accused of embezzling $350,000 and was fired. He joined a major real estate franchiser while awaiting prosecution. The 60-year-old Karcher was convicted in January and was ordered to serve a year of house arrest and pay restitution--something he’s now in a position to do.

“I didn’t bury myself. I didn’t hide myself in a corner,” he said. “You take a look at the president, and he’s kept his job.”

If people can bounce back from a bad reputation, however, it’s frequently not very high. Laros was working as a truck driver in Bethlehem, Pa., in June when he failed a random drug test and was told he was being let go. A co-worker claimed Laros threatened to come back and “start shooting people.”

Laros denied threatening anybody, and other employees ultimately backed him up. The charges were dropped, but not before Laros had been put in jail for “the longest 11 days of my life.”

A 39-year-old father of two teenage boys, Laros had to haul his local infamy back into the job market. During one of the rare times he got to the interview stage, a would-be employer asked him why he’d left his last job. Laros tried to explain. “I could see he made up his mind right there,” he said.

A few weeks ago, he finally snagged what he considers to be a pretty poor job working as a courier on commission, using his own vehicle and paying his own fuel bills. “If I could get a [good] job, I suppose I could forget about it,” he said of his firing. “The company I worked for tried to make it look like I had a big problem.”

Arte Nathan, head of human resources for Las Vegas’ Mirage Resorts, said he makes it a point to recruit the discredited not out of desperation “but because it’s the right thing to do in the community.”

The casino company has 50 first-time felons on the payroll through an arrangement with a state prison boot camp, and 300 more workers are former welfare recipients. He said turnover is lower among those groups than among other employees.

Facing Jail, Teen Opts for Training Program

One of his workers is Devontay Douglas. Last year, Douglas was with a group of guys coming back from a party--”drinking and acting crazy,” he said--when some in the group decided to break into another car and steal some amps and CD players. Police pulled them over, and Douglas, two weeks past his 18th birthday and scared witless, wound up in jail, facing a felony charge.

Although the others pleaded to a lesser charge, Douglas volunteered for a boot camp program that included physically tough conditions--digging holes in the Nevada hills and carrying buckets of sand across the desert, as well as interaction with hard-core cons who could tell him what prison is really like. But by successfully completing this program, he got his charge reduced to a misdemeanor and an entry level job as a baggage handler at Mirage’s new Bellagio resort. “I knew if I didn’t get out of that environment I was going nowhere fast,” he said of his old neighborhood.

Employers are loosening up in other ways. Lack of experience in a particular field, a history of job hopping and even the lack of a college degree are less likely to hamper hiring, recruiters say. Robert Frank, a Cornell University management professor, drew an analogy to the years following World War II, when women sharply outnumbered men. “For a period it was a buyer’s market for men,” he said.

There are still lines that can’t be crossed. Suing a past employer is a good way to remain unemployed, though nothing kills job prospects quite like lying on an application. Meissner had a job lined up for a financial sector recruit with great credentials, but he hadn’t disclosed that he had once been the target of a Federal Trade Commission investigation. If he’d been honest, Meissner said, the job would have been his.

“I got a guy who was a CEO and he had lied about his degree for 40 years,” said Kevin Jones, a manager of Background Research International in Washington. “Some will bump up to cum laude-type stuff. They will award themselves National Merit Scholarship-type ranking.”

Les Rosen, a former criminal lawyer who runs Employment Screening Resources in San Rafael, Calif., said job hunters would be surprised at how much an employer would tolerate these days if they would just fess up during the interview process. “What they will not accept is dishonesty.”

Absolute honesty isn’t easy, though. When Virginia Stringer found herself thrust back into the job market, the first application she filled out asked why she had left her old job. She couldn’t bear to write “unlawful removal of company property.”

Stringer, 53, had worked at the Wal-Mart in the rural Kentucky town of Monticello. Employees said there was an unwritten policy that packages of candy and nuts damaged during shipping were fair game for snacking before being discarded. A manager had other ideas and fired Stringer and four other night-shift employees after he secretly videotaped them munching on damaged goods in 1995.

Stringer not only was jobless, she was tarred with a reputation as a thief in a small town. So when she filled out that first application at a silk-screening company, she left blank the question about why she left her last job. She had a good interview and was invited back the next day. She was met at the door and coldly told she was no longer a candidate.

Part-Time Job Is Only One Available

After that, Stringer decided to be upfront, but she still couldn’t find anything. It didn’t help her cause that she and the other fired employees had filed a slander suit against Wal-Mart.

Finally, she applied for a job at the weekly newspaper, the Outlook. “I said, ‘There is something I have to tell you. I was fired from Wal-Mart for eating the candy.’ ”

The paper offered her a job in the composing room, although she had to spend a year working part time to prove herself. “I’m embarrassed to tell you what I make.”

Last month, however, a jury ruled in favor of the ex-employees and awarded them $20 million after a trial in which the man who had fired them said he too had eaten damaged food. Wal-Mart said it will appeal.

“Say what you want about the money, but the feeling of having your name cleared by 12 people, that was worth it right there,” Stringer said.

Many experts say the wide variations in hiring criteria are most pronounced in the booming technology sectors, especially among smaller companies or those that rely on temporary staffing firms.

“Hewlett, Motorola, Cisco--I don’t see them lowering their standards at all,” said J. Wayne Brockbank, a University of Michigan business professor and board member of the Human Resources Planning Society. But smaller companies “are willing to substantially lower their standards. They scrape the bottom of the barrel.”

And firms are increasingly relying on temporary workers they know nothing about.

“One of the things that attract companies to technical staffing firms is they don’t have to employ these guys,” said Jay Lash, manager of Manpower Technical for Arizona. He said many of today’s computer repair people are “real road jockeys, not a lot of stability in their backgrounds. They picked it up in the military or tech school. Next thing you know they’re riding around in a company car making 20 bucks an hour. The same guy I can’t get authorization [for] on a credit card.”

Years ago, he said, it would take a four-year degree and years of practical experience to fill computer jobs now being filled by people with less than a year of tech school. Lash said Manpower Technical does background searches but doesn’t always pass a criminal past on to the person who’s using the worker. “We may know the full story, but it’s just too hard to explain it,” he said.

There also is some evidence that smaller companies are eschewing drug screening, Rosen said. Most people are smart enough to abstain before providing a urinalysis, anyway, since most tests don’t detect usage further back than two weeks for marijuana and 72 hours for cocaine.

“There’s a lot of controversy over whether it’s worth it,” Rosen said. “If a person takes a drug test when there are drugs in their system, I mean, get a life. We call it flunking the IQ test.”

Yet an old conviction for marijuana possession or drunken driving is less likely to keep someone from getting a job. Being a target of a sexual harassment complaint, too, is not the career killer it used to be, said Melissa Staehle, manager of the Marin County office of Nelson Staffing, which supplies permanent and temporary employees.

Years ago, sexual harassment was typically considered extorting sex in exchange for job security. Now, the umbrella has gotten so big that it encompasses a stray comment that one person would consider innocent and another hostile, she said.

Jerold MacKenzie found this out during a conversation with a co-worker in 1993, one of his last days in the American workplace. “I asked her if she had seen the ‘Seinfeld’ show the night before,” MacKenzie said. “She said she hadn’t. ‘What took place?’ ”

What took place was an episode in which Jerry Seinfeld was trying to remember an old girlfriend, recalling only that her name rhymed with a female body part. It turned out to be “Delores.”

The woman complained, and, a day later, the father of two sons was fired from his $95,000-a-year job at Miller Brewing. He sued, arguing not only that the sexual harassment claim was false but also that Miller had secretly downgraded his job status without telling him years earlier.

Miller argued that it wasn’t obligated to tell MacKenzie that his position in the company had been downgraded and that it had warned him he could be dismissed after a secretary made a sexual harassment complaint against him in 1989.

Big Settlement Is Fleeting Comfort

Stories about the lawsuit were carried in scores of papers, and the 1997 trial, thanks to the racy “Seinfeld” angle, was broadcast on Court TV. The jury wound up awarding MacKenzie $26 million. Yet the euphoria over the verdict faded quickly. The company, backed by Wisconsin’s leading business association, has appealed, and MacKenzie hasn’t seen any money, not to mention anything resembling a paycheck. He’s sent out hundreds of resumes, but the job market, for him, remains closed.

“Any time I got close to something that should have been a strong fit, they either knew why I got fired or found out somehow and didn’t return my phone calls.” MacKenzie said he and his family have sold their home, exhausted their savings and are relying on financial help from relatives and his lawyer.

He considers the court verdict a personal vindication yet professional hara-kiri. “Now I’m ‘litigious.’ ”

Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.