January

"Effective August 1, 2014, Louisiana became another state to regulate employer use of criminal record information for employment purposes. Under the new law, expunged records of arrests of convictions are now considered confidential and no longer part of the public record. Those records also cannot be made available to any person or entity except: � To members of law enforcement or criminal justice agencies or prosecutors investigating, prosecuting or enforcing criminal law or for other statutory purposes,
� Upon entry of a court order,
� To the person whose record has been expunged, or his or her counsel, and
� To members of law enforcement or criminal justice agencies, prosecutors or judges for the purpose of defending against civil litigation resulting from wrongful arrest or other civil litigation, and the expunged record is necessary to the defense. In addition to providing for confidentiality of expunged records, the new law expressly states that ""no person whose record of arrest or conviction that has been expunged shall be required to disclose to any person that he was arrested or convicted of the subject offenses, or that the record of the arrest of conviction has been expunged."" As a result, job applicants with expunged records may legally answer ""no"" in response to employment application questions concerning expunged arrests or convictions.
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Discount retail chain Dollar General has agreed to pay $4 million to settle a proposed class action claiming it didn't properly notify more than 200,000 job applicants they would be screened by background checks, a Virginia federal court filing revealed Wednesday.

The EEOC and The Cole Group have reached an agreement reflecting the job applicant screening company's implementation of revised policies and practices to ensure that its pre-employment screenings comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), the Genetic Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA), and the anti-retaliation provisions of the federal civil rights laws enforced by the EEOC. The Cole Group screens applicants for hundreds of companies nationwide. It has assured that a job applicant's medical history and any civil rights, personal injury, or workers compensation claims made by an applicant against his or her prior and present employers are not inquired into and will not be disseminated to prospective employers.