This bakery will hire anyone

Why do felons belong on a list?

Unlawful entry into the US can be a felony in some circumstances. The list isn't conflating them morally or something, it's just saying that each entry is a group that typically has issues finding proper employment.

edit: given the ambiguous nature of the headline, maybe you were referring to immigrants as a whole and not simply people who migrated here illegally. In that case I agree with you, but given the context of the article I think they meant to refer to illegal immigrants. This, of course, doesn't make much sense because there are penalties for hiring illegal immigrants. The article hardly mentions immigrants, and it isn't clear which category they refer to. I don't think there is a broad assumption that immigrants on the whole are unemployable, as the article claims.

I'd like to see some clarification from Grist.

As someone with several drug related felonies on my record, I can do nothing but applaud the efforts of this CEO, although on a different level I wonder if any adult working a minimum wage job isn't living a very bleak existence anyway, and in fact isn't being exploited for having a brain disorder we currently call "addiction"

The problem with people who let drugs seriously affect their life is that...they let drugs seriously affect their lives, and at least from an employment point of view, where what matters is robot-like conformity and compliance, this is just not-to-be tolerated or even risked.

The sad, sad irony of this is that according to very recent studies[1], the very thing that made us addicts is the very prescription that society has deemed our punishment to be. Talk about cruel and unusual.

I wish I could say I don't struggle with relapse, but one of the few things worse then being an addict is being a lying addict.

Being unemployable by most metrics and having to constantly struggle to survive sure doesn't help with that battle.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-...

[edits]

Look at how proud the employees look in the second photo.

Some would generalize, and say that people who look like them, or who have criminal history, don't really want to work. But they do want to work, are employed, and their sense of dignity is palpable.

This is a really uplifting story. Nice to read some good news for a change.

This relates to the hiring post tptacek wrote: "Over the years, Brady has come to suspect that the traditional metrics for determining who will be a good employee are flawed. Someone without an arrest may simply be a person who has never gotten caught."

I'm guessing that you can find better people this way, felony or not by providing an on boarding process with the open expectation that not succeeding there means you're not going to continue with the company.