Jewel-Osco Steps to the Plate knocking it out of the Park while other Employers hide in the Dugout

ROCKFORD- A local TV Station recently reported that “a regional grocery chain will no longer ask people applying for a job if they have a criminal past.  Jewel-Osco applications won’t have a box to check asking if you have been convicted of a felony”.  It further reported that “According to Jewel-Osco that stopping the cycle of homelessness, joblessness “is one of the reasons a criminal background won’t stop them from interviewing candidates but they will still perform background checks as the final step to employment”.

Now this is what I call leadership.  They are not talking about hiring the individual but giving him/her an interview and while that may not seem like much to many, it is a far cry from not even being considered at all.  Mistakes in your past should not limit you to achieving goals in the future.  If the future is closed off to you once you make a mistake, what other avenue do you have.  Many people like to jump on that soapbox and decry that people need to stop mooching off the government and get a job, well please explain to me, you highly educated extra terrestrial, how that is possible if they can’t even get an interview.  You see this is how it works, many of those decrying people are lazy do not have a clue what they are talking about because getting a job is far much more than waving a magic wand or having some wealthy person or working person tell you to.

This situation is even worse for returning and existing veterans.  Many of us are too old now when before we were too old we were over qualified.  Now those younger veterans returning home are being saddled with that “over qualified” tag.  Some are even being told that they are too intimidating when they come in for the interview.  Now please tell me how wide you must smile in order not to be intimidating?

Those who don’t know say that veterans are lucky and have so many choices for assistance.  I winder if they mean places like this next story.

 “Federal investigators visited a Hines, Illinois, veterans hospital Wednesday, after claims of secret lists used to conceal long patient wait times surfaced.  Auditors from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of the Inspector General visited the Edward Hines, Jr. VA Hospital as part of a national review of VA facilities. Joan Ricard, the hospital director at Hines, said the facility did not have a separate patient wait list. She said in a statement a spreadsheet was used as a "performance improvement tool," but it was not linked to patient appointment scheduling”.

If this is what they are calling lucky maybe we would have been better off being unlucky.  But then this is just my opinion, I could be wrong and if so ME CULPA.