The next equality frontier, not unlike the mortgage lending crisis will be whether EEOC or the Department of Labor can regulate hiring discrimination using credit rating or will it result in a GOP-defanged CFPB’s continuing inability to regulate the financial product sector in favor of the public.
The credit rating scoring is manipulated by a variety of information gathering services, some off-shored and organized in the marketplace as an oligopoly. The disintegrated and opaque nature of decision making in labor practices is mirrored by the multiple regulatory agencies with information sharing less effective than DHS.
Macro-level measures of employment rates don’t reveal the amount of part-time or multiple underemployed or their relative regional race and class effects. The front end in terms of college debt is a contentious issue in the 2016 election.
Knowledge is now fungible as a feudal commitment to lending institutions or a self-perpetuating system of corporate domination, creating a de facto debtor’s prison surrounded by the digitally enabled, metric razor wire of credit scoring websites.
The invisible crimes of redlining in real estate extend to other forms of segregating human value and worth. As in 2007, debt can be resold and bundled among an entire usury and collections apparatus.
The CFPB opened its website in early February 2011 to accept suggestions from consumers via YouTube, Twitter, and its own website interface. According to the United States Treasury Department, the bureau is tasked with the responsibility to "promote fairness and transparency for mortgages, credit cards, and other consumer financial products and services"
Like the asymmetric information situation of the car purchasing market for lemons, credit rating especially in terms of misuse in hiring decisions needs to be more closely regulated. Regulation as such is left by the FTC to a disintegrated, often inaccurate information oligopoly that discriminates broadly in the production of products and services that enable identity theft and fraud.
Your worth can be stigmatized and criminalized
The information commodity that is your rating can be distorted globally and across national borders and of course having greater 1% wealth can shield you from loss or “shrinkage”. Is Credit about Debt or is it really about power, not so much about purchasing but subordination in the service of corporate profit.