This week, Ria Tabacco Mar testified at a public hearing before the DC Council’s Committee on Economic Development, urging the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) to adopt fairer hiring practices.
WMATA unfairly uses criminal background information to exclude many qualified job applicants based on prior conduct that is unrelated to the job or occurred long ago.
Ms. Tabacco Mar is quoted in a Washington Post article on the hearing:
Ria Mar of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which is representing several people it believes were unfairly denied jobs by Metro, told Bowser that the transit policy is “unnecessarily punitive.” In some cases she said, the offense was several decades in the past, or not job related.
