“Georgia is opening more licensed jobs to people with criminal records. Under a new law, licensing boards can no longer deny applicants based on vague ‘moral turpitude’ standards; they must show that a conviction is directly related to the job. More than one in five jobs in Georgia requires an occupational license, including many in fields such as health care and childcare.”
Reason reports:
Senate Bill (SB) 207 makes some significant reforms to the state’s occupational licensing laws and will require, among other things, that officials prove a direct relationship between a person’s criminal history and the line of work they’re pursuing before they can deny them a license.
An occupational license is a government-issued state credential that many workers must obtain before they can legally work in fields ranging from cosmetology to contracting. In Georgia, more than one in five jobs requires an occupational license, including one in four of the state’s high-demand jobs. Georgia already has a shortage of workers in licensed fields like healthcare and childcare, with 65,000 licensed positions sitting unfilled today and projections showing that number could triple as the current workforce retires.
At the same time, these jobs are going unfilled, and some Georgia citizens are getting rejected from opportunities to get these occupational licenses due to criminal backgrounds that do not necessarily correlate with any actual risks of misconduct on the job.
There are some jobs where a criminal record can be highly relevant, such as practicing law. A lawyer can make your life miserable by bringing a baseless lawsuit against you, and sending you a subpoena demanding your diary or other sensitive documents. Given the special privileges lawyers have in our legal system, letting a convicted fraudster practice law could be very risky.
But states also require licenses for non-sensitive jobs like washing hair, where there is little risk of loss due to things like fraud. “Washing hair is a daily at-home task, yet states like Tennessee and Alabama require specialized licenses. In Tennessee, for example, a shampoo technician must complete 70 days of training and pass two exams to legally wash hair in a salon,” notes the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
For years, Louisiana “required florists to pass a strict test on floral design, handling, and business practices to arrange flowers commercially,” although these requirements were recently relaxed. A florist poses little threat to the public regardless of whether they have a criminal record.
Excessive occupational licensing drives up the rate of theft and property crimes by increasing joblessness among people with criminal records. (It doesn’t seem to have any effect on the violent crime rate. Violent crime is not caused by poverty, and poverty is not even the cause of most property crimes).
Back in the 1950s, most states didn’t require hairstylists or hair braiders to get a license before they could cut people’s hair. Just 4 percent of Americans needed a license to work in 1950. Now, 30 percent of Americans need a occupational license to work.
It is dumb for states to require hairstylists to attend beauty school, rather than just getting on-the-job training. Hairstylists don’t need hundreds of hours of training at a beauty school to do their jobs properly. But states require that anyway, as a condition for hairstylists being allowed to work.
As the Institute for Justices notes, Studies tend to find that licensing requirements increase costs to consumers while not improving the quality of services. Licensing board are often rackets focused on stifling competition rather than protecting consumers.
Three states mandate useless “inclusivity” training for cosmetologists, making it more costly to be a cosmetologist while teaching them useless DEI buzzwords.
The harm from excessive occupational licensing regulations is so obvious that it has been noted by the administrations of Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, all of which recognized the need to cut back on occupational-licensing restrictions. “During the Obama administration, the Department of Labor and the White House Council of Economic Advisers published a lengthy report on licensing laws, and called for states to take action to remove unnecessary barriers to work. ‘Licensing restrictions cost millions of jobs nationwide and raise consumer expenses by over one hundred billion dollars,’ it concluded.”
The Trump administration also recognized the harm of occupational licensing, saying that “the cost and complexity of licensing creates an economic barrier for Americans seeking a job” and “a barrier for Americans that move from state to state.”
Kamala Harris also called for cutting back on occupational-licensing regulations in her 2024 presidential campaign.
Matt Yglesias describes how “beauty schools are ripping off their students. Terrible licensing rules deserve some of the blame.” He cites a New York Times article “about beauty schools that leave their students drowning in debt rather than opening up” job opportunities, thanks to “occupational licensing” rules.
To cut hair in New York state, you need to graduate from barber school. The number of hours of barber schooling you need is “determined by the approved NYS barber schools.” . . if you’ve been cutting hair in New Jersey and want to move your practice to the other side of the Hudson, that license is no good. Do New Yorkers whose kids go off to college in other states warn them about the dangers of Connecticut or California or Massachusetts barbers? Not in my experience, but the state of the New York takes the official view that the regulatory requirements in 46 states (and the District of Columbia) are not up to snuff.
As Yglesias points out, mandatory-school-attendance requirements for barbers and hair-stylists make no sense. Indeed, such attendance requirements make no sense even for occupations where public safety is at issue and some form of licensing may thus be justified (comically, defenders of beauty-school attendance mandates depict hair-styling as being a dangerous occupation where licensing is needed due to the presence of chemicals in hair treatments). As he notes, it makes more sense to require competency to be shown
purely through certification. In other words: You need to be able to pass the test. In that world, a beauty school can stay in business if and only if it offers a cost-effective training regime. Beauty schools would need to compete with efforts at self-instruction or with apprenticeship arrangements of various kinds. Instead, by requiring the 1,000 hours of training, the state licensing board creates a cozy business for the beauty schools. They become for-profit gatekeepers to economic opportunity. And their incentive structure isn’t to focus on effective education—the quality of the teaching is irrelevant to the business model. It’s to focus on maximizing the amount of money extracted from the students.
Many occupations that are now licensed do not need to be licensed to protect anyone. And the few that do, tend to have excessive requirements for getting a license:
“Licensing is a barrier to entry for all Americans looking for work in certain professions, but it’s particularly pernicious for those on the lower end of the economic ladder. For example, getting a license to cut hair can require more than a year of expensive schooling in some states, while becoming an interior designer in places like Florida requires more than 2,000 days (yes, days!) of training. There’s little evidence that licensing those professions does much of anything to protect public health and safety.
“Once you have a license, you might be stuck in the state where you earned it. A 2015 study by the Brookings Institution found that licensed workers were less likely to migrate between states, but not necessarily because people are happy in those places. Instead, researchers say workers feel locked in place because most state-issued professional licenses are not transferable, so moving out-of-state means you’d be out of business unless you can obtain a new license in your new home.”
