Opinion | Giving thanks for a second-chance job

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Here’s a vivid memory of a shared holiday table a century ago when food for many was especially scarce — just as it still is for millions of people, government shutdown or no government shutdown.

I worked for Minnesota Gov. Al Quie in the early 1980s. I would come to write his biography when he turned 85, which turned out to be 15 years before he died exactly one month short of his 100th birthday, in 2023. A story he told me one morning when we were working on the book still gets whatever hairs might remain on the back of my neck to stand and salute.

When Quie was a boy and broke bread with his parents, sisters and brother on the family farm in Nerstrand, in southern Minnesota, they almost always did so in the kitchen, not the dining room. The dining room was reserved for special occasions and holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. Or when their minister came for supper.

Or, when hungry people looking for food trudged to the farm.

“When I look back now,” Quie said of his parents in our first of more than 20 conversations for “Riding into the Sunrise,” “I talk of a woman of grace, a woman of gospel, because she just reached out to everyone. They had hoboes then who would come off the train, and they would know to come to our house, and she would feed them in the dining room. Dad and the kids ate with them there and Mother served us. I look back and wonder, ‘How did those two do that?’ Dad would say, ‘If I were a hobo, that’s the way I would want to be treated.’ “ That’s the line that always gets me best.

His parents naturally understood that people who have virtually nothing crave and need food for their bodies like everyone else. That was the easy part. But they also implicitly knew there were few places in the 1930s as symbolically satisfying for people in bad straits as a place at a dining room table.

That thirst remains alive for many men and women, provoked this time not by a worldwide economic catastrophe, but by Washington’s inability to pass budgets on time and its seeming hankering for old-time food lines. For those leaving prison, being symbolically invited to sit at an employer’s holiday table can be a particular feast.

Ex-offenders themselves, of course, have the biggest responsibility for assuring they are prepared to work effectively and collaboratively when they get out. But employers often can do as much as just about anyone else in helping men and women who have paid their debt and who are eager to work and redeem their lives.

If choosing to do so, how might employers better serve their own economic interests as well as those of the nation? By recognizing that prudent second-chance hiring is not just a vital business matter, but a moral imperative, too.

While a superficial reading of recent economic news might suggest otherwise, the U.S. needs more workers of all kinds. But huge numbers of ex-offenders routinely have an extra-hard time winning jobs, particularly decent-paying ones. At the very same time, while many Americans, post-George Floyd, are increasingly interested in enlarging social justice, we are only hit-or-miss serious about giving fairer shots at good jobs to people who have paid their debt to society and who are eager to work. Prompting questions such as:

Especially this time of year.