“Someone loses their job,” Ms. Wu said, “so they can’t pay their bills — and now they can’t get a job because they couldn’t pay their bills because they lost a job? It’s this Catch-22 that makes no sense.” It can also be a kind of backdoor job discrimination, Ms. Wu contends, given the numerous studies that demonstrate that those black, Latino or simply poor are more likely to have lower credit scores than those who are white and have means.

Experian, one of the big three credit reporting bureaus, states in its marketing materials, “Credit information provides insight into an applicant’s integrity and responsibility toward his or her financial obligations.”

But to Ms. Wu and others, a credit report says more about a person’s economic circumstances than his or her moral character. “Some people can go to daddy and say, ‘I can’t pay my bills, will you bail me out?’ ” Ms. Wu said. “And others can’t.”

Nearly half — 47 percent — of employers use credit checks when making a hiring decision, according to a 2012 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management. Most businesses use credit checks only to screen for certain positions, but one in eight, the survey found, does a credit check before every hire. “We’ve heard from dozens of people over the past several years who say they’re being denied jobs specifically because of a credit check,” Ms. Ludwig said. The people contacting her group, she said, are “mostly lower-wage workers,” especially those applying to big retail chains.

“Prohibiting the use of credit checks in employment is now our number one campaign,” Ms. Ludwig said. “Because it’s discriminatory. And because the last thing we need in a recession is another barrier to employment.”

Lawmakers in some jurisdictions have proved sympathetic to those arguments. Nine states have adopted legislation that curbs the use of credit reports to judge prospective hires — seven of them since the start of 2010. Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat from Tennessee, has sponsored federal legislation that would restrict their use. The New York Legislature and the New York City Council are considering strict new laws that would greatly limit an employer’s ability to do credit screening.

Advocates and lawmakers are already seeing the impact of their efforts. The Society for Human Resource Management started polling members about use of credit reports as a pre-employment tool in 2004. Over the years, the numbers were consistent: six in 10 businesses indicated that they used them. But in its most recent survey in 2012, that number fell to just below five in 10. That decline no doubt is the result, in part, of new state prohibitions and the attention the issue has received in the last few years, said Kate Kennedy, a spokeswoman for the society. But she also notes that her association has been educating its members in the importance of looking at “how relevant a credit check is for a particular position.”