The economy plummets. You lose your job. Soon, you start to find it hard to make ends meet. You start putting things on your credit card. Then you fall behind in your card payments. All the while you’ve been desperately looking for a new job. Little do you know that being behind on credit card payments may stand between you and a job – the very thing that could get you back on the road to financial health.

If it sounds like a Catch-22, well, it is. Yet running a credit check on a potential employee is not only legal – it’s common practice, as a new survey and report from our friends at Demos found out. Demos spoke with nearly 1,000 low and middle-income households who carry credit card debt and found that one in four had a prospective employer run a credit check on them. One in ten had been told they wouldn’t be hired because of what the employer found there.