For Bishop Felipe Teixeira, the fight against the state’s Criminal Offender Records Information (CORI) laws is personal.

His work as an advocate for teenagers and his willingness to intervene in teens’ disputes with the police has landed him in the back seat of a cruiser on more than one occasion.

“The charges are always dismissed, but they stay on your record,” Teixeira says.

That record of dismissed charges once cost Teixeira a job with the Brockton Public Schools. It’s also a large part of what’s motivating him and dozens of other activists to march on the State House on April 19.

The march, organized by the Boston Workers Alliance, is aimed at calling attention to the plight of people with arrest records who are unable to find work in Boston.

“The objective is to demonstrate to the Legislature that there is a strong constituency in Boston who support the CORI reform sponsored by the Massachusetts Alliance to Reform CORI Laws,” said City Councilor Chuck Turner, who helped form the Alliance.

“This will be one of the first times in the city when you have people with CORIs demonstrating about the right of workers to be able to find employment that they can support themselves with, despite the difficulties they have had with the law.”

The Boston Workers Alliance was formed after members of Turner’s District 7 Roundtable did outreach to unemployed adults in the community and found that most of the under- and unemployed people in the community are unable to work because of their criminal records.

“We felt there was a need to bring together people who are experiencing problems with their criminal background so they would be able to speak for themselves,” Turner said.

The CORI law was created in the 1970s to help law enforcement track people with criminal histories. In recent years, CORI records have been made more readily available, allowing prospective employers and housing agencies to screen applicants.

While many see the law as an important tool to protect employers, people with CORIs complain that they are barred from working in well-paying jobs even if the charges for which they were arrested were dismissed or if they prevailed in court.

Others say the CORI laws are unfair to ex-offenders who have served their sentences and are trying to find employment.

“It’s overwhelming to come back to society and not be able to make a life for yourself,” said ex-offender Sonja Chery, speaking during a recent meeting of the Workers Alliance. “Not just to get a job, but to get a job you can sustain yourself on. What a lot of people don’t understand is that when you deal with what incarceration does to you emotionally and your family and you have to struggle to meet your basic needs, it’s overwhelming.”

Bills aimed at reforming the state’s CORI laws last year included a measure that would suppress records of non-violent offenses, a measure that would erase charges that are not proven in court and a measure that would enable people to appeal to the state to remove incorrect information from their CORI records.

While none of last year’s CORI reform bills were enacted into law, activists have filed more bills this year.

“We’re not just going to march,” said Aaron Tanaka, a volunteer with the Workers Alliance. “We want to win. We have specific pieces of legislation we want to move.”

In addition to their efforts to reform the CORI laws, the Boston Workers Alliance is also seeking to establish a worker-owned temporary employment agency.

The April 19th march is planned for 10 a.m., when activists will gather at the Roxbury Crossing MBTA station before marching down Tremont Street to the Boston Common. After a noon rally, the activists plan to visit legislators in the State House.