WORKPLACE
Background checks fail
In fiscal year 2012, employers requested nearly 17 million FBI criminal background checks for prospective workers. But hundreds of thousands of records per year are inaccurate, according to a recent report.
The use of FBI records has increased sixfold since Sept. 11, 2001, and the federal agency has acknowledged that thousands of records are incomplete.
The National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for low-wage workers, said the faulty records threaten job prospects for about 1.8 million workers each year. About 600,000 of those workers’ records have positives case outcomes that are not reflected. Other records show an applicant was later convicted with a less serious offense.
Employers and licensing boards have relied on these background checks to weed out applicants with criminal records.
“People cannot get jobs, or they’re losing their jobs, because of these defects in the FBI’s records,” said Madeline Neighly, a staff attorney with for the group and the report’s lead author.
“Employers assume FBI background checks are the gold standard, but the records are unreliable.”
According to the report, half of the FBI’s records show initial arrest records but do not have final outcomes. In some cases, charges are dropped but the records don’t reflect that. The report points to a 2006 Bureau of Justice Statistics study that found that one-third of felony arrests do not result in convictions.
An FBI spokesman did not immediately return a message seeking comment on the report.
In her report, Neighly said the incomplete records disproportionately affect Latino and black job applicants.
According to the report, African-Americans are up to three times as likely as whites to be arrested for minor offenses such as disorderly conduct, vagrancy and curfew violations.
Neighly recommends that states, who are responsible for reporting data to the FBI, do a better job of updating records. The report, however, says the FBI is ultimately responsible for ensuring its records are accurate.
— By Ricardo Lopez,
Los Angeles Times
telecommunications
Google phone customized
With its first smartphone designed completely in-house, Google is demonstrating one of the benefits of moving production from Asia to the United States: It’s letting buyers customize phones to give them their own style.
Workers at the factory in Fort Worth, Texas, assemble the custom phone and Google ship it to the buyer’s door within four days.
The Moto X is going on sale in about a month at all four national wireless carriers — Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile — starting at $200.
Initially, only AT&T will offer the customization option, but Google said it hopes to make it available across all carriers soon. The company will offer 18 different back covers ranging in color from “spearmint” to “cabernet,” a choice of black or white fronts and seven different metallic accents for details like the volume button. That makes for 252 possible style variations.
In the fall, Google plans to offer four variants of wood for the back cover.
The Moto X is the first smartphone to be assembled in the U.S. Even though the concept of the smartphone was pioneered here and many phones have been designed in the U.S., the vast majority of phones are assembled in Asia. With labor costs rising in China, some electronics manufacturers are looking to move manufacturing back to the United States.
— Associated Press