6A the university daily kansan
wednesdav.november 12,2003
news
kansan.com
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The National Association of Manufacturers will use Kansas City as its pilot community for a program to encourage young people to take manufacturing jobs, the head of the industry association said yesterday.
KC to encourage industry to youth
The Associated Press
Jerry Jasinowski, president of NAM, announced the careers campaign called "Dream It, Do It" to applause at the Kansas City Area Development Council's annual meeting yesterday.
"An older generation of workers will retire in the next few years and fewer young people are
choosing careers in manufacturing," Jasinowski told area business leaders. "Too many people have in their heads images of manufacturing as it was a generation ago, not the modern, hightech real world."
NAM hopes to raise enough funds to launch its program in Kansas City by spring. The organization has not yet determined the schools with which it will work.
NAM hopes the program will make manufacturing "a preferred career option," and make young people aware of what jobs are available, Jasinowski said.
skilled workers to take over as older workers retire.
"There's a huge gap between what we need in terms of high skilled workers and the skills people have." Jasinowski said.
The industry group also wants to work with area schools, particularly community colleges, in preparing students for manufacturing jobs, Jasinowski said. He pointed to science and technology as areas in which he would like schools to focus.
Phyllis Eisen, vice president of NAM's manufacturing institute, said the industry group hopes to demonstrate through the Kansas City program how building a coalition of business leaders and educators can be critical to attracting new businesses to an area.
Jasinowski also said the project should allow Kansas City to promote high-tech career skills and attract new jobs.
Jasinowski said one concern is that there will not be enough
NEW YORK — Some career Web sites, recruitment services and automated job-application kiosks offer flimsy privacy protections and might even violate employment and credit laws, a report released yesterday asserts.
Jasinowski said the city offers a unique set of strengths for manufacturers: it's in the center of the country; it cultivates a "pro business environment" with "reasonable taxes" and "sensible regulations;" and it has an educational infrastructure that is "ready to support the kinds of skills necessary."
The report also faults self-service job application computers commonly used by chain stores. It says they almost always demand social security numbers and perform background checks on applicants without clearly stating who will see the information.
Report finds privacy holes in job sites
Many job sites still let too much information from resumes posted online get into the hands of third parties through online "cookies" that monitor Web surfing, according to the report issued by prominent Internet watchdogs.
The Associated Press
Pam Dixon, who led the investigation, urges job seekers to demand more privacy protections. She also wants the Federal
Trade Commission and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to look more closely at how job sites and recruitment services handle information.
"Technology is in such a place right now where it really is at odds with Title 7," the employment-discrimination section of the Civil Rights Act, Dixon said. "I don't want to see that eroded at all."
The report says that even people who don't hunt for jobs online should be aware that many resumes, no matter how they are submitted, are processed through vast databases.
Dixon, formerly of the University of Denver's Privacy Foundation, is now head of her own group, the World Privacy Forum. Other participants in the investigation included the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
For example, Elyon Technologies Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., has a file of 16 million executives
that it sells to headhunters, employers and companies seeking leads for sales pitches.
Eliyon's advanced software mines information about people from Web sites, press releases, Securities and Exchange Commission filings and other public sources. Dixon said she was surprised at the level of detail in an Eliyon search about her sister. Though the sister is not a public figure, the names of her children and husband were listed.
Eliyon executives told The Associated Press that Dixon's report was misleading because they will remove anyone from the database who asks. They said
Dixon alleged that Eliyon has no clear method for people to correct or remove erroneous data. That makes it "an end-run around the Fair Credit Reporting Act," which requires that consumers be able to examine adverse information maintained about them in commercial files, she said.
However, Jeremy Rothman-Shore, Eliyon's vice president of development, would not say how the feature would ensure that entries could be modified only by their subjects.
Eliyon will soon add a feature that will let people modify or delete their database entries themselves.
Dixon's report also questions the policies of FastWeb.com, a scholarship search service owned by Monster.com Inc., a leading job site. To help hone their searches, FastWeb asks users such optional personal questions as their race, sexual orientation and whether they have HIV.
FastWeb can give employers and recruiters its users' personal information only if they proactively "opt-in" and agree to its privacy policy.
But Dixon said FastWeb should do more to make certain employers cannot see anyone's religious or medical information.