Word: polygraphing
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Each year U.S. businesses lose as much as $40 billion to employees who steal. To protect their profit margins, many hard-hit companies have resorted to routine polygraph screening of workers and job applicants. But the scientific validity of these devices has never been proved, and the tests have sometimes caused harm to people who are falsely implicated. Such is the case of Shama Holleman, a college student who took a job in 1987 as a part-time cashier for Alexander's department-store chain in New York City. After a month as a model employee, she was fired because...
...response to incidents like this, Congress has banned employers' use of polygraph tests, voice-stress analysis and other electronic methods to screen current or prospective workers. The law, which went into effect Dec. 27, exempts government agencies and such workers as armored-car guards and employees who have access to restricted drugs...
...Hunters with shotguns combed the swamp, and a local radio station offered a million-dollar reward for the creature's capture. Fourteen-inch footprints appeared on a dusty road; Sheriff Liston Truesdale intends to send plaster casts to the FBI, eventually. He may also ask Davis to take a polygraph. But no one is in much of a hurry to solve this mystery. "I hope they never catch him," said Rhonda Knight as she hawked Lizard Man T shirts ($6.50 apiece...
...Daily News that he quit his job as Sharpton's aide five weeks ago because he could not "live with all those lies" the Brawley advisers were concocting. Interviewed later on New York's WCBS-TV, he repeated his charges while hooked up to a lie detector. The polygraph, said the operator, indicated that McKinnon was telling the truth. According to McKinnon, the Brawley advisers did not really believe her story of abduction and rape. He said that when he personally offered to investigate, they showed no interest. "I don't care about no facts," he quoted Maddox as saying...
More than a million lie-detector tests were given in the U.S. last year, 90% of them by private employers to their workers. Most polygraphs were for routine screening of job applicants or random testing for deterring theft. Last week the Senate passed a bill limiting the use of polygraphs in job screening for all workers except security guards and those with access to controlled substances. The new law was necessary, said Senator Edward Kennedy, to protect people from "20th century witchcraft . . . inaccurate instruments of intimidation." An employer could still test a worker reasonably suspected of wrongdoing. But the bill...