German airline tests biometric tickets

German airline Lufthansa has started testing tickets encoded with passengers’ thumbprint data in hopes of speeding up check-ins without compromising security.

The 14-day trial started Monday with Lufthansa employees trying out the system, spokesman Thomas Jachnow said. If all goes well, the airline wants to roll it out in 2006.

Though people still will be able to check in for flights using the “classic system,” the voluntary use of biometric data would make the process quicker, Jachnow said.

Passengers would get tickets encoded with their thumbprint data, then check themselves in by placing their thumbs on a machine. Frequent fliers would have their thumbprint data encoded on their frequent flier cards instead of their tickets, Jachnow said.

The German government also is starting to make use of biometric data in travel documents and will start issuing passports embedded with facial data in November. A fingerprint will be added in March 2007.

Workplace

Labor pool lacks qualified candidates

The U.S. job market has been an odd creature the past couple of years: slow payroll growth combined with a virtually static unemployment rate just above 5 percent. Some have blamed this situation on too much uncertainty and imbalance in the nation’s economy.

Yet a survey released last month offers another possible culprit: A lack of qualified candidates.

Ninety percent of 150 human resource executives said their corporate performance was meeting or beating expectations and 56 percent said they planned to add staff in the second half of 2005. Yet almost half – 44 percent – said they did not meet their hiring goals in the first six months of the year because of a lack of candidates.

The same problem is likely to recur, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., a Chicago-based global outplacement company.

Among the hardest-hit areas: specialty manufacturers, information technology companies, accounting firms and health care employers.

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