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Plow Operators Object to GPS Tracking System
An anonymous reader writes "The Boston Globe is reporting on a dispute between private plowing contractors and the state highway department. The state has mandated all trucks to equip with GPS enabled cellphones for tracking. The drivers have refused, just in time for a big winter storm. The latest seems to be that they have reached a compromise (no details yet), but the dispute highlights the public safety versus employee privacy issue. Presumably plowing could be more efficient and possibly save lives during storms if the trucks could be tracked.. a good thing. Or is this simply a step closer to an Orwellian society, where the State knows where we all are?" This earlier story does a much better job of detailing their grievances - apparently it's about money as much as anything, with the GPS tracking system being only a secondary issue.
Privacy issue my ass.
It's a contractual issue.
The employer (which happens to be the state) wants to know if the employee is really doing the work (or as much of the work as) the employee claims.
This is not about tracking where I go after work, or if I visit my mistress for an extra-martial screw.
It's all about ensuring the state gets what it pays for, and any tracking is done exclusively during the employee's work.
This is legal, and this is good.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
If you are being paid to plow a street, shouldn't the state be allowed to audit whether you've done the work or not? It seems that the only people who would/should be concerned here are those that are overcharging the state.
Oftentimes I find that the claims of "big brother" or misquotes of Orwell are made by those striving to protect their illicit activities.
It's tracking the plows. The government may not have the right to track where people go, but surely it has a right to track where government property goes.
This is nothing more than employees getting irate about losing their unofficial extended coffee breaks.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Or is this simply a step closer to an Orwellian society, where the State knows where we all are?
Am I the only one that's getting tired of these comments? What Slashdotters need to do is to seperate fiction from facts and weed out the conspiracies. Preaching death of the world we know it is fun and all, but every little thing in the news isn't a sign of it. Calm down, guys. Okay?
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
and then screw around for the rest of the year.
Umm.. no.
They mostly have other seasonal summer jobs.. like landscaping, truck driving, auto-repair (which in N.E. is a pretty seasonal gig actually), etc.
300/hr is great, but chances are, thats a handful of nights per season. Even if you make $1500-2000 grand for a night, you have to pay for the truck, the gas, the insurance, plus leave enough for you to live on.
It's not a bad deal, but still... its not work 10 nights a year have 355 off.
I have a new cell phone, a freebie given to me by Verizon Wireless when I renewed my contract. I didn't even notice that it was GPS capable until it was pointed out to me be somebody else.
Apparently, if I call 911, they know within 50 feet or so where I am, unless I disable the GPS feature.
So, how hard could it be? Are we talking rocket science, or people bitching for the sake of bitching?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If this is a cell that stays in the plow.... oh too fucking bad. It's a job. Your boss wants to make sure you're doing it. Get over it.
It would be a different issue if the plow drivers had to have GPS installed on their personal cell phones but this is probably not the case.
You'd think in a world where unemployement is such a problem people wouldn't bitch and whine over the trivials like this. I'm mean you're on the job. Your location is not private anyways [because you're supposed to follow a route]. The mgmt just wants to make sure you do the work.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
This is as much the case as the Time and Motion aspect.
There are inefficiencies in every System in regard to people, always was and will be. To apply a surveillance system, which is similarly designed for convicted criminals, to people and workers is demoralizing and demeaning, maybe unless everyone has to participate from CEO down.
We already pay hugely for contract supervision; is that expense be automated, minimized and removed?
Additionally, it is sad that people will work for relatively meaningless benefit, under such control, trading their professional latitude for temporary and false security of said contracted work. The price of the contractor's professional latitude is now known in actual dollars and will be used against them in future bidding; the victim (or taxpaying winner) of human competition. Show savings of a dollar from the contractor while massive losses occur elsewhere.
That's a bit different though as company cars belong to the company, the /. story referred to contractor's vehicles.
Video Game cheats, hints a
Let me put things into perspective, since everyone seems to think this is an acceptable use of technology.
1 - Anyone who has wrangled with telecommute issues knows that bosses have a massive problem wrapping their brain around 'how can I tell if they're working if I can't count butts-in-chairs'? Yet previous threads show most slashdotters feel there are better ways to manage employees.
Likewise, even snowplowing has lots of performance metrics: verifiable complaints sounds like a start. Or spot checks (by whoever)
2 - If we start tracking miles, someone will get efficiency-expert on us and start comparing plow operators. The one with the most miles wins. Which means an operator that uses finesse to plow full-width and not leave berms of concrete-hard snow at driveways and around cars will rank below someone running full-speed and sloppy. For us, this is like paying a coder by lines of code (where verbose and poorly-refactored code wins!) or paying a researcher by the page-of-lab-results. It rewards a new flavor of cheating.
3 - The usual way of subcontracting to private firms doesn't help. We're too soft on incompetent/fraudulent contract awardees, and lowest-bid is too compelling. I've seen bids on projects that couldn't afford to cover maintenance/gas costs on the involved equipment if done right, let alone pay for staff. Yet they're the lowest bidder. Go back to my verifiable complaints suggestion, and add in some teeth to the contract. Ban a contractor for life for the first whiff of fraud. Backcharge them for any work you have to redo. Make it easy to void contracts if the job isn't done to standards. The rest of us have to operate to ISO standards, so can they.
Next, let's go to work on the 'I wear a pager' mindset. I don't wear a pager. I moved from job to job until I found a firm that doesn't obsess at this level. Now, I don't wear a pager, I have very flexible hours, I live in a low-cost region (so I am saving money like crazy), and I really enjoy the job. My job has very rigorous quality standards, though. That's what matters. How or when I do the work is not an issue. In fact, my current boss, when he calls, starts every conversation with 'Good time/ Bad time?', meaning I can break the call off without explanation. I realize that a paycheck is more important than the perks I've mentioned, and a pager is a minor compromise. But the boss doesn't own me. Not even for 8 hours a day. And just like the ill-informed butts-in-seats metric, I take notes on any abuse of my minimum standards for how I like to be treated. Then I update my resume. Then I move on.
Funny thing is, I'm making twice what I did when the boss was a control-freak.
So...
Make the drivers be in communication (cellphone, radio, or data-link like UPS/Fedex tracking systems use), use it to give them a prioritized list of targets. Make them report back 'done' status. Enforce a code of honor/ethics. Have stiff penalties for lying. If a GPS goes into the truck, make it be there for crisis/safety needs, or only to be used as confirming evidence in a hearing/trial. Otherwise, let them be. Reward excellence, whether it be speed or precision or both. Use penalties to guide others to the realization that 'maybe you're just not suited to this job'. Life's too short to be obsessing about the wrong details.
Oh... and I'm sure there's a 'tinfoil hat' or faraday cage that'd thwart GPS reception, and that word will get around once detected. That tactic used to work when I didn't want to receive pager signals...
According to the article, the phones are provided to the contractors by the state. Those refusing to carry them "rejected the contract and returned the GPS phones they had been issued." The cost of equipment was never an issue, since the operators are not and were not being asked to pay for the equipment.
Three things that are important issues are, first, that the contract, as worded, would have required them to pay a higher insurance premium, but the state claims they have fixed that.
The next is the 30-minute response time, however, it's unclear if that means 30 minutes to respond and say "I'll plow" or 30 minutes to be at the assembly point. It may be the latter, sine the article states that no one has been turned away for showing up late, because the foremen knew they were just stuck in traffic (incidentally, if you are carrying the phone and are stuck in traffic on the way to the assembly point, the GPS phone can prove it for you, which could be a good thing from the plow operator's point of view).
Third is the issue of only getting paid for two hours minimum if they are called up for work. The example the article cites concerns a person who gets called in for an extra hour of work. Under the former system, that operator would be compensated for four hours of work. Under the new rules, the compensation would be only two hours. I can see where this would be a sticking point, because if it takes you more than 30 minutes from the time you are called to get to the assembly point and get the plow, and more than 30 minutes to get home again afterwards, at only two hours of compensation it's hardly worth your time to show up, yet if you don't show up you likely won't get called anymore. At four hours, that is unlikely to happen, and they probably even make a tidy profit out of it.
Now, some people might object to that, but look at it this way: you are on hourly pay and your employer calls you up on Satuday morning, when you may already have something else you'd rather do (catching up on all the sleep you didn't get during the work week, maybe) and asks if you could come in for an hour to do something really important and says they'll pay you two hours' wages to do it. However, it takes you 45 minutes to drive to work (I live in LA, where most people go that long or longer, probably also true for most other big cities) and another 45 to get back. This doesn't even take into account the time to get ready, and the lost opportunity of whatever else you had planned to do.
How interested would you be? Probably not much. You might do it, either because you had to or because it would just look bad if you didn't, but you wouldn't like it much. However, if they were putting four hours' pay on the table and you were sure you could do the extra work in no more than two, it would be a good deal for you. In the worst case - it actually takes you four hours to get the work done - well, you've still made an extra four hours' pay, which is a much bigger incentive than only two hours' pay.
The plow operators don't know which battles to choose here. They should forget the GPS thing, which is not unreasonable and could improve everyone's safety, and focus on the other points. Those matter a lot more.
Okay, it would be different if the plow drivers were driving their private snowplows, but while driving a $100k plow that belongs to a company, then there's no issue.
Many trucking companies have been using GPS to keep up with their vehicles for over 10 years. This helps catch when drivers go too fast, too slow, down the wrong roads, have an accident, get stuck on the side of the road, etc.
I just don't see a privacy issue here. Especially not when on the clock for tax payers.
You know, it sounds to me like the grievance they need to be filing is that they're being asked to drive too long in a shift without time for a nap (although, unless this is long haul stuff we're talking about, I don't see why they'd need to sleep...), rather than about the tracking.
The simple answer to the problem, is to answer the question of who owns the trucks. If the State owns them, then there's no question that the State can track them. If the trucks are privately owned, then tracking them would require either a contract provision, or another onerous law.
The nice thing about a free market is that you can always shop for some company willing to give up their employee's privacy for the right money. And the employees are, of course, free to find an employer who respects their privacy a little more. If the State can't find any takers, then the idea fails. If the contractor can't find any employees, then the idea fails (and the contractor gets sued.)
In principle, it's a very simple problem with a very simple answer; as long as people are free to engage in commerce with who they choose. But after the lawyers get involved it becomes a question of workers rights. People would rather file a law suit than try to find find a more reasonable employer.