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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.
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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?
This is as much the case as the Time and Motion aspect.
That's a bit different though as company cars belong to the company, the /. story referred to contractor's vehicles.
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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.