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Biometrics in the Workplace
ryth writes "The Globe and Mail reports that McDonald's Restaurants and a few other companies in Canada have introduced palm-scanning technologies for employees. Workers are now expected to 'sign' in and out using their palm prints to record the exact time of arrival and the identity of the employee. Quoted in the article Jorn Nordmann, president of S.M. Products, was blunt about why he installed a hand scanner at his fish-processing plant in Delta, B.C. 'If you want to control a whole bunch of people, it's the only way to go.' It seems that some of the most underpaid and undervalued workers are starting to be treated no better than the animals they are frying up." Except for the frying part.
While not as high-tech why not just stick with a punch card or swipe card. Sure you can get a few people who will punch in for someone every once and a while or something what's the big deal. This just sounds like a gigantic waste of money to me.
"Armed forces abroad are of little value unless there is prudent counsel at home" - Cicero
Coming soon to a population center near you...
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
that people wash their hands before coming to work, because if everyone is putting their hand on the scanner, there could definitely be some health issues.
Crushing dreams at the speed of sarcasm
Check me if I'm wrong Sammy, but I don't see how making employees sign in and out is all that terrible. Would it make people feel better if these employees pushed a button to sign in instead of having their palms scanned?
This is old business with a new timecard. Some businesses (people, really) watch the one- and two-minute differences with no forgiveness.
Is it so significant that a palm scanner is being used now? It prevents deception - it's unlikely you'll cut off a hand for your friend to clock you in early. Other than that, it means you can't lose your timecard (major accidents excepted). Oh, and you might want to wash your hands more...
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Well, it's understandable that a company wants to control their employees, but this degree of control is very annoying for workers, it's stressing and i would feel treated like cattle.
DON'T PANIC
Talking call centers which I know a bit about, it always seems to be the case that the lower you pay someone the more control the employer wants over them.
Workers need to be treated with dignity. Workers are really taking a beating in this country right now. Time for another revolutionary war.
... or a nosy receptionist.
What am I missing here - they are paying for labour, so why shouldn't they make sure people start on time?
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
When your employer is paying for your time, they have a right to measure how much of it they are getting. Just like you have a right to put that bag of sugar on the scales and check that it really is 1kg.
Seems reasonable enough to me, anyway.
I know someone who works at Selfridges in London and they have some kind of hand-scanner there for the staff to clock in and out. Doesn't sound too intrusive and stops staff clocking each other in and out and conning the system, or people who don't work there stealing a swipe card and sneaking in. Sounds like the system isn't being used properly cos they never get the overtime calculated right...
What is the submitter whining about? Palm print authentication? How is that any different than a old-fashioned timeclock, other than the fact that it virtually removes the possibility of fraudulent time charging?
Biometrics is not necessarily equivalent to privacy invasion.
i want to see that scanner in mcdonalds after about a month of employees slapping their greasy palm on the scanner. will it still work then?
If what I assume is correct, there is no reason for McDonalds to not use the hand/fingerprint data in some other way, if they wanted to, for example checking for criminal records, as mentioned in the article. They say they won't use the data for anything else, but they have also said their food is healthy. Would employees have the right to be informed if McDonalds suddenly used the hand/fingerprint data for something other than clocking in and out? Plus, it is not impossible for this data to be stolen and then abused. Who would then be responsible, under Canadian law? If employees have weaker protection under the law, does this mean that employers aren't required to secure the personal data of its employees the same way an e-tailer is required to the secure personal data of its customers?
Another problem is what happens when this technology becomes mainstream, and used in most workplaces. It is understandably used in workplaces where security is an issue, and for now it's only McDonalds and a handful of other places that do not have the same security concerns as say, a nuclear power plant. The more use, the more potential for abuse. Workers need to have their rights secured before these devices are used. I just hope Manitoba (and the other provinces lacking strong provincial privacy legislation) wake up and create new laws to protect the people!
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
in most jobs people are somehow controlled. I guess the company has some right to it, after all, if paying you some money for that time you spend working for them...
but this systems seem so invasive to me...
... y Dios vio que Linux era bueno... Genesis 99.666
then what's the problem?
It's highly unlikely they're making full palmprint data available to any shadowy organisations, rather than simply using a hash of the data to authenticate users. It's a non-issue.
Heck, why not embed RFID tags in such employees?
This is bad news for workers in the service industry, since McDs always leads the technological way, and sets the de facto working standards. Moreover, let's not forget that McDs is not above snooping; for instance, they infiltrated the London branch of Greenpeace from 1989-1991 (they actually employed two competing detective agencies!).
They are being paid to do a certain amount of work, why is it wrong that the employer knows if they are doing this work or not? It's not as if they are collecting more personal data and giving it out. Is this worse than time stamping cards like they used to do? As far as I am concerned it is much easier for both the employer and the employee.
a fry cook burns his hand on the grease??? Does he just keep getting paid until his hand heals and he can sign out.
Evolution or ID?
This is a completely valid viewpoint. My main question is how is this an invasion of privacy? I wouldn't have a problem scanning in my hand to check in to work -- but it seems that a lot of people do. I guess letting companies having biometric information could be the beginning of a long and slippery slope, but I can't really see a worst case scenario... someone care to visualize it for me?
In other news, this would meet a lot greater resistance if McDonald's allowed its workers to form unions. The restaurants have some of the worst turnover because the working conditions are abismal and the company squashes any attempts at its workers to form unions. More information can be found in the book Fast Food Nation which I definitely recommend as a good read -- it goes into worker treatment at both fast food restaurants as well as meat packing plants and the entire fast food industry as a whole, from advertising to production to health issues. I recommend as a read although be warned, you may not want to go back to McDonald's again. I haven't gone back. But that's because their food tastes like crap.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Now if they could only keep their employee's palm prints off my Big Mac
Privacy and being treated badly be damned...where have all those hands been and what have they been doing? Gross!
Well, it's understandable that a company wants to control their employees, but this degree of control is very annoying for workers, it's stressing and i would feel treated like cattle.
How is this any different than simply punching in with regards to "freedom". Care to explain how this "controls" employees any more than any other form of time tracking?
What if someone picks their nose and scans their hand. Would you really want to scan you hand next???
Evolution or ID?
I don't see how this is even remotely useful in this situation.
McDonald's is using biometrics now? OK, what's the reason? Oh there isn't one.
I'm not trying to troll but, seriously, why bother doing this in McDonald's? It hasn't outlined one good reason for doing so.
--- any post that takes longer than 20 seconds to write, isn't worth writing
And swipe access to some of the internal doors. If you haven't swiped in at the entrance you can't get through the internal doors, it's a kind of login system. It may well be used for time monitoring but it's main purpose is security, they also use it to produce a checklist of employees who are in the building in the event of a disaster like a fire.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Biometrics is the worst security apparatus ever created.
1) In the future, we're going to have a lot of thumbless (and eyeless) people running around the country side. Simple way for terrorists to get into a building: cut of the thumb of an employee. They don't even have to torture for passwords or other information.
2) Sometimes you share passwords - sometimes for valid reasons. Are you willing to share your thumb?
Is this just another step so managers don't actually have to talk to people or pay attention to what is going on in their shop?
Ancient Anguish
You all are missing the point. This is actually a beautiful way to make money. Get hired, copyright your fingerprint pattern, and then shakedown your employer for all of the electronic copies he makes. No wait, write a program that generates music from the data in your fingerprint pattern, join the RIAA and wait a few years. Give them a big bill.
Yee haaa! You want capitalism? We've got capitalism.
I'm not sure what issue taken with this is. Everyone who works a regular job is expected to show up on time and stay the duration of the day. Many jobs have some kind of time card system in place to help monitor this. That the system is more automated and exact would only be of concern to those who wish to cheat the system.
I work for a public utility. We had the hand punch system years ago. ( I always threatened to make a rubber hand, but never got around to it. ) Now we have the finger print reader instead. Overall, it tends to help both sides, since employees can often prove they were on site even if their supervisors weren't sure.
As a side note, biometric data can leak. Our finger print database is intentionally stored at a slightly lower resolution than the federal standard. The reason is that if we kept government quality information, we'd be required to surrender a copy of that information to the government. Now that's scary.
'If you want to control a whole bunch of people, it's the only way to go.'
They have guns in Canada, right?
--- any post that takes longer than 20 seconds to write, isn't worth writing
This, naturally, will cut down on the massive amount of fraudulent workers who wander into McDonalds. Furthermore, under the new Homeland Security Act, customers will be assigned a color code to match them to the employees who best fit their personality. Known terrorists will be prevented from clocking in at McDonalds, making your local play place safe from suicide bombers from the kitchen.
:)
I just hope they don't confuse the grill with the scanner, that could make for a nasty burn
-j
haud servio tui deus neque tui diabolus huad servio tui regalis neque tu
It's no surprise to me that this comes in for the lowest paid and most exploited workers who can't really complain, and likely aren't too concerned about this invasion of privacy. You can't honestly say there aren't ways of accomplishing the accurate signing in of employees without the need to resort to taking biometric data. I have a basic philosophical problem with corporate entities taking information they don't need, nor have any entitlement too.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
His 50 employees would often "buddy-punch," ... "They're typical workers," Mr. Nordmann said. "It's not nice work. You have a lot of turnover. You have them one week, and the next week they're gone. You can't tell the faces any more."
What a wonderful view of workers. Sort of Victorian workhouse style. He could always try treating his staff well enough that they don't cheat the system or quit all the time.
STINKPALM!!
just before putting your hand on the scanner?
A lot of frequent masturbators being sacked from McDonalds for poor timekeeping due to the scanners inability to deal with hairy palms.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
"It seems that some of the most underpaid and undervalued workers are starting to be treated no better than the animals they are frying up. Except for the frying part."
Homer Simpson: Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel.
Fried Fish Workers.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
At a couple jobs I've worked I was expected to punch in and out. When I arrived, I took a card and put it in a stamper, same whenever I left. Was used to track my hours. Seems like a perfectly reasonable request by an employer, that they might want to know what hours you worked.
However time card have problems. They are easily damaged, since they are just paper. Also it is possible to get confused, and grab the wrong card, I did that on one occasion. However more important to an employer, another employee could punch a friend in, making it appear as if they were there.
This eliminates problems and just streamlines everything. You scan you plam, it knows you are you and clocks you in. Scan again to clock out. No confusion and no practical way to fake it.
This in no way limits your privacy your rights or anything else. You employer has a right to know when you are working for them. And guess what? If the system is lax, people will abuse it. Like now I work at a university and all hourly positions (which is only student positions really) simply fill out a timebook once a week, which is then signed by their supervisor. So what happens? You guessed it, people cheat. A student will show up to work 15 minutes late, take a long lunch, and slip out 30 minutes eairly yet still report a full work day.
It works the other way too. Makes it much harder for a company to screw you. Say you need to work late. They decide they don't want to pay you for that time to try to claim you weren't there. Hard for them to say if there is a palm scan record of you leaving. Much easier to say if there is no record, or just a punch card.
We've had a palm-reading system for four years now, and once some people's initial concerns about being finger-printed were relieved (which isn't what's happening, at our place or at McDonald's), no one cared. There's no invasion of privacy in making sure that it's you who are punching in.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I don't see the fuss, where I work, a supermarket in Australia, they scan your right index finger when you have to sign in or out, it only takes a second to do and no-one can cheat it.
Now if they gave these file to the government then I'd be pissed off. But they haven't done that yet.
I'd love to see laws preventing that from happening by the way. Of course all someone will have to do to stop it is scream "Terrorists!" and it'll die in the arse.
But I seriously don't see why people are complaining, its not that inconvinient, its not that hard and requires no effort or time to use.
Peple can still cheat the system by saying their fingers wouldn't scan and writing in a different time but thats more effort than comming in on time in my experience.
I guess its different in the US, but no-one I know really cares all that much about it.
Read Errant Story.
This might be another little step in the direction of total control over employees / citizens / human mankind. If you look at it seperately it doesn't seem to be a big deal. But try to see it as a part of a bigger picture with DMCA, "Patriot" Act, DRM, TCPA and a million other things it becomes a bit scary, doesn't it? And of course it is also another example of a company screwing it's employees just because it can. Why should McDonalds trust it's employees instead of controling them you ask? Well I have another question for you, why would anyone want to work for such a company that has a long record of screwing it's own employees (and customers)? McDonalds is just exploiting poor men and women who can't afford loosing their jobs even if they are treated like farm animals. Ask yourself what this says about a society where such things are not only possible but happen every single day...
-virgo cluster
We have swipe card doors at work. It's nice since it's much more convienent than carrying 50 different keys around since it seems like every lock is keyed differently.
However, just like with keys, and even more frequently, people forget their card. I have a cube near the door to our room and I'm ALWAYS getting up to let someone in that forgot their card. No big deal, since it's just door access. Someone else can let them in or they can borrow a card. Bigger deal if it is needed to clock in, means they have to go back home.
Personally, I'd really like to see biometrics more. It'd just hard to loose. For high security areas/things you need other authentication, of course (like a passocde and/or keycard) in addtion but for most things a simple print is good enough. I've lost my wallet, I've lost my keys, but I've never lost my hand.
Unfortunatly when working in fields where things are often done by "lower level" employees it's becoming a necessary evil, especially in some types of manufacturing areas. All too often family groups work in these low paying jobs, and using conventional swipe/punch/time cards, one member of the family group would "clock" in for 3 or 4 others. One of the places I know of, had a family of 6 and each one would work one day a week, punching in and out the other 5.
We installed a fingerscanning device a couple of years ago for signing in and out of work. The system works by allowing a person to be late at for work or going out early for up to 7 hours per month. After that, we penalize their salary for every extra minute after the 7 hours. Since then, we have covered the cost of the devices from all the salary penalities.
Learned this from a /. post a long time ago and it has guided me in our company's quest for a 2nd factor of authentication. We don't all have the same body parts and a biometric solution needs to work for 100% of the users.
It wan't biometrics but it wasa so-called "smart card". In the early 90's I was stationed aboard the USS Enterprise when the Navy decided to test a smartcard system. A small strip on your ID card contained identifying information. We were required to swipe as we came and left the worplace. Afer the first month big brother handed our reports by division what the average hours spent per week wer. Afterthe second month they were identifying to the workcenter level. Before it got to the per-person level the system came to an abrupt end. I'm pretty sure some phonecalls to elected officials got the program sidelined. You really don't know how little you matter to your employer till they consider you litte more than a tiny statistic.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
And they should do the same with these as we have here in Finland: Train cabin doors here have round handles which have a picture of hand.. but with only 4 fingers. The designers involved called it a creative and refreshing idea, I'd call it the ultimate source of fun and confusion when applied to biometrics systems.
Or, the technicians could just put the scanner next to the supervisor's office and configure it such that only showing middle finger is enough for identification..
And here's comes the employee number 20.. 21.. 22..
-el
Those wacky Canadians! What will they think of next? Public Health Care or something?
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
I think he means control as in "manage" and not control as in "voodoo mind control, you are my all my puppetz - ph34r!!"
...especially since the #1 problem with timecards, according to a friend who manages a small manufacturing business, is that employees regularly clock each other in/out as favors.
So lets get this straight- it prevents theft and reduces peer pressure("Hey bob, clock me in early tomorrow, will ya? The kid needs new braces.") It involves absolutely nothing intrusive(I fail to see how storing the dimensions of your hand is intrusive) and is merely an improvement on a system that's been in use for almost a CENTURY.
What's the problem here? That biometrics are evil?
Please help metamoderate.
...is people!
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
My major concern in these rigid employee control devices is not so much a privacy invasion, as a reduction in trust and spontaneity. If people don't feel like they can cheat or bend the system a little (sneak in late, take an extra 15 min on lunch), they focus alot more on how much work controls their life.
A little workplace entropy distracts from the oppressive order of day to day work.
For many reasons:
1) Lower pay jobs tend to be hourly. Well if employers are paying by the hour, they want to maje sure they get what they pay for. Likewise by the hour jobs generally include OT pay, which they don't want to pay if they can avoid it. Higher pay jobs are more often salaried so it doesn't matter as much. Sure you may come into work 15 minutes late but you also may be asked to work all weekend at no extra pay.
2) Lower pay jobs tend to be more time oriented, less results oriented. Like McDonalds. It is important that you are there for the time they expect. Why? Well because at any time customers may come in and require your services and you need to be there fore that. Much less important as a software developer. It's just important that you get the software done, regardless of if that happens 0900-1700 or 0000-0800.
3) People tend to care less about lower pay jobs. If you make $5.15 an hour, how movtivated are you to give it your all, really? I know I wasn't. I would have been perfectly happy to slip out if I could. There's quite a bit more motivation if you make $100,000/year to keep your job.
Not saying it's all justified or anything, but there are legit reasons why an employeer would want to keep a closer eye on a lower payed employee.
Its obvious that there are lots of folks here who have never had to lead a team of people to do anything, much less work. Not that I am holding up McD's as a paragon of virtue (they aren't) but this is about as sinister as when a former neigbor of mine let me know that the US Post Office changes the stamps in circulation as part of a world wide code to communicate with the angels living here on earth. :-)
In any environment where you have high turn over finding a way to track workers is critical, especially in low margin businesses like fast food. Business implements changes out of (hopefully intelligent) self interest, not part some conspiracy to "control" workers. Now, do there need to be safeguards in place to make sure corporations don't share biometrics as well as other personal data, absolutely. However, American corporations are so afraid of being sued most only confirm employement dates of former employees, rather than telling the truth, even when the former employee deserves a negative review. So I find it hard to imagine the circumstance where some minimum wage worker's handprint is so valuable that a corporation is willing to part with the data, and take the risk of a high profile lawsuit. The only real exception to this is of course, the government. There is a potential for abuse there, and if I were a potential employee I would like to know what the employer's policy on information requests from law enforcement looks like, ie do they require a subpoena etc. Also how long will the company keep the information would be something I would ask.
If I were to copyright the unique prints on my hands and then could I charge the company for keeping a copy of my copyright in their database or refuse to let them use it ?
some time early this year. Most like to get ready to confiscate them.
Punishment for non-compliance is stiff. The project was supposed to cost $10 million. Current cost is over a billion and rising. extimated 80% of people are just ignoring the law.
I guess it's true outlaw guns and only criminals will have them.
Like the RCMP says "You have no need to defend yourself. Just get on the radio and call us and we will hunt across the entire NW territories to catch who ever it was that just murdered you."
I have no hands, I'm a Thalidomide baby!
Im not sure about fast food restaurants, where employee's get paid minimum wage, but for higher paying jobs, its not so bad.
I once worked for a collection agency not to long ago, and they implemented a palm scanning device.
Aside from durring the winter where people are sick, it was cool, but they did have a hand sanitizing machine right next to it.
In a building with more than 500 people in 1 room, it worked out. No more people clocking other people in and out when they werent there, no disputes about your actual time being there.
And i wouldnt say its a invasion of privacy, no one realizes it, but in a big building (5000+ employees which i've worked in) walking around with your full name, signature and picture hanging around your neck is worse then getting your palm scanned everytime you check in and out Id say.
I work for a company that sells biometric timeclocks. The main selling point is to prevent buddy punches where one employee punches in for another. The system dosn't store the fingerprint. It scans your fingerprint and generates a value using key points. When you punch in you type in your employee number and then your prompted to put your finger on the pad. It then compairs the value calculated to what is stored. There isn't enough information stored to identify you.
If you are complaining about the treatment of this "type" of worker, then do something about it. Start your own utopian company and trust everyone implicitly. Take bets on how long it takes your company to go out of business. Or, send some of your own money to a new charity that supports people with shitty jobs if you are working at a better-paying job. In countries that actually have a minimum wage, why aren't you fighting for the plight of the laborer by trying to get more frequent and larger raises in the minimum wage??
While I understand some of the complaints, one can also argue that hard data about the employee's time spent on the job makes it a lot harder for an a-hole boss to fabricate job performance complaints. Maybe also a drop in litigation against employees, or a drop in other kinds of distrust against employees too. There's good and bad with everything.
McDonalds the Microsoft of the fast food industry. ;-)
-virgo cluster
I've peripherally dealt with a few biometric identification systems deployments, and there are three major factors to consider:
-False positives (%)
-False negatives (%)
-Acceptance
The first two are objectively measurable over time. The latter covers peoples' reluctance to, say, put a DNA probe in their mouth, or put their eye to a retinal scanner for fear of catching pinkeye, or whatnot.
Biometrics themselves can be used to _identify_ someone, but relying on them as a catch-all solution to _authenticate_ is lame (authentication is performed by a combination of what you know, what you have, or what you are--think ATM card + PIN code.) Biometric systems are, under certain circumstances, a good complement to another ID mechanism, no different, for example, than using a GSM card for your mobile phone.
That said, I don't like biometric systems for something like timesheet checking. Aside from the fact that it's undignified and ham-handed (looks great on powerpoint!) there is the danger of non-repudiation in the case of a false positive. Most technical types understand this concet, but do you really think your average manager will believe Joe Frycook that he was present, if for some reason the handprint scanner had a glitch?
The other thing I take issue with is the possibility of a leak or misuse of sensitive data. A time card or ID is a physical object, usually limited to a specific use. However, if an employer has, say, a perfect thumbprint scan of mine, what's stopping him from sharing it? From using it in other, less legitimate areas (hiring a private security firm to check my laptop to see if I'm letting my girlfriend use it, whatever.) Sound paranoid?
It bugs me to see responses along the lines of "if you've nothing to hide, why are you concerned?" I'm concerned because, first, I'm a bit of a naive idealist and believe that people should be treated like human beings, not innately distrusted. And second, I've seen some fairly catastrophic examples of what can go wrong with any technology.
That said, there's a sociological theory that every human being has an innate tendency to want to sabotage authority in some small way--riding the bus without a ticket, cheating on their taxes, etc. My own insignificant little tactics involve trying to make factor #3, acceptance, lower for biometric ID systems--sneeze on eyeball scanners, smear boogers on hand readers, stick gum on camera lenses, whatever.
A few years ago, some German state had to hire private security guards to watch speed cameras, because the locals were taking shotguns to 'em. Cost them a lot of money, and sent a bit of a signal. I'm no anarchist, but occasionally the yay-biometrics mob could use a bit of the same medicine.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
If McDonald's or any other private corp wants to spend its money on biometric scanners for its minimum wage workers, let them. Whether it's cost effective or not is not the issue. It's their money.
If the corp begins to lose money (or make less) as a result of foolish expenditures, then the shareholders will respond accordingly.
It seems like most of the people here are whining about biometrics and several are complaining about companies trying to remain profitable by not paying people for work they didnt do.
How many of these same people in todays job market would leave thier nice cushy job to go search for a new job with reason for leaving their old company being, I didnt want to have my fingerprints taken or my handscanned?
While there needs to be more laws concerning employee safety and rights, just to punch in and out people are complaining an awful lot. Do you have a criminal past? Scared you will be commiting a crime in the future and don't want your prints on record?
While I really doubt any of these companies will go bankrupt without biometrics, why should they continue losing money when they can quickly pay for this new technology just by saving money on people goofing off and not showing up. You know it happens, however people are feeling that its treating them like children. Well, get to work on time, go to work, and dont take long lunches. And dont punch your friends in all the time. If one scanner costs 2500$ it would only take 8 hours x 10$/hour x # of people skipping work to pay it off.
1 month for 1 person doing it (31.25 days).
2 weeks for 2 people doing it (15.625)
10 days for 3 people (10.41)
1 week for 4 people doing it (6.9)
With 50 people crews with high turnover I dont see how a company could pass this up.
So while people certainly have the right to not submit to biometrics, companies have the right to save money by not paying cheats. Why should a company pay someone who doesnt want to work and doesnt show up when someone may want / need that job.
Karma's over rated. Speak your mind.
my son worked at burger king and managed to burn bits of his anatomy several times.
First off, your employer has a right to track your hours. This is a good thing so long as they don't start nickel, diming and whining when your a minute or two late. Biometrics would also be a good thing when combined with your credit card. Pretty hard to fake a handprint or thumbprint. Biometrics could also prevent us sysadmins from constantly resetting passwords. If we used a thumbprint for the pasword, it would be hard to duplicate and hard for users sharing signons (my biggest beef now).
BTW, Fast food isn't the only place the beef about being a minute or two late. I once worked for Meijer, a family owned chain of gorcery/superstores and they would chew you out whenever your one minute late into or out of work, breaks and lunches. I don't know if tehy stil do this, but when I worked, Meijer had a saying...the run for 1. They wanted to have only 1 percent overhead. That meant you sold a lot of damaged goods (at a SLIGHLTLY reduced price) as long as the packaging wasn't mangled too bad. I thought it was nuts and eventually they did drop it realizing it was impossible to do this. Nickel and diming employees regarding their time is just counterproductive and will result in you loosing a employee who may have just had a bad commute or a bad morning wrestling with the kids and is normally on time and a very good worker. I ain't saying you should not punish repeat offenders or even defining a standard, but if someone is late say once in 3 months, I think that is pretty good! Another thing that could be done is for every minute your late, you stay over that many minutes. Also, use overlapping schedules. If you schedule so tight that you can't afford to have people that are late, that's YOUR problem, not your employee's.
Gorkman
That's next. Didn't you hear, soylent green's made out of people!
Ahh, timecards! Remember them? Having to put the flat rock in the dinosaur's mouth at the start and finish of every shift so he could bit it?
Wait a minute...that's Flintstones!
I saw a fingerprint ID system in use 2 years ago at a clothing store distribution warehouse in Los Angeles. The employees used it to clock-in and clock-out of work, and it was put in place to avoid friends punching in and out for each other.
One thing these new systems do offer you is a rock solid alibi (sp?). It definitely proves where you were at that time. As for privacy concerns... well, you were supposed to be at work anyway, right? Is the company getting any extra information by collecting your time entry through this method?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
"punch me in" is a common request when there are time cards or swipe cards. If the swipe card is needed for access you just have your buddy open the door when you get there.
The entity that gets in trouble when this happens is usually the employer, because laws require them to "maintain accurate records" of work hours. The palm print prevents "clock me in" unless the late-arriving employee is willing to make one heck of a sacrifice.
You are grossly underestimating the allure of metrics. One of today's management fads is to reduce everything to numbers. If it can't be easily measured, it must not be important. Managers are told to set measurable goals in their performance planning. This forces them to look for things that can be measured, whether they are material to the success of the business or not. Joe Shmoe being five minutes late may not be important. Joe Shmoe screwing up a metric that is one of his manager's performance goals is a major problem, as it directly affects his manager's performance evaluation and status in the company.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
IIRC, a law was recently passed which allows the FBI to collect a business' records without a subpeona. Which means that if your employer has your fingerprints, so does the FBI.
Someone could very easily lose their anonymity by simply working for the wrong employer. The Burlington Northern example is a case in point - IIRC, employees were forced to undergo mandatory genetic testing; those with a genetic tendency toward carpal tunnel syndrome were fired. Now the FBI has access to the genetic information for every one of BN's employees who was tested.
To be honest, the confidentiality promises a company makes mean nothing. Every company has a disclaimer stating that they will divulge information to comply with law enforcement and some (such as Ebay) make it a point to market this service to law enforcement.
Our lives are no longer private. If it is in a company database somewhere, the FBI now has access to it. The only safe option is to not turn over information you don't want the government to have to anyone, for any reason.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
and who they are?!
OMG!!! PRIVACY!!! BIG BROTHER!!! CALL THE UCLA!!
It's called a timeclock, dumbass. We've got one at work, although I don't use my palm, I use a userID and password. Why? I'm PAID HOURLY. Think my boss is gonna let us tell him "yeah, we all worked 8 hours today" without some sort of proof?
I remember that a Belgian athlete (judo) could not enter the Olympic village at the Atlanta (?) games because he had injured his hand and it was swollen. The palm recognition thing refused to grant him access.. :-(
History matters..
I personally think that this is good for employees, especially the hard working type. Recently there were reports of mangers encouraging their employees to write they only worked 40 hours a week for Walmart when they actually worked more. In this system there is no filling out a time card, and if it is something that is done as you enter and leave, then there is simply no confusion and no room to press people to lie about their hours. I personally like the idea as it would ensure that over time is paid and that people who are late do not drain the company. This can only help hard working employees.
LOSE : To not win, to misplace
LOOSE: Not tight
Yep, that's right, not just coyotes and sheepdogs.
Seriously, I know with timecards, there's the problem of getting someone else to clock you in. Not many better ways to prevent this than biometrics. Michael needs to manage people sometime, maybe he'll figure this out. Let me explain:
You see, the old trick is come in early and clock you and your friend in. Leave early, then your friend clocks both of you out. The company looses productivity, increases prices, passes the cost on to the customer. Everytime someone cheats a company, the company doesn't pay the cost, the customer does. Biometric scans would prevent this as well as keeping recently fired employees out.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
However more important to an employer, another employee could punch a friend in, making it appear as if they were there.
Would a scanned image or photocopy of your palm trick one of these things?
Not that I would encourage this sort of behaviour, of course.
Apparently the people who made the chainmail for the LOTR wore their fingerprints off.
And they realise they have to draw up new regulations that prevents anyone with extensive acid burns to their hands being employed, errr, maybe.
Don't be so quick to jump the gun on this one. Expecting people to be honest is somehow less than human? What about the honest guys who see everyone else ripping off the system, while he has a clear conscience? This will only validate those of us in society who play by the rules, and hopefully stop those who do break the rules. The only problem I would have with such a system would be if it linked up to government databases, or something like that. I would not be surprised given "security" companies' stances lately of profits over privacy. This practice would also, inadvertantly, be able to defeat fraud by management, like cutting people's hours. Most of the time, technology should not be needed, because all you need to do is have communication in place between all members of management. Example "why is Joe-Bob still clocked in?" "he shouldn't be, he left at noon".
I hate sigs.
minimum wage in BC is currently $6CDN or 2.6 pounds for the "training wage" for the first 500h(?). You get people on the bus handing out flyers for the site 6buckssucks.com. One thing that factories have learned is that people have a higher moral when they don't have to use punch cards. Now this probably won't give much better results than punch cards but I'd think that the moral result would be even worse.
now you could argue that hey if they're working at McD's they're probably tranisitory and often with no experience. Sure it'll help with bad employees but it'll also get rid of the good employees a lot faster.
I sounds like they're getting the shaft twice for working at McD's. The difference is that at the fish processing plant they meantion the wage is upto $21ph CDN or 9.1 pounds. He's worried about the bottom line. McD's looses more in left over food than they would in having employees coming 15min late.
either way it sounds like the use of biometrics in vancouver bars to Tracking Patrons.... Go Canada and for anyone having to go through this process, rub jelly on your hands and you'll get a lot of faults in hand reads. The more the faults occur, the more managers will get pissed off that 30min a day or longer is spent getting the machine to work.
Palm-print activated blow dryers?
There should be a law requiring/prohibiting that (Please circle one)
--
Power to the Peaceful
Like where I work. We have video monitoring (digital) but we can't make it show whatever we want. The DVRs watermark it somehow, so authenticity can be checked. Likewise we can't do whatever we want with door records that our swipe cards open, a thrid part controls the system (Amer-X).
Thing is even if the company controls it directly, it'll be the higher ups most likely. These things will phone home to the main headquarters, not be run locally. So local management (the ones who would be doing teh screwing) can't get around it.
"seems that some of the most underpaid and undervalued workers are starting to be treated no better than the animals they are frying up."
Underpaid and undervalued workers? No, if they had a marketable skill, they'd be doing something that paid a real dollar amount. As it is, they are getting paid what they're worth. Why is it that people think that jobs exist solely for the benefit of the employee? Employers pay what is necessary to fill a job, based on the skillset and intelligence required to perform the work. If the job requires no skills or intelligence, then the pay will match. Don't like it? Learn a marketable skill and improve your lifestyle. Or gain experience in the fast food field and eventually become a manager there. Some of those jobs pay a decent wage once you have enough experience and management skill. See? There it is again, that "skill" word.....
As long as it is just private employers utilizing technology to minimize employee theft (by having their friends clock them in?), this is fine.
You can quit your job. You can find another, with an employer who doesn't utilize this technology. You can start your own business and recruit the best employees by advertising that you don't use these products.
When government starts to do this, then we have a problem. Employers have no "power" over their employees -- both can end the contract at any time. Government uses the threat of force to coerce you into following the rules.
Biometrics have been around for quite some time now, and McDonalds is private property. The employees are not slaves, which makes the comparison to animals a huge fallacy. They are free to quit and leave at any time if they do not like or appreciate how their employer or the property owner are treating them.
This is nothing more than an advanced time punch-card, and there is no big deal. This isn't involuntary or obfuscated tracking like RFID, it's overt.
And employers have been controlling employees since the dawn of humanity. It isn't subjugation when you receive a previously contracted rate in exchange for giving the employer control over your resources.
The issue with swipe cards, that palm scanners eliminates, is that people often find ways to cheat the system. Certain individuals will get their friends to swipe or clock them in before their arrival at work. This was a very common problem with time clocks where someone would be late for work and they would call and have a coworker clock them in on-time even though the person didn't actually show up for work until an hour later. That's theft. This system prevents that possibillity as they cannot easily fake the palm scan. This saves the company a lot of money that it would otherwise be defrauded of.
I am aware of a very large produce packing company in south Florida that installed a similar system several years ago for tracking employee hours for the mostly migrant pickers and packagers. Prior to this system it was not uncommon for a quarter of the staff to not show up for work at all yet, still collect a paycheck for a full week's work. The companies facilities are very low tech overall, due to the nature of their business so, it was very surprising to see such a high tech time clock there.
In this particular case they used a number of hand scanners that measured the geometry of the persons hand for biometric identification. The company also found that the process of clocking in and out was much faster with this system as it illiminated the search for the time card on the wall and the examination of the timecard after it was punched. With the hand scanner the worker simply placed their hand on the scanner and when the light turned green it meant that they had successfully been identified and they moved on. Instead of taking one or more minutes for an individual to clock in, it now takes less than 15 seconds. This adds up when you start talking about crews in the hundreds.
This might work, but the fry clerk is gonna have a hard time wiping all the grease of his hands just to check out.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
I don't eat at McDogfood, nor do I believe it is a problem. The quality of McDogfood is already horrible and with these new biometrics, it's going to get worse. I eat at "in and out" anyways, which pays it's employees well with good benefits. In fact, the employee retention rate at "in and out" is unmatched by any fast food company. Aside from the whole mad cow thing, In and Out is by far the best darn burger you can get. Now if only I can get them to open a few in the NorthEast. Damn I miss In and Out.
I am in the time and attendance field. My company sells and I setup biometric clocks along with regular clocks. The hand recognition clock we use is made by a company called recognition systems. You people are too damned paranoid. This system, nor the thumb one we use does NOT take your handprint, or thumbprint. You can really tell if you actually look at the handpunch device. The bottom that you are placing your palm on is an optical reflecting surface (just like the old optical mice). It has these little pegs on the inside and it measures the thickness of your fingers and the length. The thumb system that measures the thickness of the ridges and amount of ridges in your thumb and just record that. It does NOT store your fingerprints, nor does the prior store a handprint. You guys need to RESEARCH what you are complaining about before you complain about it. And this was a poor job of research by the journalist that wrote this article. But they have an excuse, they are uninformed liberals, and definitley not in the technical field to even understand how technical things work. Most of you guys are in the technical field.
Some former employers of my acquaintance (*cough* rat bastard restaurant owners *cough*)used to 'round off' the 20 or 30 minutes I put in past the hour, and I'd never get paid for it. I'd have loved a system that recorded me as on the clock until I walked out the door. Plus my state requires employers to pay overtime for more than 8 hours a day, which they ignored too, and I'd have loved a record I could have taken to the labor department.
Oh well, now I'm a high-paid technologist and those days are behind me. But when I go to a restaurant I'll frequently put cards listing "employee rights" and the labor department phone number on the worst-looking cars around back as I leave.
"...if we kept government quality information, we'd be required to surrender a copy of that information to the government. Now that's scary."
No, it's not. What exactly could the government do with your prints? Add them to the massive database used in criminal investigations? Knowing you were late to work is only of interest to the authorities if you're suspected of committing a crime at that specific time. Perish the thought of you not being able to commit a crime.
G
Oh, and they also take credit for my work and suggestions too!
What do you have to hide?
What they are most likely talking about is hand geometry, where a machine measures the shape and outline of the hand, not fingerprints, or palm prints, palm prints give much more false positives than hand geometry
Having worked in both a Network Control Center, and a semi-conductor lab, I've had to pass through security controls via 'palming' for the last five years. Was only locked in the tunnel once, and found it entertaining, actually.
robotization of the population? just another rumour?
georgewellian fuddite corepirate nazi felons' (Score:mynuts won, does this mean they're not going to return what they've stolen so far/we shouldn't give them any more monIE?)
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 14, @09:25AM (#7972904)
badtoll plan for US, shrouded in greed/fear/ego based ?pr firm? stock markup FraUD hypenosys/deception?
there can be only won? lookout bullow.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators.... get ready to brighten up.
I think the difference is that my biometric data is my mine, and not my employer's. It can be used in various nefarious ways by my employer or someone who steals it from my employer. Thus, I choose not to share it.
If the company needs to keep track of my whereabouts during working hours, they should use something *they* own. I recommend hiring managers who can actually tell if their team is at work on a particular day.
Seems to me allot of the slashdot crowd dont even know how biometrics work.
In many instances, there is no central database that holds the palm print for comparison.
The palm/fingerprints are kept on EACH DEVICE. So to setup a new employee (in this case), You have to bring the employee up to the device, read his palm/print and with a software often connected (temporarily) by a serial port on the device, it will give you a number (26bit wiegand) associated to the palm/print in question.
Palm/prints are kept only on the device and in normal operation all that is sent from the device to the Time & Attendance or Access Control System is this number, more often then not (26bit wiegand).
So all of you who are scared of giving your finger print to an employee can just relax. The most sharing that will be done with your print is some devices can be networked between each other if the side has multiple readers.
I had an job at a popular burger chain in high school, and while yes, there where a lot of people there that were 'just passing through' as in getting an education and exploiting flexible hours, there were also a fair share of individuals who had 'reached their full potential' shall we say. It's the nature of the fact that you're making minimum wage. At the time, we were required to punch in/out by keying our SSN into the registers. (Which might make people cringe, but your employer needs anyway to pay you). This is really no different and arguably more secure. (How many ways can I currently use you palm scan to steal your identity?)
On the animal note... I can draw more references to the average aptitude needed to operate a fry machine than I can to the way people are treated. That and if your treated unfairly at one burger joint, move your damn cheese. Half the places out there required simply that you speak English (an even this might be waved) and that you are breathing/have a pulse.
When they start taking blood samples ala Gattica or feeding worker rendered coworkers, then complain.
I am a SW Developer/SysAdmin for a small manufacturing company and we have a similar system here. Of course it isn't tied into my pay as I am on salary, and my employer is not a stickler if I am a few minutes late back from lunch or in the morning. But point is, working in technology, there is a lot of work that happens outside of the walls of the building, and, for instance, when I get a call at home at 9 pm because "email is down," of course that doesn't show up on the timesheet. I don't love it. I don't exactly hate it though either.
It's all the fucking geeks fault. When do you learn to realize the consequences of your actions? Didn't your mom tell you not to mess with palm scanning? In order to make a few bucks, geeks have screwed up privacy. Now just shut up and live with it, stupid slave.
If I were to copyright the unique prints on my hands
"The copyright does not belong to you. The copyright belongs to God."
That may sound odd to those living in the People's Republic of California, but here in the Bible Belt it isn't too strange.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
... for your company's lack of imagination and creativity.
And obvious lack of humour and iron...y.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Now I just wave the card in front of the door and it magicly opens. I'd rather have to get by a biometric device than an armed guard anyday, biometrics allow you to pass if your authorized, simple and clean, armed guards can be having a bad day and start hassleing you for no reason or just to feel big. A biometric palm reader or retinal scanner can't have a bad day and only hassels you if your info doesn't match the file and machines (for the moment anyway :-) don't have ego's.
Only thing I'd like to see change is that I should have access at any time to my own data, and I should be able to control what my employeer does with that data, although I should have that right anyway as employeers shouldn't be able to do illegal or unethical actions with your data in the first place.
Why do they want to know at what time do people arrive and leave to the working place?
Here you go, in case you are puzzled:
You can't trust people to do the right thing, so must treat them like children or animals.
They should have pay docked by the minute if they're late. Of course if they're a early that time doesn't count, and of course if at the end of the day it takes them longer to finish than the hours you are paying them for, them that must be their fault so they shouldn't be paid for that either.
Compris vous?
TO me that addresses exactly the point raised by the original question.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
...for a company not doing very well. I am the lowest paid employee at my company. ie: all of my employees get paid more than I do. The company has no profits. Sometimes I don't even get a paycheck. Sometimes part of payroll gets put on my personal VISA. Welcome to owning your own business. Imagine how you'd feel in this position, to discover that some of your employees were taking advantage of the situation, by not showing up and getting someone else to clock in? I have an employee who habitually shows up an hour late, takes 2 hour lunches, and leaves when the clock strikes 5:00. Yet complains when his cow-orker, who does the same work, gets paid more. Yeah, I love most of my employees. They do terrific work and I pay them as much as I can afford. But I'd implement whatever I could to keep them in line if they were taking advantage of me.
No really - people are lazy. If one guy can get his buddy to hit his punch card in the morning when he is late - he will. Palm scanning technologies allow verification down to an individual level. It makes a lot of sense. If we all "behaved" in the first place no one would have invented palm scanners.
I've seen a lot of "what's the big deal? What's the issue?" type of posts, so I thought I'd reply to that.
1) the pace of life -> at one point in time paysheets, like everything else, were more relaxed than now out of necessity. People look at their watches all the time and report the time to one who asks only to an accuracy of +- a couple of minutes. True, timecards for a while now have had minute or even second reported on them but...
2) now there is a digital record of it which may be traded and used more easily than a paper record. When you apply for a new job your prospective employer may ask McD for a record of your attendence. Turns out you were 30 seconds to 2 minutes late often, and the enquiring party is told you had a 70% tardiness record.
Or whatever. Things that used to be ok (b/c they were unenforcable) are now becoming not ok (because now they can be monitored). One can argue that the employer has a right to know these things, but that doesn't discount the fact that workers' (effective) rights have just been degraded a little bit more.
Adam
So McD's is just catching up to the gov't. Remind me to sell their stock!
"Ain't I a stinka..." - Bugs
I think the basic point is, if it can identify -- and thus record -- me as an individual, it can be modified to store that information. I, for one, do not ascribe massive malicious intent to the large majority of employers (I used to run my own business, with fantastic employees whom I wish I could have paid more). However, there's no end to the innovative ways in which raw data can, and will, be mined.
... Houston, for arbitrary purposes. Naturally, Administration will, and should, investigate. Do they have a batch of bad readers? They need to find out.
Suppose, for instance, that McDonald's Corp. notices that it begins having an unusually high palm reader error rate with a group of franchises near a major urban area
Now suppose that nothing is found to be wrong with the readers. The only noticeable anomaly is that for certain employees, their palm map seems to be shrinking slightly. Turns out that these employees are losing weight.
Now suppose that news reports begin to surface of an upswing of HIV infections in the Houston area.
So now McDonald's has a serious dilemma. They have an identifiable subgroup of employees who prepare food, who use sharp kitchen implements, who may be infected with HIV. Corporate has no reason to suspect this other than their clock-in reports, but they have to act on it. This is begging for a lawsuit (either for violating the 4th Amendment rights of their employees, or by recklessly endangering the lives of their customers, or for decreasing shareholder value by sitting on the information and doing nothing).
It's not black and white, by any means.
My prison native land
true hostage feel
in every place I go....
And so it goes....
Sieg Hail BIG BROTHER Sieg Hail!!!!!
Throughout history different types of educational systems have been common.
The rich tend to have a mentor/classics home school education where they learn how to think.
The middle class has had a professional education system (apprenticeships) where they learn when to think.
For many years the poor had very little education. It has been proven that educating even the poor can and does raise the overall standard of living, so many nations will adopt some sort of public schooling for the poor. This education system is geared to teach students *what* to think.
It's the students from the last system that will be working in the lowest of jobs, requiring the most control.
I worked during the holiday season in a warehouse that utilized these hand scanners. The scanners streamlined the clocking in/out line except for all of these 'underpaid and undervalued' employees who were unable to grasp the concept of (type in last 4 digits of ss#;insert hand;press enter). Let's keep in mind that, given the chance, most of these employees will cheat the system and do most anything they can to avoid actual work. It is truly sad, but that's a fact. In order to prevent people cheating the system, business are basically forced to use devices such as these to try to keep an accurate record of employees clocking in/out.
Besides, they already have your ss#, and all of your relevant tax information anyway.
But is this so much different ? The point of the post was that people are tagged using bodily properties. If you store thumb ridge count, that's as personal and private as storing minutia locations. There's a whole lot of issues involved in using biometric data for identification. This reference from IEEE Proceedings covers a lot of them: "Comparing passwords, tokens, and biometrics for user authentication", O'Gorman, L.; Proceedings of the IEEE , Volume: 91 , Issue: 12 , Dec. 2003, Pages:2021 - 2040
with cards, what stops a pissed-off cow-orker from
clocking you out several hours early? or simply hiding
or destroying your card? ever try to get a replacement
card at the start or end of a swing shift when no-one able to
issue such things is available?
it's not just illicit clock-ins that screw up the system.
At our office, we've got HID cards and palm readers. You need your card to get in the front door and you need your card *and* your hand to get past reception or in the secondary entrance.
All events from the card reader are logged. We don't use them as "punch in/punch out" devices, they're used for authentication and authorization. Need access to the tape vault or remote comms closet? Use your card and hand. If you're allowed, you're in. If not, why were you trying? Did someone tell you to? If so, who? If not, why were you trying to get in?
If a piece of hardware goes rogue over a weekend, the list of who it could be gets narrowed down quickly by looking at the audit trail. This prevents non-involved people from having even a minute of their time wasted!
Even the cleaning crews have to use this system. We're in leased space so we only authorize certain cleaners to take care of the office. They can't be substituted by the property management and they can't access the Crown Jewels (machine room / tape vault / comms closets). It's about trust. I don't think the cleaning crews are comprised of "bad" people. Bluntly, I have no idea who they are, I have no idea what they're like as people and I have no idea what criteria the property management folks use to do a background check on new hires. Given this, why is it logical to let people you don't know go roaming willy-nilly through an office? Nobody in their right mind would let Joe Sixpack off the street go roaming/rummaging around, would they? Not much difference in the two scenarios, except for accountability. A cleaning crew member "borrows" a desktop, I've got a record of them being there and if it's proven, I can go back to the property management folks and put their necks on the chopping block.
If you've got a business that considers its data and assets valuable and you're *not* doing something along these lines, shame on your upper management. The cost for implementing the entire system (five readers + audit/control software) was less than 10K$USD installed. That's *cheap* insurance where I come from.
Please prove me wrong by posting a link to a scan of your handprint, and in particular, I want to see your fingerprints. No further points you make have any meaning until you do this. Thank you.
Goodness, it's so easy to shut these people up. Or if not, to abuse them. :)
I spent my college years working at an unskilled job with unskilled people. There was a lot of "clock me in when you get there" and "clock me out when you leave". There was also plenty of "clock in from break then finish the cigarette".
You may think it's terrible, just terrible, that they have to "prove" their identity with their palm print. Sorry, it's not. There's very little difference between that and regular punch-in/punch-out, except that this is harder to fake.
So what's the gripe?
Do you have ESP?
An ID card or time clock punch card are tracking one thing. There's a barrier, a limitation. Biometrics does away with that and too many of the people wanting to use it say they have a right to know everything and those objecting are knee jerk or have something to hide. The intent of those people is inherently bad. The old technology curtails them; biometrics lets them run rampant. Recall the arguments over spam where one was that there should be a technological, not a legal solution. In this instance, the technical solution was already there and it's getting removed. Legal solutions are not as good as physical or technical barriers. Legal is what will be left and those wanting to remove the barriers have already
been changing the laws to make them useless as well.
While perhaps I mistated it a bit in the article, I think that tuxette hit the nail on the head later in the replies. If you had read the article rather than just jumping on the synopsis first, you'd notice that the issue is the use of this information (in this case your palm/finger print). While according to McDonalds is being used to simply clock people in and out, what is to stop them from cross referencing with criminal databases in the future or what if two companies with this technology begin cross referencing employee files?
Long story short, it's a slippery slope and a scary thought that there are few protections for these employees (and in this case keep in mind most of them are minors). You can't trust McDonalds to tell you the true ingredients in their french fries, why should you trust them with your biological information??
Cameras at the front door scan for people. When a hit on a known person is made, that person's name is announced.
What I do with that information is up to me... (System: "Your mother-in-law." Me: *hiding in the basement*)
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
There would be no palm reading errors. The machines automatically update the template they have internaly with updated info on the hand for that paticular employee. So if you are losing weight (or gaining weight from working the fry station!) it is gradual enough that the averages it takes from your hand will be adjusted. The employer has no way to know this. If they developed their own handpunch (which i'm sure they didn't) then they could probably add the functionality that you are speaking of, but I know these readers could not identify anything even close to what you are speaking of. Also as far as "identifying" - it is very possible to have a similar hand, so I'm not sure that the hand template would hold up in court for identification purposes. Also the clocks don't report changes in templates at all. It's not a function or value you could recieve from the clock. I guess that functionality would be added, but I'm sure it won't for reasons you state. Not everyone is out to get you. :)
I've read probably about half the >= +2 comments, and I saw a lot of them bitching about "reducing the employee to a string of numbers". I'm not sure what company these folks work for (or if they even work), but guess what? You already are a string of numbers to most places.
:) (And for anybody that cares, I'm all for privacy)
Take your job for example. What's the easiest way to keep one employee straight from another one? Assign some type of unique identification to each one. The easiest uniqie ID thus far has been a number...you don't run out of them!
Now, you have to keep in mind that this number is really only used on the backend systems...the payroll system, the employee benefits system, the HR system. You don't see employee #57823 greet you with "Hi, 23884!" do you? If you, please stop reading now, and find a new job. Your co-workers are freaks.
And metrics? Yeah, they're important. It's important for a company (or at least most companies) to make money, correct? So you need to know where you are spending your money to figure out how much you're gonna have left. One component of this is, you guessed it, finding out how much you're paying your employees! Now these hourly folks, you don't want them clocking each other in when they're not actually on the job, or otherwise finding a way to cheat the system (disclaimer: all systems can be cheated in some way)? In other words, getting paid for time they didn't work? Of course not. Would you pay the plumber for time he wasn't actually working on your clogged toilet? Pay the auto mechanic for time he wasn't working on somebody else's car? Pay the web monkey for time he wasn't marking up a webpage? No. You're not going to waste money.
So you're going to have your bosses, or at least the accountants in your company, run numbers to find out where the money's going. And this kind of thing isn't new, it's not some metrics trend, it's been going on for quite awhile now.
What about some other places? Do you think that store cares to know your name? The big one you buy your clothes at? Of course not, what possible use does that serve them? The mom and pop shops might, but they can afford to, that's their allure. But the larger shops aren't in the business of knowing the names of all their customers, they're in the business of providing you with a large selection of products to purchase. The larger entities in society don't care to know your name. There's no reason to know your name.
Yes, it is true, you are a number to them. Yes, they can probably track you and find out that "Customer #349374 likes to purchase grapes, red t-shirts, and fishing magazines, so we need to market product X to them". They can probably match this stuff to your home address and begin mailing you circulars.
But that's more to do with privacy which isn't going to be touched on here
--mh
But these items are nowhere near as unique as an actually thumb or hand print or DNA. We have seen people with similar hands be able to punch for each other and I'm sure the same goes for the thumb reader that just measures amount and thickness of several ridges in the thumbprint. We sell more of the hand readers beacause of the paranoia of a thumbprint though. I think it's probably more common to have a similar hand than a thumbprint.
That is, some organization agrees with some individual the reward some measurable quantity of presence (duration) or labor (unit/piece work.)
Since the detection of presence or count of piece work is essential to the contract between employer and employee, it is not surprising that the employer, who is burdened with record keeping, calculating wages and the pre-tax, tax and post-tax deductions and issuing payment to the employee and everobody who has a legal claim to some portion of the remuneration, find some way to lower the cost of keeping track of the presence or units of work.
Since the costs of payroll processing are fixed, presence detection and/or piece-work counting is the only portion that can be automated to streamline the process.
If that smacks of "Big Brother"ism, would you rather have to argue about it and possibly not get paid at all?
Now what COULD be considered as "Big Brother"ism is if the same technology was used to provide other information. I don't think I'd want my boss to know when I'm having bladder problems as this does not really affect my thinking processes, just the frequency of my visits to the bathroom. That's just too much information.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Whoopeee
Yet another way to spread bacteria from one employee's hands to another before they handle the food.
Maybe a retinal scan would be better.
I'm not a fan of "technology can solve anything" like many here, but I'm getting tired of the automatic "if some higher power than me uses technology they are evil and squashing the little guy" mentality that is yet again echo'd in this story submission.
This isn't the little guy being dominated anymore than they already were. This technology is used by many people for authentication and time carding. Datacenters use palm scanning devices as the defacto standard these days to verify you didn't steal a key or access card. All it does is make existing procedures less prone to abuse. The people who should be afraid are the abusers, not the average Slashdotter.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
I challenge the Presidents, CXO's, Vice Presidents, and each member of the Board of Directors of Biometric companies to post the following on a freely accessible URL:
1.A high-quality picture of their hand scans.
2.A high-quality picture of their fingerprints.
3. A high-quality picture of their signatures.
4. A digital copy of their Iris scan.
5. Their birthdate.
6. Their Social Security Number.
7. Their Drivers License Number.
Personally, I'd be happy with items 1-4. I can get the other items myself.
It is quite clear that if they were to do this, then they would have complete and total confidence that their info could not be abused; or at the least, easily repudiated.
It is also quite clear that if they don't do this, they are fully aware of the serious problems and abuse which can result. In which case, they are simply selling snake-oil to make a quick buck, and we can place absolutely no confidence in any of their products.
So in other words, put up or shut up.
sounds like bacteria soup to me, imagine a palm scanner during "cold n flu" season =)
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Woolworths Australia has been using fingerprint scanners for signing in and out of work for at least seven years. I used to work in one of their stores in 1997.
The fingerprint was only used for verification, not identification (you had to enter your employee-id first). The system was easily cheated though: it was possible to use ANY finger to idenitfy yourself, not just the one that was initially scanned, you only had to press it hard enough onto the scanner.
Last time I checked, they were still using the same system. 0x2a
WHAT? Are you NUTS!?
It's bad enough that we have to goad the employee to wash their hands EVERY time.
Now, who is going to wash the palm readers?
This is the multiplier effect that we dont need in a food preparation setting.
Besides, how do we revoke our very own biometric if someone fudges the database to imitate anothers?
My friend used to work at McDonalds. McDonalds employees are actually paid reasonably well in Canada. They're treated quite well, too... it's a very good job here. And the benefits are fantastic.
Personally, I'd much rather have a machine read my palm print than carry around a time card. But maybe that's just me.
I think every time a new technology for personal identification emerges, there are questions about the implications for privacy, and rightly so.
I believe that the moment we stop questioning new tracking methods is the moment the really insidious ones will begin to be implemented, whatever they may turn out to be.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Where do you work? I would like to apply.
It seems that some of the most underpaid and undervalued workers are starting to be treated no better than the animals they are frying up
Why does a company tracking whether or not their employees are lying to them constitute being treated like an animal?
A company is expected to pay you for the hours you work (when you're not salary)... so if you worked 80 hours and got paid for 75, you'd be pissed off!
The reverse is also true, if you SAY that you worked 80 hours, but only actually worked 75 then your company should be pissed!
This is the best way to ensure that people are not stealing via the time clock. If you're paid $7.25/hr and you cheat the clock out of 30 minutes a day 5 x week you're stealing about $20 from the company. Would you expect a company to be ok with a bunch of employees just taking $20 out of the register each week?
Someone who says "this is wrong!" is either also a cheater or a black-footed hippie, because there is nothing immoral about this at all.
It's called a "timeclock," and they've been around for a century or so. Palm scanning is new, but employee timecard fraud ("Hey, man, I'm gonna be late for work. Can you punch me in so I don't get my lazy ass fired?") isn't.
The reason those "underpaid and undervalued workers" are underpaid and undervalued workers is because most of them can't can't hold down a better job.
Well, I really, really hope that these people who could be handling my food are going to wash their hands after they get to work anyway...
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
That recording can be easily mis-used, without your knowledge or control, to cause you harm in a false-positive situation.
Is it paranoid (with respect to the opinion of the average citizen)? Yes. Is that okay? Yes. Why? Because in this age the voters have chosen to let their government have A LOT more power over them than the last age (ie. about 25 years ago). Voters want their peace and comfort and are willing to pay almost any price for it, even if it means handing an absurd amount of control to the government.
If the government was made of perfect people who never made decisions that benefitted themselves at the cost of the citizens depending on them, there wouldn't be a problem. But instead we have a government made up of imperfect people who will and have made decisions that benefitted themselves at the cost of the citizens.
As a paranoid but possible example: Say you are standing on a street corner waiting for a friend to pick you up in their car, and there is no one else around. There happens to be a bank right behind you, and it's being robbed at that moment. Your friend happens to pick you up just seconds before the robbers run out of the bank, but you're facing the other direction so you don't see them. The bank customers are scared for their lives and demand that the bank owner do something otherwise they'll pull out their money and go to another bank. The filthy rich bank owner is outraged and demands to the mayor that the culprits be caught within the next few days or he'll stop making "large sum donations" to government programs. Well, it turns out the robbers could not be identified because they wore masks, and time is running out so the mayor does something dirty and has you arrested claiming "you were standing outside the bank as a lookout person" during the robbery.
Yeah, it's a weak example, but it can still happen. They'll have a recording of you standing there, where as if it was a police officer patrolling the area he'd see you but probably wouldn't even remember your face because you obviously didn't have anything to do with the robbery.
There have been points made about this not being intrusive, or that it's evil,etc.. Personally I feel that like any other kind of technology it is only as trustworthy as the people who wield it.
'If you want to control a whole bunch of people, it's the only way to go.'. Control? McDonalds, and other min. wage shops already "control" their employees by giving them so little money, inflexible hours, and constant threat of termination, I fear to think what they could accomplish with more of it.
One of the great flaws with an electronic system (Voting, time-card, billing, other) is how easy it is for the system owner to manipulate the data with absolutely no evidence of the manipulation at all.
If in a year or so we learn that a mega-corp like Walmart has been secretly deducting worker hours by a couple of minutes each day, the only thing that will surprise me is that we learned about it at all! A well planned scheme by an unscrupulous employer would be impossible to detect.
If the city police were willing to use a picture of you leaving the scene of a crime to "prove" that you were involved in it, they'd be perfectly willing to do a lot of other things without the technology. Say, Officers A & B would both claim they saw your car (randomly selected out of all the people who used the ATM that day, for instance) leaving the scene at the same time...
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
At my workplace, we all have ID cards that have our face printed on them. They also have a barcode to scan or in some cases an RFID chip (used on ID cards that have to have access to RFID-locked doors). My old company had an RFID card for everyone. And everyone knows that the military has had RFID/Biometrics cards for their employees for ages.
surely you see the psychological and political and philosophical difference between swiping a card and swiping a hand/finger/eye.
Stealing is stealing, that's true. But McD's also needs to loosen up and respect the employees with extremely flexible schedules. McD's can call someone in for one hour if it suddenly gets busy and then tell them to go home as soon as it's empty. To demand that from someone and then have the balls to say "the scanner says you were punched in for 59 minutes, I'm not paying you for that extra minute by rounding up to an hour!"
That attitude is that of Scrooge from the famous Christmas story. You don't see people cheering for Scrooge like: "Scrooge is a good employer, he pays his employees for working those hours and nothing more". If Scrooge added a biometric scanner what would your opinion be?
For another example, let's assume they have some kind of benefits package for full-time people, but you have to work 30 or 35 hours a week to get it. Now A works 60 hours a week, and B works 10 hours a week. (Or, more likely, works somewhere with better pay but no benefits.) A clocks himself in as B about half the time - and they're both getting benefits.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
These kids make minimum wage! 10 minutes = $.86. The US Minimum wage is so damn low to begin with. I bet you are at your office right now. These kids don't get to fuck around on /. like us, and they make like no money. --Sure all the discounted burgers they want, and free refills on their soda as long as they keep their cup.
Anytime these fast food giants make strides in effiecency at the expense of their employees demonstrates just how little they care about anything but $.
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
What if you have twins? Are their fingerprints different??? If they also are the same, isn't this (rare?) problem ...
If you look at one of the plam readers offered by one of the leaders in biometric devices, Recognition Systems, you'll find that they don't "scan your palm", they take various measurements of your hand, compress it down into a 9 byte template, then store the template in conjunction with a PIN or other credentials (like a swipe/HID card).
When you enter your PIN or swipe your card, it calls up the nine byte template from memory that goes along with that PIN/card.
According to my contacts at Recognition Systems, the system has adjustable sensitivity as to how tightly any given scan must match the stored template for that PIN/card. If the match is outside of the given range, no access is allowed. If it's in, no problems, walk on through. It boils down to a usable uniqueness of about 1 in 50,000 (for every 50,000 people, you'll probably have two that will have similar templates).
Combine that with a PIN/card and you've got a good authorization/authentication device that *DOESN'T* give away your personal identification details any more than a hash of your password gives your password away. Really, it's ok. You can put your tin foil hats away now.
The device they are using doesn't scan the palm, it takes some geometric measurements and stores it in a local memory bank. The company that makes it is Locknetics or Recognition Systems which is owned by Ingersoll Rand. Here's a PDF on the device. Handkey Reader The user actually has to enter a pin number first so it locate the proper memory bank to find the geometric template. Or this can be done with a card reader also.
Everybody who works in a fish processing plant or fast food joint will essentially get a chance to shake hands. I hope they washed after using the john.
It seems that some of the most underpaid and undervalued workers are starting to be treated no better than the animals they are frying up." Except for the frying part.
It's regularly quoted that the London Underground, in summer, gets so hot it would be illegal to transport animals to slaughter on it. That's OK though, they're just transporting humans and we don't have the same animal cruelty protections.
If people were punching holes in my hand, I'd want to make a rubber hand, too.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Upon discovering this as the manager I'd have fired Juan. And if his cousins didn't have green cards I'd report them to INS. There are a lot of HONEST immigrants out there that would appreciate the job (not to mention citizens). Hard working or not, Juan was putting his bosses ass on the line should INS or whatever government agency catches Juan screwing the system. ESPECIALLY if management became aware of his scheme and neglected to remedy it.
A big part of the solution to management treating its workers like cattle is for the workers to stop behaving like stupid cows, come to work on time and to an honest days work. I know there are many that do, but it's the bad ones that spoil it for all. In turn, management should openly reward employees for good, honest work instead of crapping on everyine because of the problems 25% of the staff make being bottom-feeders.
If low-level workers had a better work ethic there would be more trust between management and labour. There was more at one point but work ethic has slid a lot since the "good old days".
Juan should've been up front with his boss about needing to work so much that his family would have to fill in, and his family should've made sure that they could all get green cards should they be required to work. Your friend/his boss was not doing him any favours looking the other way. He was exploiting the situation for cheap labour and if he was REALLY concerned about Juans' welfare he'd have rewarded his hard work by training him for a better job and promoting him (to the cook lines or to server or whatever), or at least paid him a humane wage so he wouldn't have to work two full time jobs to support himself.
It'd be refreshing if he could keep his personal opinions the hell out of story submissions.
If you, as an employee, are unwilling to use
this fingerprint scanning device, does that
mean that you are a Chicken Finger?
Leave it to Michael to be a Douche.
Fish plant workers in Delta and Richmond BC have some of the best paid union jobs in the province. But thats because you smell like dead fish at the end of the day. My mother worked for a few years at one of the fish processing plants, she only stayed because it paid very well.
I thought this story was about fast-food workers, not teachers. Since when are these people underpaid and undervalued? They may not make very much money, and they may have to work a lot of hours and do mundane tasks, but what VALUE do they really offer to society? Not that they don't deserve respect for the job they perform, but they would not be anywhere in the top 100 undervalued workers. Not every job has the same value in our society. Our society rewards some pretty ridiculous jobs in our society, and rewards some only a fraction of their true value, but fast food workers are not one of those.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Someone wants to build a better punch clock, and all people do is complain, and say the old system was good enough.
Whether you like it or not, biometrics at the workplace helps you catch the slackers. A workforce management system that uses biometrics is, in my opinion, most needed at places of employment where employees are hourly-waged. I've worked in the past at retail stores like Toys R Us and I saw a lot of inefficiency in the employees that were hired. In an idealistic world, the employees hired would all be mature, responsible adults but we all know life doesn't work that way. You will always have the slackers slip through the cracks. The only way you can catch them slacking is by tracking their activities while on the clock as best you can. If you are on a 9 am to 5:30 pm shift, you better clock in at 9 am and clock out 5:30 pm, not clock in at 8:30 am and clock out at 7:00 pm unless that overtime was approved by your manager. Every department/branch of a company is allotted a budget and that budget has to be maintained as best as the employer can.
Companies like Timera have developed incredible workforce management systems that use biometric devices (currently fingerprint scanners) to discourage bad clocking in/clocking out behavior from employees (e.g., clocking in too early, clocking out too late, taking too long of breaks) and thereby increasing the efficiency of their workforce and weeding out the slackers. HEB (grocery store chain) utilizes the Timera EWM system and I am very curious as to how much money they have saved thanks to this system.
Before any of you start whining about loss of privacy or how companies don't trust their employees enough, put yourselves in the employers' shoes and think how you would feel if you were losing money due to employees claiming more time on the clock than they were allowed, or if they were not actually going to work and were instead having their friends clock in for them.
So, why are you actually storing the fingerprint data in the first place? Why not store a hash value that is the result of an encryption using the palm/handprint as a key? This would give you a couple of things: 1) still the ability to validate the person using the device is the person (since each hand/fingerprint is unique, we all have a unique seed for a private key) and 2) no need to pass data to the government. Heck one could set the resolution as high a they want and still be OK.
That's all well and good until you lose your hand in a workplace accident. I have a hard enough time getting my swipe card replaced today...
It seems that accumulated fish guts would eventually gum it all up. Are they gonna put scanners in the restrooms to make sure people wash their hands of fish-guts so that the scanners at the exit work?
Table-ized A.I.
I would have no problem with using one of these as long as the company I work for put in writing that:
1) The biometric data (hand/fingerprints) will NEVER be shared with ANYONE for ANY reason.
2) All biometric data will be erased when my employment is terminated.
If they can agree to, and put in writing, those two things then I would be happy. I can understand the reasons to use such a system. Paper cards cost money, co-workers punching in for other people, speed up the punch-in/out process, etc. but it's a two way street. They would have to agree to the above before I would ever use it.
It's a good thing the world sucks or we'd all fall off.
The number one problem I have with the current structure of the workplace (at least the American one) is the emphasis on time served instead of work accomplished.
Eight hours seems too arbitrary (depending on industry, of course), and I suspect that's why you have people skimming ten minutes here and there: they're done with the work for the day!
Maybe if employers measured work instead, there'd be fewer slackers to thwart.
A friend of mine used to work at McDonalds and he often had others swipe his card for him when he called in sick. He'd get the day off and still get paid!
You ever work in a hot restaurant?
Okay, maybe it's not actually "frying". Might be broiling since there's a lot of sweat moisture involved.
Depends on how greasy you are to begin with, maybe.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Gives new meaning to "punching the clock".
--
make install -not war
In McDonalds NZ, a little LCD hooked up to a keypad, is where you put in your number and, press "in" etc. It isnt really possible to clock another person in, as the shift manager always checks who is going on to the floor.
If you are anymore than 2 minutes late you get a warning. If your break is 1-2 minutes over, you get a warning. Talk about hard lines.
Maybe its time for some new human rights laws to keep up with technology. For example a law that says everyone has the right to not be forced to use their physical body for identification (apart from a simple photo id) and they must be given a choice - eg a swipe/photo card instead of palm prints or iris recognition. Are their any current laws on your biometric rights? The only law i know of in the UK that even comes close is the Data Protection Act which is pretty cool. Its certainly time for governments to think about it.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
controll of the data.
When I leave the company, will they delete my palm print data?
Will they turn it over to authorities without a court order?
Is there something in place to say I was at work if the scanner says I wasn't?
what happens when it malfunctions?
Is the scanning system trusted implicitly, and the worker always suspect?
Those issiues need to be dealt with before this system is implimented.
Personnally I thyink its an outrage when you can't take someone pictures when they are in public.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I don't think using biometrics to help accurately clock hours on the job is in itself especially intrusive.
I'd be more worried about the security of the stored biometric data used to authenticate. The company/admin now has the information necessary to represent themselves as you within any similar system.
Perhaps it's just my lousy cooking skills, but I don't think this would work for restaraunts because I frequently change my finger/hand prints on the grills.
You're nothing; like me.
As a worker in the medical field, my employer uses this technology. Whenever I clock in, I just enter my code then insert my fingers between the pegs (for lack of a better term) and squeeze the pegs for about a second or less. If successful, the system, if not it asks me to reinsert my hand. When I clock out I go through the same exact procedure.
real geeks hate soap operas.
I for one welcome my new bio-metrically knowledgeable overlords.
I really have to ask 'what?' on this one, as a person who has worked at timeclocked locations and had to carry around a stupid card all the time to check in/out (a card I often misplaced, since it had to be easily removable to swipe), when I read this article I thought to myself 'cool that's a great idea, and nice thing for the employees'. Yet there are dozens of posts about possible security concerns?
If your emplyee wants your fingerprint for some illicit purpose, they can get you to handle a glass object and lift it later. Heck, they could probablly just plain ASK for your fingerprint 'in connection with a series of food store thefts' and you'd hand it over without a second thought (since you diden't steal any food), or perhaps after a second thought, but that thought being 'it's not worth loosing my job over it'.
So if it's that easy to get your fingerprint, what has the instalation of a biometric reader really done? It's made life easier on the emplyees, who no longer have to carry around a stupid card- BUT it's also made life harder on the employees who cheat the system by getting there buddy to clock them in early.
Besides if your so terminally afaraid of your fingerprints being stolen, why don't YOU (the theoritical emplyee of mcdonnalds who dosen't like his hand being scanned) insist on something else being scanned, like your lucky hat, or somesuch. Something tells me they woulden't care, but they might check to make sure you don't get your buddy to check you in a LOT (which they have the right to do). Also I'm sure they woulden't care if you wore a glove during the scan (just make sure you allwase have that glove, and don't go crying to mannagment the day you forget it).
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
Where I have lived, experience indicates that you don't get good people to work these jobs (or that it is difficult to find and retain them). I worked at a (not well managed) fast food restaurant, and our turnover was 1.5-2 the total number of workers employed (at one time) in three months. Where I live now, no one wants to do these jobs, so, of course, the response here is to advertise them more. At the (not well managed) restaurant, competency only got you more work; if you were promoted to manager, you weren't paid much more but got lots more responsibility; eventually you would get fired for some stupid reason (usually within a month or so). If there's no way to effectively reward or promote good workers, and a suboptimal level of pay, you get the level of turnover I saw.
If you can't get good workers, then obviously the people who might work there think that their time is worth more than the employers want to pay them. With the (at best) mediocre work conditions and the operating assumption that the workers are criminals, how do you expect these places to get good workers when they can't recruit them now at the current levels of pay and crap? There is a big difference between what reliable workers think they're worth and what their employers think they're worth (or are willing to pay them). This has been a persistent issue, and my locale's technique of low pay and heavy advertising doesn't seem to work at getting people to accept these jobs. Wages haven't risen to attract people (as theory would posit), and employers can't attract the people they want at the wages they pay. If you can't make a product because nobody effective will work for the money you can afford to pay, you can either find other benefits to offset the pay, or admit that your business model is infeasible. (You can also hire people from other countries willing to work for less, but because the goods can't be made elsewhere and the desired pay won't cover the cost of living here, that won't work).
I'm left to wonder if it is the employees' understanding of their value that is incorrect or if their (prospective) employers' understanding of their value is incorrect.
Reminds me of an episode where Krusty went counterculture and convinced the other characters to burn their cash as a protest.
It's a spooky idea. If they use it to replace locks on doors, thats got trouble written all over it. Anyone remember a while back that a person defeated a biometric lock with A FREAKIN' GUMMI BEAR! Anyways.... it could work but it would just be more stuff to clean, repair, replace, and maintain.
I don't see the issue. the employer has a right to check your background for criminal activity. No?
I'm from Delta! (Ladner to be precise)
There are lots of fish there.
There's no difference between this and needing a security badge to get in and out of work every day. I used to do that sort of thing. In fact, I still do. As far as the treatment of people in low paying jobs go, I seriously doubt the person who posted this is a plant owner who pays top dollar for unskilled factory workers.
You have "covered the cost in salary penalties"... good for you.
You don't seem to have made any assertions about having changed employee behavior, and you also havn't discussed the lost intangables(sp?) like how often your employees sit at their desks thinking "those but-munch managers dock me for 1 hour, I'll take it out of their hide... I'll just blow off two."
Not to get all biblical but "don't muzzle the ox who is trampling out your grain." That actually means a lot.
An example, I worked for a company that had strict "no personal calls" rules. Looked really good on paper but it was expensive as hell in that people would be sitting around for half the day worrying about elements of their personal lives that they could have resloved with five minutes on the phone "on company time". When I worked for a company without those typse of restrictions much more got done.
So now I will pull out Ben Franklen "Peny Wise, Pound Foolish" (for the surprisingly large number of those who don't know, in this usage it's "pounds stirling" i.e. "dollars" etc.) meaning that when you pinch your pennies and you will often hemmorage your real money.
Also remember that everybody has a little larceny lurking in their souls. A lot of really talented people "get off on" being able to "get over on their employeers". Sometimes it is stealing post-it notes, sometimes it is in shaving time. When an employer starts playing the game for real, and take extreme measures trying to stop this, they will almost invariably be screwed on the back end. This doesn't make your employees bad people, just regular ones. This is a game youusually lose by winning. (if you catch my meaning...)
Techonolgy cannot solve social problems and a strict time keeping system that doesn't have any latitude for shy the employees are skew to the system, really doesn't pay off long-run. When you treat your people as untrustworthy they will stop being worthy of your trust.
In point of fact, even without the technology, everybody at the company already knows who the slackers and the losers and the ought-to-be-fired(s) are already. You don't need a timeclock to tell you that. Find these people and fire them, then give everybody else their slack.
For instance, I for one, have about six hours of "good programmer time" in me a day. But I am very very good in those six hours. Once I get tired I star making stupid mistakes that take longer to undo than to make. When I get that tired I stop and either do paperwork (of which I have very little to do) or just go home. Sticking to this policy I end up producing some of the tightest code we have. A lot of my research, reading, and planning takes place informally and off the clock. That wouldn't be practical at your company, I'd just have to sit in jail for those couple hours a day/week/month. Goody, "I think of my job as jail!" That's just *GOT* to be "saving" you loads of money.
People rant about the RIAA treating their customers like criminals, but it is a bigger mistake to treat your employees as interchangable cattle and/or theives.
It's dumb.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Whether the ill-will generated within his gulag costs him more than the total time he would have lost with a loser Richt Fuhrer...
In short, do his employees "waste" more time "on the clock" because the clock is so strict?
It is easy to imagine that people who would "steal" time by shaving it would be "quite inclined" to "take back" the pay they were docked by wasting twice as much time while at work. And then they'd bitch and moan about it too boot.
The single most common form of employee revolt is literal obedience compounded by ill will.
There is more to the ballance sheet than the dollar figures.
This is *EXACTLY* as dumb as the RIAA treating their clients as thieves, or SCO suing their customer base.
Treat people as thieves and, sure as rain, they *will* steal from you.
The actual problem isn't that the incidnce of theft *of time* (real shrinkage in the form of stolen merchandize from a retail or wholesale business is a different issue) is significant, it is that it *seems* significant if you only look at the dollar values *and* you are unwilling or unable to fire the known dead-wood.
Lets face it, everywhere you have ever worked, *everyone* knew who was worth it as opposed to who were the fekless inexplicable losers. You also wondered how those people didn't just lose their jobs right away. There is the only "real" cost. Turning a blind eye to the normal amount of time shaving and post-it note theft is actually much more useful and cost effective in the long run. Having your employees against you is like having cancer, it can go on for a long time and cost you all sorts of health and opertunity before you become aware that it is killing you.
If this is a union shop, where you *cant* fire the known-bad and unworthwile, then you need to get all technological in self defense. Baring that extreme condition of mutual emnity it is unbelievably bad to rule with too iron a fist.
You won't know how bad though, because it is hard to measure refusnik behavior and harder still to account for bad will. How many transactions a month do you lose to customers not liking the feel they got from your employees? How long would it have taken a happier and more "trusted" employee to put together that FratBaz report? How much money would have been saved?
The problem with the iron-fist aproach is that once you go down that road you can never have enough iron in your grasp. Fine, you time your employees arival and depatrure time. What about smoke and bathroom breaks? Time spend "reading reports" in the cube farm? Email read and respond? Coffie break? Collaboration visits with coworkers? Time in the copy-room?
When you construct a jail, you only really control passage through the outer wall. Making sure everybody "does their time" isn't the same as building a profitable enterprise.
Really, do some reading and then ponder the similarities.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I have never worked at a job in my life where there wasn't someone who would have instantly noticed if I had done any of these things.
They're delicious
I've put these into my biz...many people are scared at first that their finger prints are going to be taken and "used" but...most of these "palm readers" convert your hand shape from knuckles down to a number average then computes your score tied to your ID and first time enrollment....So no finger print or image is stored of the user.
Why is everyone so afraid of their Government getting the biometric information? If you think this is what your Government wants and you are afraid of it then elect somebody else. If you're worried about the Government holding power over you, think about what you can do about it legally and morally to stop them. Keep informed about what the world thinks of your Government and don't let them use War as an excuse to retain power.
All of what you said is correct - but that doesn't mean that the value of the position is very high. I am speaking of true value to society. To illustrate this, imagine if half of the fast food positions vanished overnight. Whooptie-doo. If half of our fast food restaurants had to go out of business, it wouldn't be a big deal. Now imagine if half of the hospitals did. Or half of the police stations, schools, universities, waste facilities, fire stations. If we lost half of our airline pilots, construction workers, factory workers, etc. Those are the ones that give us more immediate value. Then there are the writers, poets, artists, chefs, wine makers, musicians, research scientists, who contribute more to the long term value of our culture. And we do need jobs that aren't of high value, and that doesn't speak ill of the people who are in them. But don't tell me that a worker at McDonald's is undervalued.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
What if I showed up to work and clocked in at 9am, left at 9:30 for a "dentist appointment" without clocking out and back in, took a two hour lunch, spent the rest of the day reading slashdot, then clocked out at 5:30?
Just knowing when I clock in and out doesn't guarantee that you're getting your money's worth of my time, after all. People will find ways to beat any system. Wouldn't it be better to just trust the employees and reward the high performers (and fire the low performers)?
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent