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Bosses Keep Sharp Eye on Mobile Workers
camusflage writes "AP is running a story on the penetration of GPS devices and monitoring of fleet operations. Such technology is hitting the mainstream, with UPS distributing 100,000 GPS-enabled handhelds 'to alert them when they're at the wrong address.' One driver is quoted saying, 'It's kind of like Big Brother is watching a little bit. But it's where we're heading in this society.' Needless to say, the Teamsters weigh in on the negative side on the whole thing."
It's unfortunate that this is happening but I don't see a backlash happening any time soon. The job market is too tight and most people will just roll over and accept it until it's so pervasive that we won't remember what life was like without the leash around our necks. Kinda like marriage.
GPS is a Godsend to most folks. I use my tomtom GPS with my Palm tungsten in the car ALL the time. You can keep GPS info for most of the first world on a 1gb SD flash card (less than $100 these days) and never need to worry about getting lost.
Cheers,
How is this an issue? Explain to me, please, how having oversight of the people you're supposed to have oversight on is a bad thing? Guess what? We track our employees via time clocks, quality assurance, and production quotes. We know where they are all the time while they're here, and if we don't, they're punished for being somewhere they're not supposed to be.
Yet another example of the reason that slashbot crowd simply does not have it's collective head planted anywhere near reality. If you have a problem with your employer making sure you're doing your bloody job, then quit. Be unemployed. When this starts to become an issue of people trying to monitor their employees in their homes or when they're off the clock or something, let me know.
I have a new opinion of the YRO section: anything that appears in it, especially if it's posted by Comrade Censorific Sims, is something that doesn't matter, and I shouldn't care about. This section is only good for keeping me up to date on all the things that aren't an issue and nobody needs to know about.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Can't recall the name, but remember reading several years ago about a U.S. trucking firm that did real-time tracking of all its trucks, monitored their fuel consumption, speed, how long it took of load and offload, if they deviated from the designated route or schedule, etc. Apparently resulted in serious efficiencies and serious revenue, with little grousing from drivers.
This doesn't seem to me to be a grievous problem. Employees don't have the right to use the boss's time and property as they choose.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I wonder how hard it would be for a third party to get this information? Knowing exactly where a big van full of boxes of stuff is right now would make it quite a bit easier to pillage said truck wouldn't it? Or maybe a competitor could conveniently get people to interfere with traffic and slow them down along their routes, things like that.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
The funny thing was overtime fell from 10 hrs / week (per employee) to 1 or 2 hrs / week once people knew they were being watched.
The other funny thing was the guy we caught going to his GF's house for a noon-er. Imagine that, pulling up for some lovin in a 2-ton garbage truck.
Not a civil servant. UPS, not USPS.
Regardless, your point stands. The truck is the property of UPS. UPS is paying the driver to take a package from point A (depot) to point B (delivery location).
If said driver spends a lot of time at point C (donut shop ? 'discreet encounter' ?) and claims upon his return that he was caught in traffic? Who pays for that?
Shareholders and consumers. And that's just crap.
There are other places where it would be handy - transit systems could use it to nail bus drivers who decide to run 5 minutes early, or catch up from time lost on their cigarette break by driving recklessly. I've experienced a city bus driver trying to make up lost time by driving a 10 or 20 ton bus more than 20km/h over the speed limit (faster than I routinely drive my car) - when I got off at the next stop I was sure to let him know that I didn't feel safe, and was waiting for the next bus solely because of his reckless driving.
If the location and time were logged , the transit system would have had solid data to prove how fast he was driving, and could have taken appropriate disciplinary action. Just knowing that the speed and timing data are recorded could add safety, and ensure that buses don't run too early or late. The only thing worse than waiting 15 minutes for a late bus is having to wait 15 minutes for the next bus because a driver chose to ignore his timing points.
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
We (www.agilissystems.com) make software that can GPS track cell phones and beam jobs down to them. There are some pretty cool advantages to this tech beyond just tracking people. The following illustrates this:
One of our customers is a large midwest grocery chain that has a fleet of trucks that deliver all kinds of groceries to their stores. All the drivers carry our GPS tracked cell phones - the cell phones lists the jobs (deliveries) that the driver has to do that day. As soon as a driver is done delivering at one store, the system automatically calls the next store in line (using VOIP via Asterisk, no less :) with the estimated arrival time. The store preps its loading dock to receive the truck. This allows them to turn the truck around quicker than they could otherwise. This leads directly to significant savings (more deliveries per truck, fewer drivers needs etc etc). They don't care one zot of where their drivers are, just that their stores are ready to unload their trucks when they arrive.
</shameless plug>
Oh, and a quick note. Don't be fooled into thinking thats its only GPS enabled devices that can be tracked. We can (and do) track *regular* cell phones using cell tower triangulation as well
-naeem
I work for Roadway at a terminal in Bloomington California. I do not drive trucks, but I load them and I am a Teamster. It's hard for me to believe that the GPS systems are being used to monitor employees for abuse of time or whatever. On the dock that I work on we probably damage close to a million dollars worth of freight per day, with no repercussions. We also have cameras, but they can only be used for damages and theft, they cannot be used for abuse of company time, so I'd think the GPS rules would apply in the same way.
This is a by-product of UPS's Industrial Engineering unit with the aim of not keeping an eye on their employees as much as making sure packages are sent as quickly as possible.
Without this unit you wouldn't have packages sent as quickly to you thanks to their research in creating systems to determine the shortest land route to deliver as many packages as possible or track packages accurately.
This is with the aim of helping deliveries of your amazon product or thinkgeek gear get to you as quickly as possible. What's the problem with that?
Monitoring Law Enforcement
Choice quote:
I hate to sound like an employer, but I really get the feeling that the only people opposed to this sort of stuff are those who are used to taking a little personal time now and then while working. The article above goes on to deal with FOP complaints. I don't personally understand why people think their job should be unsupervised, particularly those who work for the public.
Do you have ESP?
You like to complain about how big brother is controlling you and how bad it is. Meanwhile you have never been on the employer's side of things. I have and I know how employees are your biggest loss, weather its theft or stealing time they always want more to do less. I am sick of the typical /. whiner crying about how the big corporate employers are always fucking the little guy meanwhile it's the little guy who always is the one trying to get one over the employer. It also doesn't matter if the business is big or small, most employees don't give a shit about the employeer they just want money and more of it. In a business you have to make ends meet and that means shelling out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in utility bills, insurances and taxes per year. The typical whiney employee only has to show up and do his/her job. They have no responsibilities outside of what there job is. They don't have to deal with demanding customers, bills out the ass and the stress that can take a toll on ones physical health.
It's the companies right to track there employees productivity whether you like it or not. If you're so damn paranoid about them watching your productivity then maybe you're not doing what you are supposed to do. Sure there are bosses who might try to abuse there employees, but what percentage of them will?
I know I will be flamed for this and so be it. Unless you have been the employer putting up with employee bullshit then I don't want to hear it. Most people on this damn sight are either too young or too damn lazy to comprehend what goes on beyond there simple job.
"I doubt, however, that most of these companies are using them to spy on their drivers, the benifits (better schedualing, accident handling, tracking if stolen) are outweigh the drawbacks for people yelling about their privacy. Its the way things are heading, and if done right, can make things a bit better."
You know, the privacy aspects don't really concern me (I'm at work anyway...) These systems, IF USED INTELLIGENTLY, can be great. If the point is to determine system bottlenecks, route improvements, etc. and then IMPLEMENT them, great.
But all too often they are used as a means to "encourage" people to work faster without common sense (gee, you took 60 seconds at that stop, we only want 45 seconds-I don't care if you had to deliver 10 100lb boxes 200ft up some steps....) Or improvements are never made because that takes real work and is likely to step on some important persons toes... People get lots of numbers and forget that how fast you can do things in the real world depend upon things out of control of the employee or that the employee is a person who has good and bad days. That is why I think people hate these systems. This is the reason that I am leary of them.
I currently work for an road side assistants company (you know the guys that come out and help if your car brakes down) and we just install GPS in all of our vans to;
Yes I know that point 2 seems a bit big brotherish but really we had no choice. We are not for profit organization where all the profit we generate goes back into making the service a better service and it was found that the contractors we hired during the busy seasons where making up to 60% of our costs I was also found that 70% of the contractors would find a nice shady spot to park for majority of the day and take maybe one or two jobs that day which that would later claim took up the majority of their time.
I know there are other ways to make sure they are working IE commission basis. But that turned out to be fundamentally unfair as it is was really pot luck if your sector was busy that day or not. So the only really way to make sure we where getting value for money was to track them and make sure they where doing what they claimed to be doing.
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
"And the problem with that is... what?"
False hits.
At my previous job, I was busted once for reading Slashdot at work. Stupid thing was, the one time they caught me, I was actually doing work. I was looking at the source code for the home page to solve a problem I was having with the website I was working on. Sadly, I had two monitors, and my boss looked at the left one with the web page on it and not the right one with the source code.
In the end, I was able to explain to my boss what I was up to and all was cool. But if she had 'busted' me by looking at logs of the sites I were visiting, I would have risked being terminated without being given a chance to defend myself.
In the case cited above, this guy was clearly wasting time. But if bosses/managers get so in tune to just reading the logs and hitting the 'fire' button, what rights would the employees have? Managers in particular have a bad way of summing up a situation with too few facts. The last thing I'm interested in doing is arming them with more details to make their decisions with that would cause them to make up their mind before the employee has had a chance to defend him/herself.
"Derp de derp."
I work for one of the major cable companies and all our company vehicles have a gps in them. The techs weren't told when they were first installed. We watched a guy drive in a 4 block circle for 3.5 hrs. Get rid of the dead weight. The other big thing people are missing here is the safety aspect to having a GPS in fleet vehicles. Somebody is missing in poor weather, you can find them quick. We had a guy fall off a ladder and broke his leg and couldn't move. When he was late for his job we found his truck and had a tech go out there to see if he was ok. Who knows how long he would of been there (and it was a very cold day, -10F).