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."

Comments

If you're on the clock..

[dustinbarbour]

..then you need to be doing only business related tasks. That is unless you have an understanding with your employer. Period. Kaput. Nothing else to see here.. yadi yadi yada.

Re:If you're on the clock..

[stupidfoo]

Notice who posted this? Michael of course. Another big business is bad, poor little employees. Oh, and lets look to the our uncorrupt and pure friends at the Teamsters union for comfort and help.

Why shouldn't a company be able to know where their truck and equipment and products are?

Like another poster said, it's not as if they're tracking their employees when they're at home.

inevitable and unstoppable

[exhilaration]

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.

Sure, it sucks if you're a slacker, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

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,

Of course the Teamsters don't like it

[The I Shing]

Of course the Teamsters don't like it... I can see it now... "So, either of you fellows care to explain why you drove the delivery van over to Mario Calienti's office and then drove it and a cement mixer over to the waterfront?"

Re:Of course the Teamsters don't like it

[LewsTherinKinslayer]

"So, either of you fellows care to explain why you drove the delivery van over to Mario Calienti's office and then drove it and a cement mixer over to the waterfront?"

Because 8-Ball's shop was closed.

Seriously Sims, Give It A Rest

[the_mad_poster]

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.

Re:Seriously Sims, Give It A Rest

[DNS-and-BIND]

"When the bosses talk about improving productivity, they are never talking about themselves"

Re:Seriously Sims, Give It A Rest

[Herkum01]

The question for me is when you give executives millions in salary and stock options and they have little oversight of their actions. You do not have to look too far to see this behavior (Lord Black, the paper baron or Micheal Eisner handing away a $140 million severance package). These are people in charge of hundred of millions of dollars.

A GPS system to micromanage a $10-20/hour employee seems to be small potatoes.

Re:Seriously Sims, Give It A Rest

[stupidfoo]

$15 an hour * 100,000 truck drivers = $1.5 million an hour

$1.5 million an hour * 40 hours / week * 52 weeks /year = $3,120,000,000

A little bit more than the money they pay their execs.

Re:Seriously Sims, Give It A Rest

[wwest4]

> If you have a problem with your employer making sure you're doing your
> bloody job, then quit.

Aren't there more black-box ways of determining whether I've done my job without gathering extraneous information that invades my privacy? I see problems with the Big Brother approach as not dealing with root cause.

Example: At my workplace, we have a loser who is significantly less productive than his counterparts. He pisses his day away looking at the Internet, talking at the water cooler, forwarding unfunny internet apocrypha and jokes to everyone, and eating 15 meals a day.

He eventually gets his work done, but he does it so slowly, that he is not worth his salary.

Instead of enacting policy that cripples everyone else in order to deal with his particular loafing strategies, doesn't it make a lot more sense to fire him for not earning his compensation, barring a better excuse (health, etc)?

No. Why? The litigious nature of our culture? Personal feelings interfering with management objectivity? Who knows. Whatever it is, I'd like to find out so that I don't have to implement another custom snort filter or whitelist instead of just firing the loser.

The flip side of this is that it disallows me from accepting a job that is easy for me. If I choose to work at Joe's Tape Backup Emporium, and I am compensated for the duration of my time pushing catrtidges, and my work requirements are met, I don't see why I cannot read a book during the downtime (can't leave, but I'm idle). Just because I'm capable of exceeding my quota, while Johhny Newbie has to concentrate 100% just to match me at 50% effort, does not mean I should be compelled to share the benefit of my personal efficiency with my employer if he does not compensate me more than Johnny. If he's not paying me more for my efficiency, why does he care if I'm reading or staring at the screen? The right answer is that he shouldn't, but he does because people like getting shit for free. However, I see no justification of the position that you must work until it's a grind for you. And that's what pervasive monitoring could lead to, because it's always in the employers' interest to squeeze you for all you're worth at the cheapest possible price.

Re:Seriously Sims, Give It A Rest

[Skye16]

Yes, but be realistic. Every single driver isn't going to slack off and not do their job every single hour of every single day for an entire year. I agree it's still a lot of money, but it's nowhere near 3 billion dollars.

Re:Seriously Sims, Give It A Rest

[The FooMiester]

Aren't there more black-box ways of determining whether I've done my job without gathering exraneous information that invades my privacy? I see problems with the Big Brother approach as not dealing with root cause.

How better to figure out where someone is at a given time than a GPS unit that phones home? What other black-box solution do you suggest? Alot of them are already carrying the hardware needed to impliment this(nextel phones do it for one).

Invades YOUR privacy? How about protecting the owner of the company's assets?

Instead of enacting policy that cripples everyone else

How does a black box in a truck, or a cellphone that you carry anyway cripple anyone? Or did I just get trolled

Thus spake the article

[nizo]

This past summer, for example, managers at Metropolitan Lumber & Hardware in New York worried when a new driver dispatched to a delivery just six blocks away still hadn't arrived after 3 1/2 hours. But using GPS, dispatchers soon tracked him down, "goofing off" on the other side of Manhattan, said Larry Charity, the company's information technology manager.

Remember, the way to get out of this is to lock yourself in your trunk when the boss shows up.

I am looking forward to an automatted "potty tracker" that keeps track of how often I and my coworkers visit the restroom each day. Maybe everyone can give their tracking devices to the new intern (wow look everyone is in the bathroom at the same time).

Hasn'y This Been Common With Truckers?

[reallocate]

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.

At my work..

[doormat]

We've been tracking our field staff using Airlink CDMA PinPoint modems. Not only does it provide our field staff with cellular-based internet access for our web-based field applications, but it also provides us with GPS coordinates of the device every 5 seconds. It also came in handy when one of our trucks was stolen a while back, it was easy to track it and find it. We just cant wait 'til they upgrade the modems from 1xRTT to 1xEVDO. 200kbit/s wireless access!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Cool advantages of this tech

[syslog]

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

As someone associated with UPS...

[ObiWonKanblomi]

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?