I think you raise a lot of good points here. Driver retention has been and continues to be a serious problem in the industry. Excessive/invasive monitoring only makes that worse. If you overuse or abuse those technologies, your driver turnover will increase.
On the other hand, there are some things that technology has brought to drivers over the last several years that they really like. Online access to load information is a big hit. So is the ability to transmit paperwork - via images in our case - back to the home office instead of overnighting it. The drivers at the company I work for like it because they get paid faster.
The bottom line is that if a company wants to take care of its drivers it has to use these technologies responsibly. If not, drivers will leave.
There are still a lot of tractors on the road today with OMNITracs units in them. It's hard to believe how long those things have been around. However, laptops with nationwide cards and smartphones are replacing them every day.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you raise a lot of good points here. Driver retention has been and continues to be a serious problem in the industry. Excessive/invasive monitoring only makes that worse. If you overuse or abuse those technologies, your driver turnover will increase.
On the other hand, there are some things that technology has brought to drivers over the last several years that they really like. Online access to load information is a big hit. So is the ability to transmit paperwork - via images in our case - back to the home office instead of overnighting it. The drivers at the company I work for like it because they get paid faster.
The bottom line is that if a company wants to take care of its drivers it has to use these technologies responsibly. If not, drivers will leave.
There are still a lot of tractors on the road today with OMNITracs units in them. It's hard to believe how long those things have been around. However, laptops with nationwide cards and smartphones are replacing them every day.
Why didn't TVA prevent employees from hitting the site to begin with?