DANBURY, Conn. – Ciro Viento commands a platoon of 110 garbage trucks, so when a caller complained after seeing one of the blue and white trash tanks speeding down Route 22, Viento didn’t know which driver was to blame. Until he checked his computer.
With a few taps on the keyboard, Viento zeroed in on the driver of one particular front-loader – which, the screen showed, had been on that very road at 7:22 a.m., doing 51 miles an hour in a 35-mph zone. Gotcha.
More employers are adopting technology similar to the system used by Viento’s company. As they do, workers who have long enjoyed the freedom of the road are rankling over the boss’s newfound power to watch their every move – via satellite.
The technology, global positioning systems, is hardly new. But using GPS to track workers and vehicles is catching on with a growing number of business and government employers bent on improving productivity and customer service, and keeping tabs on labor costs.
“If you’re not out there baby-sitting them, you don’t know how long it takes to do the route. The guy could be driving around the world, he could be at his girlfriend’s house,” said Viento of Automated Waste Disposal Inc., a commercial and household trash hauler doing business in western Connecticut and neighboring New York counties. “Now there’s literally no place for them to hide.”
Some long-haul trucking companies have used GPS to manage their fleets for years. But the range of employers adopting GPS – usually fitted in vehicles or in cell phones and other devices workers carry on the job – is broadening, particularly among companies dispatching large numbers of service technicians, in the building trades and others whose workers span wide territory.
UPS Inc., for example, will distribute new hand-held computers to its 100,000 U.S. delivery truck drivers early next year, each equipped with a GPS receiver. The company says the feature will not be used to monitor workers but to alert them when they’re at the wrong address or help them identify an unfamiliar location.
But for many of the employers adopting the technology, including many smaller firms, the primary benefit is not just the ability to smooth business operations. They want to keep closer track of workers who aren’t always doing what they’re supposed to be doing, even though they’re on the clock.
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 31/2 hours. But using GPS, dispatchers soon tracked him down, “goofing off” on the other side of the city, said Larry Charity, the company’s information technology manager.
“There’s less of that now that they know they’re being tracked,” he said.
Other employers are taking a similar approach, not just to track workers but to influence their behavior.
“The capabilities of people at the dispatch level are becoming more and more, I’d say, almost omnipresent,” said Ron Stearns, an analyst who follows the GPS industry for consulting firm Frost &Sullivan. “Not only to monitor an employee in the field, but to govern what they do.”
GPS, developed for the military in the 1970s, keys off a constellation of satellites transmitting signals from space. At its most basic, GPS allows a user to locate a person or object carrying a receiver.
But the systems being installed by employers can do much more. Companies are harnessing GPS to tell them how long their employees and vehicles have been at a specific location, what direction they’re heading in and how fast they’re moving. Workers are expected to use GPS-equipped systems to clock in away from the office, and log the time spent and activities performed at each stop along the way.
At Automated Waste Disposal, Viento says that before he installed the system last spring, drivers of his 22 front-loaders were clocking about 300 hours a week of overtime. Once the company started keeping tabs of the time they spent hanging out in the yard before and after completing their routes, and the time and location of stops they made along the way, that plummeted to 70 hours – substantial savings for a company whose drivers make about $30 an hour on overtime.
Some workers have grumbled openly about the new technology, but accept that it’s not their choice to make.
“It’s kind of like Big Brother is watching a little bit. But it’s where we’re heading in this society,” said Tom McNally, a driver for Automated Waste Disposal.
Companies that sell GPS services say employers have every right to track their workers while they’re on the clock. But the systems are designed so privacy can otherwise be maintained.
“If you start a lunch break, we stop tracking,” said Ananth Rani, vice president of products and services for Xora Inc., whose worker monitoring software runs off cell phones. “At the end of the day, we stop tracking because what you do after the shift ends is private and what you do before the start of the day is private.”
GPS can be a boon to workers, documenting claims for overtime pay that employers might previously have disputed, said Krish Panu, president and CEO of At Road Inc., a service provider. Some employers, using the systems to track how many assignments a worker completes, use it as a means of awarding incentives rather than punishment, he said.
“This is not about tracking people. It’s about managing the business,” Panu said.
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