Revisiting the “Big Brother” Issue, or, more appropriately .. Do Employers Have Control Over Workers??
Filed under: GPS Successes, GPS Tutorials, GPS for Business, Uncategorized
Some employers say GPS has delivered immediate dividends.
At Automated Waste Disposal, Viento says that before he installed the system this past spring, drivers of his 22 front-loaders were clocking about 300 hours a week of overtime at 1.5 times pay. 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 just 70 hours — substantial savings for a company whose drivers make about $20 an hour.
The company has also installed the GPS receivers, roughly the size and shape of tuna cans, in its salesmen’s cars. Using his computer, Viento has set digital boundaries around a local bar he says some of his company’s salesmen have been known to frequent around 4 p.m., when they’re supposed to be calling on customers.
Some workers have grumbled openly about the new technology, but accept that it’s not their choice to make.
This quote comes from amuch more extensive and well-written report here
Time and time again this single issues seems to dominate the question of how useful GPS tracking of employees is. The referenced article is nearly a year old, and I have been doing this work for many years now. We still spend more time dancing around the question of just whom do employees work for?
The person who signs their paychecks? On themselves, by some sort of God-given right that let’s them collect the money of someone else and work when and if they want to?
If you read the subject article you’ll even see a quote from a union representative that makes me so mad I could SPIT. I won’t even quote it here. How the organizations that brought up the downtrodden workers of the world can now adopt such ridiculous pay for cheating policies just amazes me.
If you run a business and want to know if you have a problem or not … then simply take a free trial offered by many GPS Tracking dealers and see what happens … I bet you’ll get a surprise.
If you’re an American worker? And you’re bitching about cost of living allowances and jobs being exported to India? The you better ask yourself if you are giving your employer the hours and minutes she or he is paying you to perform.
By the way, GPS vehicle tracking is a very hot item right now in India .. apparently workers there are happy to have a job and don’t spend so much time complaining that their bosses expect the workers to hold up their side of the contract.