CATEGORIES
- NYC COVERAGE
- WEB STARTUPS
- WEB NEWS
- CONFERENCES
- WEB TECH JOBS
- VENTURE CAPITAL
- MICROSOFT
- INTERVIEWS
- ADVERTISING
- VIDEO
- ALL TOPICS
- ALL COMPANIES
CONTRIBUTORS
- ADRIAN CHAN
- ALICIA NAVARRO
- ALLEN STERN
- CORSIN CAMICHEL
- DRAMA 2.0
- DARREN HERMAN
- HANK WILLIAMS
- MARK DAVIS
- RICK TUROCZY
- SANFORD DICKERT
- SHANNON CLARK
- Comment on YouTube Down by DVS01
- Comment on Twitter COO Costolo: Advertising Coming To Twitter Soon by Satoshi Nakajima
- Comment on Twitter COO Costolo: Advertising Coming To Twitter Soon by OMG Stop the Web! Twitter is gonna run ads ? and Scoble says you?ll love it
- Comment on What?s Up With Yahoo Mail Delivery? by MJ
Man Fired Thanks to GPS Tracking
John Halpin, a 21 year employee of the NYC school system was fired yesterday for accepting pay for time worked when he allegedly was not at work. How do they know he wasn't at work? It appears that they were monitoring his activities using the GPS functions of his government-issued cell phone.
The NY Post reports, "Schools Chancellor Joel Klein yesterday fired a veteran worker whose movements were tracked for five months through the GPS device in his cellphone, leading to charges that he was repeatedly cutting out early."
He said he was never told that the cellphone he was given in 2005 could be used to monitor his every move and questioned the accuracy of the data it produced. The judge issued a decision saying the Department of Education was under no obligation "to notify its employees of all the methods it may possibly use to uncover their misconduct."
Only 2 states in the U.S. require a company to let an employee know when they are using a GPS tracking device. We know of companies who monitor Internet and phone usage, now they are tracking movement.
What's your opinion: Is this big brother or is it OK for a company to monitor an employee's movements during their on-duty time? Is the answer different for a Web worker?
I agree 100% with the decision. I see it going on around me all day everyday at my place of employment. People like me end up doing the job while they are getting paid for not doing anything. They are the first to complain about not making enough and in constant need a raises. A lot of my people also lean on discrimination as a defense of their wrongdoing. Such actions by employees are nothing but pure robbery. When you accept the position, that says it all (that you would earn your pay not use the system)
I Think it great. I just started tracking my 4 employee vehicles and all of a sudden they seem to be around the office in afternoons if they are slow. before i never saw them…it was like they were always cover up with work. I found my units at http://www.ggppss.com if anybody is interested. I spent days doing research and this is the one i chose.
j
It is OK to monitor provided there is due disclosure. Did the terms of the contract prevent an employee from loaning his phone. Does it mandate having the phone all the time. There are days when I leave my phone in my car / home. There could be situations similar to there.
Again , the catchword is “repeatedly”. Obviously, this employee was doing this too often.
The employer should disclose that they will moniter… then it would save the cost and effort on the employees part to actually monitor. The threat of it would likely be enough to keep an employee from ditching work early. Really though, was he leaving ten minutes early or an hour?? How “fair” and legitimate was the concern? Also, if the employee is paid hourly it seems it would matter more than if he were paid salary. If salary, then he should be judged and level of production and quality/efficiency of work not so much time spent.
Public employees are notorious abusers of the system…it doesn’t matter what country they are from. School boards are even worse. That’s why our taxes are so high. Because incompetent lazy staff like this guy get away with murder..
They have been doing this in the cable/phone business fleet trucks for years already. Any company with a really large stable of vehicles puts GPS in it. The stupid people that get fired are the ones who think they are invincible due to tenure and push their luck. It sound like this dude thought he could get away with it and did, for a very long time.
Do something wrong and expect to get caught eventually. It’s not brain surgery.
I don’t like it mind you, I do my fair share of slacking on the job, but jeesh man, be mindful of technology.
It’s really bad that someone’s movements were watched, without telling him about it. Had he been a threat to society, say a terrorist or something, then this monitoring business could have made some sense, otherwise it’s not good that employees are being monitored without telling them. Doesn’t it create a tense and unfriendly environment? I wouldn’t comment on if cutting out early was good or bad on that employees part but monitoring employees like this is not good.
Keep in mind that it’s not that he was leaving early, it was that he claimed to still be there, but was in fact leaving early. He was defrausing his employer of money, not just being a slacker. As for the rightness or wrongness of the situation, the phone is their property, they can track it however they want.
theft is theft. unauthorised absents is theft. Cost of living will decrease when allunnecessary employess are removed. this dishonest thief was unnessary.
Is this big brother?
No, because it’s not on a wide scale.
Is it OK for a company to monitor an employee’s movements during their on-duty time?
No, an employee should be judged on his output or what he produces, not wise use of time.
For instance, say employee A works faster than employee B. Employee A produces 34 widgets in a day, but only works 5 hours. Employee B produces 24 widgets a day, but works 8 hours.
Would it make sense to get rid of Employee A because he’s cutting out from work early? No, he’s your better producer.
Is the answer different for a Web worker?
I don’t think so. The same principle applies. An employee should not be judged by how he uses his time, but on what he produces.
You aren’t allowed to record a phone conversation without someone’s permission. You can’t put video cameras in bathrooms. If a cop finds evidence without having a warrant or probable cause for suspicion, he can’t use that evidence in a court of law. This should be viewed the same way. Hopefully law will catch up with the new technology.
This is definitely okay. I never would have that there would be much use for it in the academic field, but in the service industry, this can be invaluable resource.
As an employer or supervisor, you can use the GPS in a lot of cases to make sure your employee is not billing for hours they did not work. That can be extremely helpful if you have employees that bill for a lot of overtime hours.
In addition, it can be helpful to the company and the employee together. Say you send an employee out on a job. The employee goes out there, does the job, and leaves. A day or two later, an invoice shows up in the client’s mailbox. Now, say that the client calls and says “I don’t think the job was ever done. In fact, I don’t think you ever even showed up at my house.”
If you have GPS tracking enabled, you can prove to the client that your employee was, in fact, at their house, and you can prove the amount of time they spent there.
If you work in the service industry long enough, you will run across issues like this. We started making sure that our employees left paperwork (with carbonless copies that we kept) at all job sites, no matter what they did or how much time they spent there. In addition, for some clients that we knew we would have problems with, we had the employees snap digital photographs (with time stamps) when they arrived on the job and when they left the job, to show that the job was done and how long it took to do the job.
Unfortunately, with the way lawsuits are handed out in this country, I don’t see it being too long before some service personnel need to start video-recording all of their movements on job sites.
Conley: at a big office most contracts say that employees phone conversations can be recorded without your permission.