I read an article in The Age about employees committing suicide then their family saying GPS trackers in work vehicles were a contributing factor.
Employers are fitting out their fleets of company cars with invasive GPS tracking systems despite claims the technology unnecessarily invades staff privacy and contributed to the suicide of a Telstra linesman last year.
What the?
I know there are companies putting trackers in their fleet vehicles. Some even do it without telling their employees, and that I have a problem with. But when the employees know a tracker is there, what’s the problem?
Personally, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. I have been wanting trackers in our work cars for ages. For one, it would mean an end to filling out that stupid log book. And to people forgetting to fill it out, and filling it out incorrectly, etc. And secondly, I know there are people that do abuse the resource, and this would put a stop to that.
The fuss seems to be about invasion of privacy and lack of employer’s trust for employees. But there need to be allowances for this resource to be used with flexibility. How flexible is the employer willing to be with their vehicles, and how they allow their employees to use them? The problems arise when you get draconian employers using minute details in the data in unfair ways.
An employer that respected their employees would develop some simple software to examine the data collected and find obvious patterns of abuse, then take appropriate action against the abusers. They would also clearly state their policies on vehicle use, and any thresholds that would constitute abuse. These policies would be developed in consultation with employee representatives, aiming towards a fair balance between flexibility and efficient use of company resources. For example, employees could be allowed to stop and pick up milk on the way home, etc.
Our company’s policy states that stops of less than 30 minutes during a journey do not need to be recorded in the log book. So an employer’s policies would need to reflect those they had before trackers were introduced. When employers learn to respect their employees and reflect this in their policies, devices like GPS trackers would not cause as much upset and may even be welcomed.
Update 16/8: Added quote from article.
What you said sounds good to me.
I guess this is just another example of The Age being crap. It’s like A Current Affair in print.
Huh? I’m surprised you say that about The Age. It’s meant to be the good one isn’t it? I always thought the News Ltd. papers e.g. Herald Sun were the trashy tabloid ones. I don’t read The Age much, except what appears in their Tech RSS feed. Could my faith in Fairfax media be misplaced?
To me the article was reporting on claims and accusations made against such employers then stating what some people involved had to say about it. The Telstra employee’s suicide is actually old news.
I remember watching the 4 Corners report mentioned in the article a while back (transcript). Search page for “GPS” and start reading from there.
Reading that again reaffirms my disbelief in how people are so willing to accept unfair working conditions. Somehow they feel powerless to do anything about it. I can only comment on the OHS legislation of NSW, but there are explicit provisions in there protecting employees from dismissal should they raise Health & Safety concerns. So what’s stopping them?