On the Road Again, But Now the Boss Is Sitting Beside You

[R. A. Hettinga]

<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB108448724279211265,00.html>

The Wall Street Journal


 May 14, 2004

 PAGE ONE


On the Road Again,
 But Now the Boss
 Is Sitting Beside You
Workers Chafe as Businesses
 Embrace GPS Trackers;
 A Cop Caught Napping

By CHARLES FORELLE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 14, 2004; Page A1


After hearing complaints that police officers in Clinton Township, N.J.,
were doing a lot of loafing, Sgt. John Kuczynski sprang into action.

Without telling the patrolmen, the internal-affairs officer installed a
global-positioning-system tracking device behind the front grills of
several patrol cars in the spring and summer of 2001. Then he used a laptop
to keep track of each car's precise movements on detailed maps.

Sgt. Kuczynski soon netted five officers loitering over meals or hanging
out in parking lots. Their log books indicated they were patrolling the
townships' streets or watching for speeders on its three highways.

Four of the officers pleaded guilty that year to charges of filing false
records and were barred from working in New Jersey law enforcement. A
fifth, Barry Krejdovski, a then-28-year-old officer who was literally
caught napping on the job, disputed the charges. He was convicted in
November on the records violation and a more serious charge that was later
set aside. Three of the officers who pleaded guilty are suing the town to
get their jobs back.

As employers increasingly turn to GPS technology to keep track of their
fleets, more workers are balking at having the boss constantly looking over
their shoulders. Independent snowplow drivers in Massachusetts staged a
demonstration at the state capitol last year after they were required by
the state to carry GPS-enabled cellphones. Washington state garbage
collectors are protesting the installation of the devices on their trucks.
And Teamsters union officials are watching closely to make sure the devices
aren't used to punish employees.

Developed in the 1970s for military use, GPS relies on a cluster of
satellites orbiting 12,500 miles above Earth. The satellites emit coded
signals, which a ground-based receiver can pick up to triangulate its own
position. GPS trackers remained expensive niche products through much of
the 1990s largely because they were difficult to use and it was expensive
to relay location data from a moving truck back to a company's home base.
Now, thanks to the spread of cheap cellular-phone service, the devices can
send the information as easily as a commuter can make a call from the road.

Without clear limits on when the devices can be used to track workers,
employers are testing the boundaries of GPS. That's especially frustrating
to independent-minded workers such as truckers, who have long treasured
their freedom from close supervision. Many of those workers are accustomed
to being paid for specific performance -- getting a shipment from one place
to another, for instance -- and chafe at the idea of having their routes
closely tracked.

In King County, Wash., the municipal government is installing GPS receivers
on the roughly 200 tractors and trailers that haul solid waste between
landfills and transfer stations. Theresa Jennings, the county's solid-waste
director, says the primary purpose of the system is to improve efficiency.
Supervisors, for example, can automatically determine which trailers of
trash have been waiting longest at depots.

But last year, Teamsters Local 174 filed an unfair-labor-practice charge
with the state's public-employee commission, arguing that the installation
needs to be subject to collective bargaining. The union contended that
drivers have been told they could be in trouble if the tracker reports they
are straying from their routes. The union missed a filing date to provide
more information, and the charge was dismissed, though the union says it
will refile if a driver is disciplined. That hasn't yet happened, and the
union has sought written assurance from the county that it won't.

George Raffle, the union organizer who was responsible for the filing, says
trucks follow set routes, so there's no need to use the GPS devices for
routing. A driver might exercise his judgment to avoid a traffic jam or
slick roads, but a supervisor might see that as an unauthorized detour to a
side road, Mr. Raffle says. The trackers "don't take into account all the
unknown factors: road conditions, weather conditions, what's the load," he
says.

Ms. Jennings says that the county doesn't as yet plan to use GPS tracking
to punish drivers, and so no bargaining is necessary to install the
trackers.

The national Teamsters union is closely watching a plan by United Parcel
Service Inc. to include GPS capabilities on its next generation of delivery
scanners -- the electronic tablets that store delivery data. A Teamsters
spokesman said the union isn't necessarily against the use of tracking
technology but stressed that safeguards need to be in place to "ensure that
it doesn't result in an invasion of privacy or is used to "get" an
employee."

UPS officials say the company is as much as two years away from actually
using GPS on the scanners. They say that the company would use the
technology to improve customer service -- for example, to quickly reroute
packages in transit -- and not driver discipline. UPS already has GPS
devices on its tractor-trailer trucks, which haul packages between
warehouses.

Last December, snowplow operators in Massachusetts marched outside the
state capitol to protest a new requirement that they carry cellphones with
GPS receivers. As independent contractors paid by the hour, they feared the
highway department would use the tracking data to unfairly squeeze their
payments. Satellite tracking equipment, they complained, could wrongly
label a plower stuck in a traffic jam as napping by the side of the road.
The Massachusetts highway department said that it is confident the devices
can accurately track plowers.

After hundreds of plowers packed a rowdy legislative hearing at Boston's
State House, the highway department partially backed down. The compromise:
Drivers began carrying the GPS phones but are being paid according to the
old-fashioned paper timesheets they submit. The contract runs until the end
of the year.

In Mecklenburg County, N.C., a sprawling district encompassing the
Charlotte metropolitan area, officials say a new GPS-enabled dispatch and
routing system has shaved 10% off the time it takes ambulances to respond
to emergency calls. The system automatically tells 911 dispatchers which
ambulance is closest to the call and provides the best route to an address.
The system, based on software from California vendor ESRI Inc., also
captures historical data about travel speeds, allowing dispatchers to route
ambulances around potential rush-hour trouble spots.

Sabby Nayar, a marketing manager for MapInfo Corp., a Troy, N.Y., maker of
mapping software, says the benefit of GPS trackers on police cruisers is
obvious. "If the officer is injured, you know where he is, and you know
where his car is," Mr. Nayar says.

In Clinton Township, the devices were installed specifically to check up on
the officers. Some of the officers were missing for hours at a time,
sometimes on daytime shifts, but Mr. Krejdovski was unaccounted for less
than two hours in the middle of the night. According to Mr. Krejdovski's
activity logs, he checked a residence, a cemetery and a cluster of car
dealerships in the early morning hours. But the GPS showed his cruiser,
unmoving, for much of that time in a McDonald's parking lot, overlooking a
car wash and a Japanese restaurant nestled at the intersection of two
highways.

The three officers who are suing the town to get their jobs back claim that
idling was a department-wide practice in the two-dozen-member force. The
activity reports used to build the town's case against them were simply
"busy sheets," intended to demonstrate that the officer was on duty, not
precise records of his movements, one officer testified at Mr. Krejdovski's
trial. They also claim they were deliberately singled out for the tracking
because superiors wanted a pretext to get rid of them. The township's
attorney declines to comment on the case.

Sgt. Kuczynski, the internal-affairs officer, said in an interview that his
tracking program "may appear to be extreme" but that the department had a
"systemic" absence problem.

Mr. Krejdovski, now 31, declined to comment on the case. He testified at
his trial that his GPS-tracked nap occurred because he was exhausted from a
stomach virus, compounded by the flu medication he was taking. He admitted
that he waited until shortly before the end of his shift at 7 a.m. to fill
out most of his reports and that they were sloppy and incorrect. "I was
just trying to guesstimate at what time I had gone through those areas," he
said on the witness stand.

Testimony established that his reports deviated from his actual location,
as determined by the GPS, for about 76 minutes.

Mr. Krejdovski's lawyer, Walter Lesnevich, argued that his client was a
young cop who made a mistake and was unfairly swept up in a dragnet aimed
at catching more-serious offenders. When he was tracked another night, Mr.
Krejdovski's log matched up with the GPS tracker.

The jury convicted Mr. Krejdovski on both charges he faced. New Jersey
Superior Court Judge Victor Ashrafi was not so convinced. He set aside the
jury's verdict on the official misconduct charge -- which would have
carried jail time -- and sentenced Mr. Krejdovski to probation and
community service. His conviction means he will never be able to work in
law enforcement again. The nap, the judge ruled, "did not result in any
actual damage or loss to the public, other than the loss of Officer
Krejdovski's services during a period of fewer than 90 minutes."


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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'