小心！老板正在监视你！_中英双语新闻

Dennis Gray suspected that workers in his pest-control company were spending too much time on personal issues during the workday. So the general manager of Accurid Pest Solutions in southern Virginia quietly installed a piece of GPS tracking software on the company-issued smartphones of five of its 18 drivers.

The software allowed Mr. Gray to log onto his computer to see a map displaying the location and movement of his staff. One employee, he discovered, was visiting the same address a few times a week for a few hours during the workday. At that point, Mr. Gray told the driver he was being tracked.

The employee confessed he was meeting a woman during work hours. Another driver admitted he was blowing off work. Both men were let go. ‘We were certainly impressed with the software,‘ said Mr. Gray.

Blue-collar workers have always been kept on a tight leash, but there is a new level of surveillance available to bosses these days. Thanks to mobile devices and inexpensive monitoring software, managers can now know where workers are, eavesdrop on their phone calls, tell if a truck driver is wearing his seat belt and intervene if he is tailgating.

‘Twenty-five years ago this was pipe dream stuff,‘ said Paul Sangster, CEO of JouB小儿癫痫治疗群eh Technologies, a Canadian company that develops tracking, or ‘telematics,‘ technology for businesses. ‘Now it is commonly accepted that you are being tracked.‘

Office workers have come to expect that their every keystroke is tracked on a server somewhere, but monitoring for hourly and wage workers has long been limited to video cameras in the break room and GPS on delivery trucks. Companies are now watching a wider swath of blue-collar workers more closely to ensure work is getting done.

A 2012 report from research firm Aberdeen Group found that 37% of companies that send employees out on service calls track the real-time location of workers via their hand-held devices or vehicles.

High-tech monitoring feels like a violation of privacy to some workers, but employers say such measures improve workplace safety and productivity while also helping to reduce theft, protect secrets and investigate harassment or dismination claims, among other things.

Workplace tracking technology is largely unregulated, and courts have found that employees have few rights to privacy on the job.

No federal statutes restrict the use of GPS by employers, nor force them to disclose whether they are using it. Only two states, Delaware and Connecticut, require employers to tell workers that their electronic communications--anything from emails to instant messages to texts--are being monitored.

‘It‘s not a question of whether companies should monitor,‘ said Lewis Maltby, founder of the National Workrights Institute, which promotes employee privacy. ‘It‘s a question of how.‘

His group advises companies to clearly explain how workers are watched and set procedures for monitoring of workers suspected of misdeeds.

Though companies say monitoring isn‘t solely used for discipline, that is often exactly what they are doing, Mr. Maltby added. ‘Employers suspect that some of their field service workers are goofing off and they want to catch them,‘ he said.

Last year, Jane Rodgers, finance manager of Plants Inc., a Chicago business that provides interior landscaping services to homes and workplaces, bought a mobile monitoring program from Awareness Technologies to keep watch over employees who work mostly outside the office.

She installed the software on the company-issued phones of nine of its 16 employees.

While she has the capability of viewing any photo, text message, or email sent over company phones, along with call logs and website visits, she said she uses only the geolocation tracking feature--and turns to it only when customers raise questions.

She also advised her workers to turn off their work phones at night if they didn‘t want her to know their whereabouts.

One Plants customer recently called to ask if a technician had visited the client. Ms. Rodgers pulled up the program and saw that the employee was at the site between 10 a.m. and 10:30 a.m.

‘You feel more confident,‘ she said. ‘You want to find out who the troublemakers are.‘

Rockwell Vance, a Plants Inc. technician, didn‘t think much about Ms. Rodgers‘s monitoring efforts, but said some of his co-workers felt their privacy was invaded.

Telematics goes beyond GPS tracking, which was pioneered by the trucking and logistics industries decades ago; now, the latest software can, say, decelerate a truck if a driver fails to take action if a rig gets too close to another vehicle.

Trucking company Schneider National Inc. uses software from Telogis Inc. to see whether drivers are braking too hard or heading into an area with high risk of theft. The company uses that data not only to discipline drivers, but also to reward those with top safety records, said Don Osterberg, Schneider‘s senior 南宁到哪里治疗癫痫好vice president of safety. He concedes, that ‘there are some who don‘t like the eye in the sky looking over their shoulder.‘

Companies that keep quiet about tracking efforts may miss out on the benefits of deterrence. A 2013 academic study of NCR Corp.‘s theft-monitoring software used in 392 restaurants found a 22% reduction in server theft after the software was installed and staffers were told about it. Drink sales, meanwhile, rose 10%. Being watched, researchers found, made waitstaff work harder. (The software alerts managers to excessive numbers of sales that are voided--an activity that suggests cash is being pocketed.)

At Accurid Pest Solutions, Mr. Gray said the phone-tracking tool costs about $50 per quarter per user, compared with about $200 per quarter per car for a GPS tracker.

Since rolling it out, he has cut back the monitoring to a monthly review of a handful of employees.While he terminated two additional workers this summer, he said overall the technology has made drivers more productive and prompted more honesty, he said.

‘If guys have to veer off, they call us and say we are taking a little personal time,‘ he said. ‘It is changing their behavior in a positive way.‘

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