GPS in City Owned Vehicles

spalbicki

My Public Works Director wants to pilot a GPS tracking system in our vehicles. He has identified the business necessity as (1) route efficiency and (2) ability to track time at job sites. I am curious if other municipalities use these devices and if so how you put employees on notice that their vehicle may or may not have a tracking device.

sonny

I would check with your City attorney or labor attorney. We have them on a couple vehicles but have yet to actually use them to monitor whereabouts although we keep talking about it. I think it is a good idea.

davids

We considered tracking building inspectors with a GPS function on their cell phones. There were many good business reasons for this. However, we never implemented it because of problems with the particular program we were using. When we were in the planning stage, we advised the union of our plans. They had issues such as: 1) would the employee be tracked on his/her lunch time; 2) what would happen if the employee traveled into a "dead zone" where the cell phone/GPS didn't work; 3) how would we use the information gathered; 4) could employees be disciplined based on the information gathered? Although we believed that we had the management right to implement the GPS tracking, we [I]may[/I] have had the obligation to negotiate the impact on the employees.

So, I would recommend that you bring you bring your union into the loop before you implement. This presumes that you have a union. If not, I would bring all employees together for a group meeting to explain the how and why of using the GPS.