Montreal to track City workers with GPS
CTV
The city of Montreal plans to install GPS devices in some of its vehicles to monitor the whereabouts of its employees.
City officials insist the plan to use a global positioning system is not to spy, but rather, a way to better utilize city resources and improve service.
A pilot project is slated to begin next winter to install the devicesin some snow-removal vehicles in the northwestern borough of Cote-des-Neiges/Notre-Dame-de-Grace.
GPS satellite technology, already used in the trucking industry and a common feature in vehicles today, allows a computer to precisely locate where the particular vehicle is.
Borough Mayor Michael Applebaum said Tuesday the initiative will allow city workers to be tracked at all time.
"We feel that with this new technology, we will be able to get a lot more information for how our vehicles are being used, modify the hours of usage and be more efficient," said Applebaum.
And a greater call for efficiency has been sounded by many Montreal taxpayers, after repeated reports of some city workers spending more time on lunches and breaks than repairing roads or cleaning city streets.
Ten blue-collar workers were suspended recently when it was revealed they were spending much of their time on coffee breaks and driving aimlessly around the city.
They were disciplined with one- or two-day suspensions.
Their work habits became known after the city secretly followed several crews in the Ville Marie borough and saw they filled only nine potholes in 90 hours of paid work -- a task that should have taken nine hours.
Icy sidewalks are another routine call these workers respond to.
Last month, Montreal's two biggest unions said employees felt like they had been slapped in the face when the city said they were taking a no-tolerance approach to slacking and warned employees caught doing so would be suspended for three days without pay.
A second infraction would lead to termination, the city said in a letter to employees.
The unions were furious, and the plan didn't help their already rocky relationship with the city.
On Tuesday, the city's blue collar union had no official reaction to the GPS project. But one long-time city employee told CTV Montreal that, at a cost of roughly $1,000 per vehicle, it would be a waste of taxpayers' money.
Montreal's Urgences-Sante, where GSP has been in use since 1998, is calling the system an indispensable tool that no employee needs to fear.
"It's used very seldom in disciplinary cases," said Urgences-Sante spokesperson Andre Champagne. "Most of the time people have learned to work with it. They trust the system now."
Meanwhile, industrial relations expert Michel Grant with the L'Universite du Quebec a Montreal said GPS could help clean up the blue collars' bad-boy image.
"They've had a bad rap now for many years and working together they're going to also be able to show services are being provided, that they are working to their full potential and maybe their image will also change," Grant told CTV Montreal.
