Public Employee Press

Workplace surveillance
Local 375 stops mandatory hand-scanning at design agency

Workers at the Dept. of Design and Construction will no longer be forced to use palm scanners to clock in thanks to an aggressive fight-back campaign by Civil Service Technical Guild Local 375.

In an e-mail message on Feb. 9, Commissioner David J. Burney announced the agency’s decision to back off its use of palm scanners to keep track of employees. Burney said the agency took that step after the city Office of Labor Relations changed its timekeeping policy to give agencies discretion over whether to use palm scanners.

“This is a tremendous victory for Local 375 members and for city workers in general,” said Local 375 President Claude Fort. “Even many of our own members had doubts that we could win this. But we opened the eyes of a lot of people about workplace privacy and managed to beat back this intrusive practice.”

Last year, DDC decided to use palm scanners under New York’s City Time program. Introduced a few years ago, City Time is a $250 million effort to automate the city’s timekeeping program and let agencies record daily attendance and handle leave requests more efficiently.

Local 375 decided to fight the use of palm scanners at DDC after members expressed their outrage about possible violations of their privacy and raised health concerns about a high-tech monitoring device shared by thousands of people every day. During its campaign of more than six months, the local met with members to hear their concerns and update them on its effort to protect their privacy, reached out to the media, negotiated with management and lobbied the City Council.

Local officials said a high point of the campaign occurred when the City Council Civil Service and Labor Committee, chaired by Joseph Addabbo Jr., held a hearing that included testimony from rank-and-file workers as well as labor leaders. Ed Ott, executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council, said the devices point to the disturbing rise of the use of sophisticated technology for monitoring employees.

“People who never had to use a time clock before felt degraded,” said Local 375 1st Vice President Jon Forster. “Our members believe that palm scanning is a very invasive, very rigid timekeeping system. A system of electronic timekeeping where you could, say, fill out a weekly or daily time sheet on your computer would be much better.”

Dennis Sullivan, director of the DC 37 Research and Negotiations Dept., said the union would continue to closely monitor the implementation of City Time to safeguard the contractual protections of union members.

— G.N.H.