Union Rips DDC Monitoring

Call Palm Scanners Offensive

By HOWARD MEGDAL

Members of District Council 37's Local 375 wore surgical gloves Aug. 7 as a protest against the Department of Design and Construction's plan to have employees scanned by a biometric palm print machine in order to keep track of work time for some titles.

Photo by Alan Saly 'BIG BROTHER IS COMING': Civil Service Technical Guild Vice President Jon Forster, with union President Claude Fort to his left, raises objections at a Department of Design and Construction hearing to the plan to have employees scanned by a biometric palm print machine that will track their whereabouts during work hours.

The union believes that forcing DDC workers to utilize the machines without collectively bargaining the issue is a violation of its contract, and plans to file an unfair labor practice charge this week with the Public Employment Relations Board.

'Invasive, Offensive'

"The biometric scanners are invasive, offensive, and our members do not want them," said Civil Service Technical Guild Local 375 President Claude Fort, who represents Architects, Engineers, and Project Managers at DDC. "The union considers the order to employees to submit to palm print scans to be an invasion of privacy."

The palm scanners are part of a mayoral initiative, called CityTime, which allows the city to keep track of workers through such devices as GPS trackers and docking stations which would be visited by those on assignment.

The increased monitoring was called "a return to the factory floor" by Local 375 Vice President Jon Forster, who noted that employees who never had to punch a time clock before are now being placed under equivalent scrutiny.

"This is a system that has been used for over a decade by more than a half-dozen agencies," mayoral spokesman Stu Loeser said in an Aug. 10 phone interview. "It's worked well, and there have been few if any complaints on it." Mr. Loeser admitted that the palm scanners had not been previously used.

Unnecessary Evil?

The union claims that the city's Office of Labor Relations said that the scanners act independently of the CityTime chronological functions, and instituting them was a matter of preference, not necessity. "These data-collection devices have capabilities which the city is not talking about," Mr. Forster said. "Our members at the Department of Design and Construction feel that Big Brother is watching them."