Vehicle tracking in the construction sector


An article in the UCATT Building Worker magazine (Spring 2015) cites a UCATT regional organiser who expresses a concern, shared by many union officials, that “management who have a problem with a particular worker will build a case to discipline or dismiss them” using data from vehicle trackers or hand held digital devices. What commonly happens is that “management will identify a potential issue that a tracker has identified and rather than deal with it immediately, they will let it continue in order to increase the seriousness of an employee’s offence”.


Another UCATT official told LRD that managers and “especially middle managers” who have access to this technology and the data it produces “trawl over and regularly look at the details to build cases against individuals they wish to marginalise or attack”. And they “highlight what they would term as unnecessary journeys, time taken on jobs, speed vehicle was travelling at, as issues that would warrant disciplinary action”. UCATT has seen a rise in this kind of approach and “have had a number of members dismissed, based upon evidence that was solely produced by tracker evidence”. 


In one case cited in UCATT’s magazine, a vehicle tracker recorded that a company employee had broken the speed limit on the motorway 60 times in a 12-week period. But none of the recordings were above 75 miles per hour and they were only for very short periods (for overtaking). Yet the company was determined to dismiss the employee, and the union had to secure a settlement agreement for him.

Another case involved two operatives for a utilities company who were summoned to a disciplinary meeting after a vehicle tracker recorded them leaving a site early. However, the tracker also recorded the workers leaving one location and arriving at another 15 miles away in six minutes, leading the union to point out that the tracker was clearly faulty. The case was dropped. The official concerned said that what was really alarming was that the company, a major employer, had no tracker policy and there were no restrictions on access to what should have been confidential data.

In another case where employees were suspended and one dismissed, on the basis of tracker data indicating that they were not where they were supposed to be, the union got these decisions overturned on appeal after it highlighted the employer’s failure to comply with ICO requirements. The company had not registered with the ICO as a data controller, and had not informed its employees that they were being monitored or what the information was being used for.