Personal digital assistants


A number of unions have raised concerns about the way in which personal digital assistants (PDAs) are being used by employers to monitor the activities of workers. These are small handheld computers, also known as personal organisers, which are commonly used by mobile workers, for example, service and maintenance staff who may be permanently on-call. 


The devices are often equipped with GPS technology so that employers can track workers and/or mobile or wireless internet to enable communication. 


The advent of tablets and smartphones, essentially small computers, means that such technology can be more easily used by employers to keep tabs on their workers. 


Postal delivery workers use a form of PDA (this stands for postal digital assistant) to confirm collection and delivery times, as well as scan barcodes and capture customer signatures. But these can also be used by managers to keep tabs on the whereabouts of delivery staff. 


An article in the UCATT Building Worker magazine (Spring 2015) reports that workers involved in maintenance work use PDAs “receiving their instructions for the day electronically.” The union said that while it was “difficult to argue against the use of technology”, there were “concerns about how PDAs record where a worker is.” In some cases issues were arising about “how quickly a worker records they have completed one job and are on the way to their next task.” 


As with the use of vehicle trackers, UCATT officials have expressed concern about the way in which data from PDAs is used by managers to build up cases against workers they “have a problem with”, often allowing any data on alleged transgressions to build up rather than be dealt with immediately in order “to increase the seriousness of an employee’s offence.”


UCATT advice to members where PDAs or vehicle trackers are being introduced by employers is also set out in the article. It states that “this should be via negotiation” and that there should be “agreement about what the monitoring equipment is used for”, and if possible “it should be explicitly stated that PDAs and trackers are not used for disciplinary purposes.” 


It also states that workers “must be informed that monitoring is being introduced and what it is being used for” and of any changes to the monitoring equipment “or the monitoring purposes.” It suggests that good practice is to display stickers on equipment to indicate monitoring is occurring. Where monitoring is already in place, shop stewards are advised “to discover whether existing policies are compliant with the law and the organisation is registered with the ICO as a data controller.”