Truck location data belongs in the collective agreement

Every operator with a field workforce now has the means to know where each truck is, minute by minute. Most also have a lone-worker problem: technicians working alone, often beyond cellular coverage, in weather that can kill. My position is that the same device can solve the second problem only if the employer gives up most of what it could do with the first. The restriction should be written into the collective agreement rather than a policy the employer can amend, and it should be audited by a committee on which workers hold half the seats.

That is not the usual view among operations leaders, and I understand why. Location data is valuable. It can show which routes waste time, which crews finish early and which timesheets do not match the day. A finance team looking at a telematics investment will reasonably ask why the company should pay for the device and forgo the benefit. My answer comes from a night in January 2018, and from what happened in the months after it.

What a location trace can be asked to prove

One of our technicians at Keswald went off a forestry road in a blizzard in the upper Miramichi, out of cellular range, and waited five hours in a cooling truck before a plough driver found him. Our check-in system then relied on telephone calls to dispatch every two hours. On storm nights, with every crew out and every line ringing, a missed call looked like a busy technician. He recovered. We were lucky, and everybody in the company knew it.

When we proposed putting satellite-capable devices in all 1,300 trucks, the union's first answer was no. Its safety representatives wanted the protection. Its members had heard, from colleagues at other companies, how location records had been produced at disciplinary hearings to show a long lunch or an unauthorised stop at home. A trace can be asked to prove almost anything about a working day, and once it has been used against one person, every technician assumes it will be used against them.

The practical consequence of that assumption is not a grievance. It is a device in a glovebox, a check-in button nobody presses and an alert that fires so often from trucks parked in odd places that dispatchers learn to ignore it. A lone-worker system works only if the person it protects wants it to work. On the night it matters, the technician must have pressed the button, left the device mounted and believed that the alert would bring help rather than questions.

Writing the limits into the agreement

The letter of understanding we signed in May 2018, and carried into the 2019 craft agreement, is short. Location data may be used for three purposes: responding to a safety alert, maintaining vehicles and, when an employee or the union asks, answering a customer's claim that a technician caused damage. Nothing else is permitted, and in particular the data cannot inform a performance review or a disciplinary file. Records are kept for ninety days. Every access is logged, and the policy health and safety committee, with equal union and employer membership, audits the log each quarter.

We chose the collective agreement over a company policy for a reason operations colleagues sometimes find frustrating. A policy can be changed by the employer when a new executive arrives with a different view. An agreement can be changed only by bargaining. Technicians believed the restriction because we could not quietly withdraw it, and that belief is what made the system work. In its first two winters it raised 236 alerts. Fourteen were genuine, including two vehicle rollovers found within forty minutes.

The audit matters as much as the wording. In 2020 the committee found that a regional manager had looked up a truck's position while investigating a complaint about a technician's conduct at a customer's home. He had not used what he saw, but he had looked. We treated it as a breach, the manager received a written warning and the union read the finding in the committee minutes before it heard the rumour. I have come to think that a restriction nobody has tested is only a promise. One enforced breach did more for trust than the letter itself.

The productivity case we left on the table

The cost was real. Our head of field operations valued the routing and productivity uses of the data at C$3.4 million a year, and he was probably right. We gave that up. We also accepted that we would sometimes suspect a timesheet problem we could not prove from the trace, and we dealt with those cases as we always had, through supervision and conversation.

Four years later the union proposed something we had not expected. Having seen the data stay where the agreement put it, its executive agreed that anonymised, aggregated route data could be analysed for scheduling, with the joint committee reviewing every analysis before use. That recovered about C$1.9 million a year. I do not think the union would have agreed in 2018. Trust had to come before the productivity case, not alongside it.

There are serious objections. Some employers worry that a restriction will shield genuine misconduct, such as a technician running a private business from a company truck. That risk exists, and it is the price of the system. Others argue that unionised workforces are a special case and that a non-union employer can simply set a policy. I would say the reverse: without an agreement, a policy is even easier to change, so the employer should make a binding, public commitment and invite outside audit. A third objection is that privacy law already limits workplace surveillance. Law sets outer boundaries. It does not create the confidence a technician needs on a forestry road at night.

A board approving a telematics investment should ask management three questions. Which uses of the data are excluded, and where is that exclusion written? Who audits access, and what happened the last time someone broke the rule? And what productivity benefit is the company deliberately declining, and why? If management cannot answer the third question, the system is probably being bought for the wrong reason, and the people it is meant to protect will be the first to notice.