Since the 1980s, workplace monitoring has grown in popularity because of the decreasing cost and widespread availability of tracking technology. A 2005 survey by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute found that keystroke monitoring was used by 36 percent of companies queried. Fifty-five percent of companies perused employee e-mail messages and 76 percent tracked websites visited by employees.
But the monitoring of employees goes beyond what they do at their desk. Global positioning systems (GPS), radio frequency identification (RFID) chips and biometric identifiers such as palm, fingerprint and iris scanners are increasingly used for security and timekeeping at the workplace. Their popularity has surged in the post-September 11 era, driven by security concerns and society's deepening relationship with technology. Some workers feel this technology has soured the workplace atmosphere and given employers unprecedented access to their personal lives. "Workplace surveillance has become standard operating procedure today," Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, says. "You ought to be more concerned about your boss than the National Security Agency." In New York City, on-the-job monitoring is increasingly practiced by private and, especially, public employers.
The largest New York City workplace-monitoring initiative is CityTime, an overhaul of the payroll system for 160,000 municipal employees from 80 agencies. Launched in 1998 by the Office of Payroll Administration (OPA) with an initial price tag of $68 million, CityTime was intended to streamline timekeeping via digitization: Workers fill out their timesheets electronically, clocking in and out with a biometric hand-geometry reader that prevents "buddy punching"—when a worker punches in for an absent colleague. The biometric readers use laser imaging to generate a three-dimensional profile of a hand, which is used to clock in. A private audit conducted for OPA in 2002 claims CityTime will generate $60 million in annual savings by reducing "hard" (paper and transportation of documents) and "soft" (staffing and time) costs. A decade later, the project's price tag has risen to half a billion dollars under the guidance of Science Applications International Corp., a major San Diegobased contractor that has handled billions in Pentagon business but whose track record includes cost overruns and allegations of substandard workmanship. More than 13,000 workers at 18 city agencies currently use the system. Many are vehemently opposed to CityTime, citing an inflexible time clock that rounds up by a quarter of an hour, unnecessary busywork for supervisors and—particularly—the use of hand-geometry scanners for employee identification. CityTime "goes way beyond the pale in terms of any acceptable kind of surveillance," says Jon Forster, first vice president of Local 375, the branch of municipal union DC 37 that represents technical workers. "What the administration doesn't get is that their implementation of surveillance technologies is incredibly demoralizing. People are enraged. They feel like they're not being trusted."
While the Bloomberg administration is hunting for budget cuts amid shrinking tax revenues, OPA Executive Director Joel Bondy told a City Council hearing in May that his agency has not considered imposing a cap on the cost of SAIC's CityTime contract, which could run through 2021. There are questions about that contract that go beyond cost. While OPA insists that the CityTime contract was awarded competitively, it appears that SAIC got the CityTime account in 2002 when SAIC acquired Paradigm4, a spin-of f from the original CityTime contractor, Systemhouse. Meanwhile, Bondy worked from 2002 to 2004 as a subcontractor for Spherion, a Florida firm that OPA is paying $60 million to monitor SAIC's work on CityTime. Bondy denies any conflict. Some City Councilmembers are considering asking for a moratorium on work by or payments to SAIC.
