Tracking employees

[backaftera2yearbreak]

Wats app has a new feature that shows you someone’s location. My nieces work want to use this feature to see where they are on there days off. This is in case they need them to work overtime. That way the employees could not lie about there where abouts and be made to come in. Is this in any way legal?

They can try and introduce compulsory overtime which needs to be agreed by both parties, the unions and h.r. should have been involved and details set out clearly and discussed. Monitoring staff on their days off is a different matter, I don't think you can refuse to do compulsory overtime if you've signed and agreed to it on a contract. If they do work for the government there will be a data protection department who will know what's going on.

This is the kind of crap they come up with at my work. (Also government by the way). It soon falls by the wayside when the union get involved and point out how badly this looks and would look at tribunal.

It’ll be one management bright spark who tracks their kids and thinks oh I know, I can treat my staff like that, won’t it make my life easy as they keep telling me they’re doing personal things in their personal time, how unreasonable of them.

The trick is not to accept it. If you start doing it, it becomes what you do, and it’s very much harder to get out of.

This sort of stuff is also the reason I refuse to use my own phone for work (they tried that one, I refused to make phone calls when working from home (I deal with the kind of people you don’t want to have your personal number!) and hey presto a work phone turned up), then I said I’ll only use whatsapp for work on that phone because my boss likes to message about work matters on sundays in a mon-fri job, and then I turn off my work phone at the end of the day/week. But at every stage of this they railroaded me and told me I was being thoroughly unreasonable.

I’m actually hoping she’s misunderstood the situation but we will have to see. I have an employment solicitor on hand to check cuntract carefully if they try anything x

Don't they need the union, an employment solicitor or ACAS, it's something that affects them and their colleagues.

A union won't get involved once a solicitor is. They will have rules about third party advice.

Yes, don't accept it or allow it to happen. A contract is not a piece of paper, but an agreement. If an employee starts carrying out or going along with a change that can be seen as accepting the contract.

What government organisation is it? NHS? Army? Military police? MBDA? What job does she actually do?

It's a long time since I did "on call", but this is effectively what they are asking your niece to do (unpaid on call), I seem to remember they had to accrue us annual leave for every hour we were on call. This wasn't much so it was just automatically given to us as paid overtime. If they are going to expect her to be "available" (tracked) 24 hours a day 7 days a week minus her working hours, that is a lot of annual leave she will build up!!

I think there has also been test cases that day if overtime is compulsory they have to pay/allocate annual leave. If it's voluntary they don't. Another thing that your niece needs to check up on and raise with her union.

It’ll be one management bright spark...

Agree. I had a manager who wanted to insist everyone took an hour for lunch because it suited him. Lots of staff took a shorter lunch so they could finish earlier. A quick mention of the Working Time Regs shut him up.

Turns out it was indeed one management “brightspark” 🙄. Let’s get them all on wats app so we know they’ve seen the message we need overtime cover. Oh, better still, we will be able to check they’re where they say they are. It seems a HR professional known through family contacts basically said that shit won’t fly and it will be dead in the water before it even reaches the union!

OP glad to hear it won't happen

it's amazing how things happen with these idiots

I walked into work around the time of the GDPR, to be greeted by a management brightspark telling me she'd had a great idea and wanted to hear my view. Immediately after she shared it, I raised my eyebrow and said "Data protection?" and she said "I hadn't thought of that". The fact that these people are paid so much chaps my ass!!