A Show of Hands: City Workers Resist Tracking

City unions are up in arms once more against the Bloomberg administration's widening implementation of hand-scanning technology, part of a long-running computerized payroll initiative known as CityTime.

Aside from unions' assertions that the "hand geometry" scanners are an invasion of their privacy, the CityTime program is under the microscope for its ballooning $400 million price tag, the track record of the contractors undertaking the project and ties between one contractor and the chief of the Office of Payroll Administration (OPA), the agency responsible for CityTime.

A year after Local 375 (the branch of municipal union DC 37 that represents engineers, architects and other technical workers) successfully petitioned the Office of Labor Relations to give each city agency the right to decide whether to use the Ingersoll Rand Hand Punch 4000 units—which clock workers in by reading the specific geometry of their hand—an increasing number of departments have implemented it as part of CityTime.

At least a dozen city agencies from the Law Department to OPA itself, comprising some 13,000 workers, are now using biometric time clocks, and another five agencies will do so by summer 2008. The program will eventually include 80 agencies and 160,000 city employees. Last fall, the Parks Department started requiring workers in various facilities earning under $68,000 to clock in and out with palm scanners. Among the Parks Department's 7,000 employees, more than 5,000 will be required to use biometric readers.

During a boisterous Feb. 21 rally in front of their agency's headquarters in the Central Park Armory, about 150 Parks workers bundled up against the cold and stated their case against biometric screening, chanting slogans such as "Olmstead and Vaux didn't punch time clocks" (a reference to the city's legendary park designers) while waving placards. LaShawn, an assistant landscape architect for Parks (who didn't want her name used for fear of discipline), uses the hand scanners to clock in and out every day, to her displeasure. Along with her co-workers, LaShawn finds the scanners "demeaning" and views them as a sign of distrust. "That shows how they consider me as a worker. If they trusted me, they'd just ask for a code," she said.

Linda Lawton, a 59-year-old former artist who became a registered landscape architect because she wanted a profession that's respected, deplored the wage-based criteria that determine which workers must scan. Hand scanning, Lawton says, “undermines morale and creates a class division because scanning has to do with the salary level." She also has strong reservations about submitting further personal information to the Parks Department, since employees are fingerprinted and photographed when they are hired.         "Where do we end, when we start putting chips into people's bodies?" City Councilmember Joe Addabbo of Queens told City Limits. Addabbo chairs the Civil Service and Labor Committee, whose January 2007 hearing on CityTime's hand scanners is credited by unions and legislators for prompting the city to let agency chiefs decide whether or not to implement the technology. According to OPA, CityTime will increase efficiency and reduce costs by cutting down on "buddy punching" (instances where one worker signs an absent colleague in and out) and forged timecards. Addabbo does not share OPA's concerns about buddy punching: "For every one of those instances, there are thousands of city workers who do an honest day's work."        OPA Executive Director Joel Bondy contends that in designing CityTime his agency ensured privacy protection by selecting "hand geometry" technology over other, more invasive biometric methods that were under consideration. Fingerprint scanning, which was a popular option during CityTime's planning stages, was rejected because of "the potential for the misuse of electronically captured and stored information," said Bondy. The controversial Hand Punch machines were adopted, he said, "to minimize any privacy concerns that our employees might have."        The concerns, however, aren't confined to privacy issues. CityTime critics like State Assemblyman Alan Maisel (D-59th District, Brooklyn) are worried about the cost of the entire program, which also includes developing a computer network for data transfers. "I have a hard time understanding it," Maisel says. "There is so much money available for the Mayor's gadgets." The CityTime budget from 1999 to date outstrips this year's proposed budget cuts of $324 million and $95 million for the Department of Education and the NYPD, respectively.