 |
| lytx.com |
Article thanks to tandemthoughts.landlinemag.com and John Bendel. Links provided:
Sept 8, 2017 Driver-facing cameras just got a poke in the eye from a Canadian court.
A Quebec Superior Court in Montreal has upheld an arbitrator’s ruling that Sysco Quebec cannot have driver-facing cameras in its delivery fleet. Sysco Quebec is part of Sysco, the food supply company that operates the 2nd largest private fleet in North America. Sysco Quebec employs approximately 70 drivers, according to court records. Their fleet is primarily day cabs.
Problems first arose when Sysco Quebec installed DriveCam exterior and interior cameras in November of 2012. Drivers were happy to have the forward facing cameras. They were not happy about the cameras staring them in the face.
Lytx, the company that distributes DriveCam, explains that while the driver facing cameras record all the time, they continually overwrite their memory. Video is only saved when an event – an accident, for example – causes the system to save 10 seconds of video immediately before the incident and 10 seconds after. Those are the only images management sees, the company says.
Even so, the Montreal Sysco drivers were not happy. They complained to their union that they felt intimidated by the cameras. Sometimes, they claimed, a bump in the road would cause the camera to save and transmit video back to Sysco.
So the union filed a grievance asking that the driver-facing cameras be removed. Sysco declined, and the grievance ultimately made its way to an arbitrator who ruled in May of 2016 that the cameras had to go.
Now it was Sysco’s turn to be unhappy. Sysco obeyed the ruling and removed the interior cameras; they also filed suit claiming the arbitrator had misinterpreted and misapplied the law. The arbitrator, Sysco said, had failed to properly consider a driver’s expectation of privacy while in the driver’s seat.
According to Sysco, the case was about the balance between a driver’s right to privacy and the company’s duty to proactively promote safety and health.
In its August 18th decision, the court found the arbitrator had considered that balance correctly. Methods “less intrusive” than those cameras could be used to further the interests of safety, the court said.
So the arbitrator’s ruling stands – at least for now.
Lytx deferred to their client, Sysco, for comment. For its part, Sysco declined to comment, but in an interesting way. Sysco’s corporate director of external communications wrote in an email: “Thank you for reaching out. Sysco does not provide comment on pending litigation.”
Pending litigation?
Sounds like Sysco may not have accepted the latest court decision as the final word.
Even if it were, the issue of driver-facing cameras is not really settled in Quebec. In 2014, Linde Canada installed the same DriveCam systems in its trucks. Linde is the German-based company that supplies industrial gases across North America. Some of those gases are dangerous.
Linde drivers complained about the cameras, a grievance was filed, and as in the Sysco case, the issue went to arbitration. But in the Linde case, the arbitrator found in favor of the company. The nature of the cargo made the difference. Hazardous cargo, such as hydrogen, tipped the scale and the Linde fleet now has driver-facing cameras.
These two conflicting opinions make it hard to predict the future of driver-facing cameras, at least in the Canadian province of Quebec – the only place in which those decisions apply.
No comments:
Post a Comment