Chinese Companies Monitor Street Cleaners Using GPS Tracking Smartwatches

South China Morning Post reported that Nanjing West Bank Environmental Service has recently put into use smartwatches to monitor its employees during their shifts.

What the smartwatch does is if it detects that a worker doesn’t move for at least 20 minutes, an alarm will sound to notify and telling them to continue working.

The company’s vice president, Zhang, said that monitoring workers via smartwatches is to cut down management cost.

He said:

However, the use of this device had been receiving backlash from the company’s employees. As a result, the project was canceled just after a few days it had been initiated.

However, the company still requires workers to wear the smartwatches to track their locations and ensure they are still working according to rules. There is also a big monitoring screen to keep track of all employees’ locations and movements in real-time.

The project first started back in March. The smartwatches are expected to boost productivity by encouraging workers to be more dedicated.

However, an unnamed employee said that this monitoring method is still inadequate. The company constantly keeps track of its workers even when they don’t have anything to do. So workers have to continue walking even though they need to take a break.

Nanjing street cleaners are not the only ones having to wear the devices though. Several agencies and companies in Hangzhou, Qingdao, Chengdu, and Guangzhou have all reportedly required its workers to wear smartwatches since last year.

Recently, China has been emerging as a leading country with many new technologies to help monitor and administer society, including a Social Credit System to grade its 1.4 billion citizens, facial recognition systems to avoid cheating at schools. Even some prisons in China have installed AI systems to keep an eye on prisoners who intend to escape.