System Tests Coordination of Bus Drivers

One of the first things that the Old Town Trolley Tour’s 32 employees do when they report for work is sit down and “play the machine.”

That’s what the San Diego tour bus company’s drivers and ticket-takers call a high-technology system that, according to its developers, simply and effectively screens employees whose on-the-job performance might be impaired by drugs, alcohol, emotional stress or other causes.

The computerized, self-administered test, which takes just seconds to complete, is designed to measure hand-eye coordination. Employees manipulate a rheostat to keep a point of light centered on a computer screen. The point moves continuously, so employees must move fast to keep the point centered.

Results of those daily tests are compared with the employee’s base-line scores. Thus, in effect, workers compete against themselves. Employees who fail the test are retested; if they fail a second time, they must meet with supervisors before going on the job.

The company is one of three in the state trying out the new testing machine that seems certain to stir controversy about whether the testing is an invasion of privacy, as some regard drug screening.

But the test’s developers say it skirts the privacy issue by measuring only what interests the employer: whether workers can do the job, and not directly what they were doing in their off time.

Old Town Trolley began using the machine in May, after the company was invited to test the device by a former executive at the firm that developed the technology, according to Don Harrison, the bus company’s general manager.

The device is a handy tool for helping to identify employees who, for whatever reason, are unable to handle their jobs that day, Harrison said.

The device was installed in May as part of a trial that also involves two other California companies, he said. Old Town Trolley hopes to learn whether the device might prove suitable as a companion to its existing drug screening program.

One trolley employee who failed the simple examination twice on the same morning subsequently said he had just broken up with his fiancee, Harrison said.

“You could imagine his state of mind,” he said. “He could be a real threat to safety.”

The bus driver was kept behind a ticket counter for a day or so and later “patched things up with his fiancee,” Harrison said.

“That incident was for me compelling, because to have seen him, you never would have suspected anything was wrong,” he said. “But the machine found out something was wrong.”

Old Town Trolley employees have not balked at the tests, according to Harrison, who said the company also uses pre-employment drug screening and “probable-cause” drug tests for employees involved in accidents.

“This is a possible alternative to random urine testing,” Harrison said. “If their performance is significantly below their base line, it’s then the responsibility of the supervisor to find out what’s wrong.”

However, the device is likely to draw the same kind of court challenges as urine testing, which many labor unions have described as an invasive form of testing, according to Harley Shaiken, a UC San Diego professor who is nationally known for work on industrial technology and the workplace.

While Shaiken was not familiar with the particular device used by the trolley company, he described the theory upon which it is based as “a technical invasion of privacy. . . . It’s testing for life style . . . and I’m not interested in telling my supervisor what I happened to do last night.

“It will be viewed as an invasive form of testing. The underlying issues are the same (as drug testing), because it’s a form of testing that is divorced from normal activities on the job. It opens up more questions than it answers.”

But Mark Silverman--president of Performance Factors, a company based in Emeryville in Alameda County that has started to market the device--countered by saying: “We measure hand-eye coordination, and that’s all we measure.”

The machine is not designed to uncover “legal or illegal drugs, alcohol, illness, fatigue or stress,” he said. “The fact of the matter is that whether the individual is impaired because of illegal drugs or a severe case of the flu is beside the point.”

Silverman said the device is “performance oriented, not life-style oriented. . . . Urine testing tests for life style, not performance, and conversely, we can only test for performance, not life style.”

In addition, he said, the test takes just 30 seconds, right before the employee goes to work.

The technology used in the testing machine has existed since the 1950s, he said, when the Department of Defense developed a complicated version to determine whether pilots could fly the newly developed generation of fast, high-flying jets.

Two years ago, the company bought rights to the technology and has since produced the model being used by the three California companies, Silverman said.