ESCA Introduces New National Badge Plan

For employees of service contractors tired of walking around laden with different badges every time they report for work at a different venue, help is on the way. The Exhibition Services & Contractors Assn. announced it will start a new national worker identification badge program for tradeshow labor, providing one badge that can be used in all participating facilities.

The system, according to ESCA Executive Director Larry Arnaudet, is necessary because of the number of facilities throughout the nation requiring identification.

“Over the years, a number of facilities across the country have decided that they were going to institute an identification and/or security system, whereby they were requiring anybody that worked in that building to be processed for an identification badge from their facility and were charging them accordingly,” Arnaudet said. “It was getting to a point where some people were needing to be badged by three or four different facilities, and it just didn't make a lot of sense to try and do that.”

And these days, added Stephen Hagstette, a Freeman regional senior vice president and president-elect of ESCA, the trend is for even the major hotels to badge contractors.

“What we're trying to attempt to do,” Hagstette said, “is, instead of having to spend money – either the companies' money or the employees' money – to go out and buy badges for all these different facilities, that we have one badge that would be accepted in the majority of the facilities.”

For Andy Minton, director of national sales for service contractor AEX Convention Services, the pluses with the planned system are many. His staff works in at least 10 to 12 buildings a year, Minton said, and must go through each venue's badging system every time.

“It'll make it easier just for our access,” he added. “We also bring some of our ... local union people, either from our Houston office or our New Jersey office, to travel on the traveling shows that we do. So ... they would be part of this system also and would not have to go through the rigors of signing in every time ... and getting new badges every time.”

The badges, Arnaudet said, will contain a magnetic strip, a barcode and a passive RFID chip. The information held in the badge will include the individual worker's name, base city and state, badge number, trade group or affiliation, expiration date, the ESCA logo and a photo of the employee. The information, he added, will be kept in a master database. Participating companies will have access to their own employees' information and the venues will have a changing pass code, offering them access to the information on those working in the building that day.

The master database will be stored with ESCA and maintained, according to Hagstette, by an as of yet unidentified vendor partner. However, he added, ESCA may end up doing some maintenance in-house.

Arnaudet said the badge system will roll out first in three cities – Atlanta, Houston and Dallas – most likely in January.

“From the customer to the facility to the contractors, everybody needs to know who is on their exhibit floor, and whether they belong or not,” said Mark Zimmerman, ESCA board member and general manager of Atlanta's Georgia World Congress Center, one of the first venues that will embrace the national badge system. “It's just a way to really identify who's really supposed to be on the floor.”

Zimmerman added that he knew from the start that this was a program his venue would want to be involved with.

Although Arnaudet stressed that this is an identification system and not a security system, he added that in the future something may happen that would force venues to take a closer look at using the badges as security devices.

“In order for it to be utilized as a security system, the specific venues would have to, No. 1, endorse it and, No. 2, establish entry and exit points and some method for scanning the badges,” he said.

Hagstette echoed those thoughts, but added that the identification badges could be useful if another terrorist group attacks, because the government could ask to know who is working in the building and if they are supposed to be there.“We feel if we are being proactive and put this national badging system together where we have something in place, then that might be acceptable,” he added. “We're looking in the future. Eventually, one day, this may be a requirement, and we would have some input into how it was going to work rather than just be told it's going to go this way.”

Someday, Hagstette said, the system might even be used in place of traditional time cards for individual payroll systems.

“We can even get into the verification (of) identity by using a thumbprint or a retina or a handprint, depending on how sophisticated the contractor wants to get,” he added. “It could also stop any duplication or somebody signing somebody else in and not really being there.”

As far as preparing for the system in the venues, Arnaudet said there will not be much involved in upgrading. He said that if a facility chooses to adopt the system, it will only need to install some sort of scanning program for the badges.

Luther Villagomez, general manager at Houston's George R. Brown Convention Center, another venue preparing for the initial rollout of the system, said he does not believe there will be any huge monetary costs involved with the venue installing the system.

“It'll really be training our in-house security force to recognize the badge, and I think also a re-education plan for the event security officers who are badge checking the labor entrances and exhibitor entrances and attendee entrances,” Villagomez said.

The cost for contractors employing the system will probably range between $5 and $10 per badge, although, Hagstette added, the hope is that the price will fall below that.

“In a city where an individual works for multiple employees, we're looking at the possibility of maybe dividing that cost up among those multiple employers or some kind of percentage (for each),” Hagstette said. A second possibility would be that each company would pay for its regular employees and independent contractors may end up buying their badge themselves, he added, which is not uncommon.

“I know in New Orleans, a lot of the employees have to buy their own identification badges to be able to be in the building,” Hagstette said.

The badges are important, Hagstette said, because occasionally, individual workers that are not on call end up in the facility and on the showfloor. This can be a problem, he added, because often those workers may not be registered with show management and could pose liability issues by not having certificates of insurance.

Although it is not a common occurrence, Villagomez said, it is not unheard of either. Off-call workers attempting to gain access to the showfloor may occur every now and then, he added, but is not a pressing issue. Zimmerman said he also has seen instances of this problem occurring, but that the badge system would help put an end to that.

“I would say there's instances around the country where people have probably misrepresented themselves and went on to an exhibit floor for whatever purpose,” he added. “People who basically shouldn't have been there.”