Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance
By Karen Levy
Princeton University Press
ISBN: 978-0-6911-7530-0
The strikes in Hollywood show actors and writers in an existential crisis: a highly lucrative industry used to pay them a good middle class living but now has the majority struggling just to survive. In her recent book, Data Driven, Cornell assistant professor Karen Levy finds America’s truckers in a similar plight.
Both groups have had their industries change around them because of new technology. In Hollywood, streaming came along to break the feedback loop that powered a highly successful business model for generations. In trucking, the culprit is electronic logging devices (ELDs), which are changing the profession entirely.
Levy has been studying truckers since 2011. At that point, ELDs were beginning to appear in truckers’ cabs but were purely voluntary. That changed in 2017, when the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s rule mandating their use came into force. The intention, as always, is reasonably benign: to improve safety by ensuring that truckers on the road remain alert and comply with the regulations governing the hours they’re allowed to work.
As part of this work, Levy has interviewed truckers, family members, and managers, and studied trucker-oriented media such as online forums, radio programs, and magazines. She was also able to examine auditing practices in both analog and digital formats.
Some of her conclusions are worrying. For example, she finds that taking truckers’ paper logs into an office away from the cab allowed auditors more time to study them and greater ability to ask questions about them. ELDs, by contrast, are often wired into the cab, and the auditor must inspect them in situ. Where the paper logs were simply understood, many inspectors struggle with the ELDs’ inconsistent interfaces, and being required to enter what is after all the trucker’s personal living space tends to limit the time they spend.
Truckers by and large experience the ELDs as intrusive. Those who have been at the wheel the longest most resent the devaluation of their experience the devices bring. Unlike the paper logs, which remained under the truckers’ control, ELDs often send the data they collect direct to management, who may respond by issuing instructions that override the trucker’s own decisions and on-site information.
Levy’s main point would resonate with those Hollywood strikers. ELDs are being used to correct the genuine problem of tired, and therefore unsafe, truckers. Yet the reason truckers are so tired and take the risk of overworking is the way the industry is structured. Changing how drivers are paid from purely by the mile to including the hours they spend moving their trucks around the yards waiting to unload and other periods of unavoidable delay would be far more effective. Worse, it’s the most experienced truckers who are most alienated by the ELDs’ surveillance. Replacing them with younger, less experienced drivers will not improve road safety for any of us.
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