BOOK REVIEW
Technology and Power in the Trucking Industry Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, by Karen Levy (Princeton University Press, 2022) Reviewed by Brian Lobato
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regulations, labor unions4, GPS guidance, oversight on their work, and often even warnings for their own safety. As shown later in the book, truckers’ culture of independence often comes to blows with government regulation.
s technology has advanced and relevant laws have evolved, the way Americans work is changing too. Karen Levy’s book Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance is a well-written and thoughtful look into how labor works in the trucking industry today, and how it is changing. More importantly, through discussing the changes in trucking, she is able to touch on important topics about its workers, and how changes in technology and legal regulations can also lead to great changes in working conditions, for better or for worse. In a relatively brief book, the author manages to thoughtfully explain the industry’s labor situation, how advancements in surveillance technology fundamentally change the relationships between workers, employers, and law enforcement, and how strict, bureaucratic enforcement of rules can often makes those rules worse. These are all highly important topics that affect both truckers and other laborers in the US and around the world. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in topics such as labor economics, government policy, management, or how technology affects business and human behavior.
Chapter 3 introduces and discusses in detail the government regulation of trucking labor and electronic logging devices (ELDs)5. The government mandates that truckers are only allowed to drive for 10 hours at a time without significant brakes as a way to reduce dangerous situations caused by driving heavy machinery whilst significantly fatigued. Truckers generally do not support these regulations, due to how focused their culture is on independence and disdain for oversight, but also due to incentives caused by getting paid per miles driven. Truckers would regularly forge their logbooks6 to skirt around regulation. As a response to this, ELDs have now become mandatory for all truckers to have in their trucks when working. This is seen as a massive overstep by truckers, who are both uncomfortable by the ability for their employers to track their location and violate their privacy and angered that they were no longer able to lie on their logbooks.
After the first chapter, only included to give brief introductions to topics that are reintroduced and better explained later in the book, Data Driven starts by explaining how trucking now works. The author explains how trucking used to be seen as a noble profession, but as economic, regulatory, and cultural conditions changed, truckers lost much of their former respect. They make relatively little in wages for their work, being paid per mile traveled, rather than the time they spend working1, like other professions. While this does encourage efficiency, it also creates negative incentives2, such as overworking3 to make ends meet, and neglecting aspects of the job that don’t directly result in getting paid.
From chapters 4 through 6, Levy takes the time to discuss in detail how the ELD has affected trucking, from how labor is done, to how much autonomy truckers have lost, to how the relationships between truckers, their employers, and law enforcement have changed, to how truckers have attempted to continue to skirt around regulations. Under the new ELD monitoring regime, truckers would face a host of new obstacles. Firstly, regulations around driving time and breaks became strictly enforced, making truckers very frustrated at how they might have to stop to rest for hours when only being a few minutes away from their final destination, or at how it became nearly impossible7 (sometimes actually impossible) to meet employer deadlines.
Truckers are also viewed somewhat negatively in popular media for a variety of reasons. One important reason that Levy cites is the depictions of truckers as serial killers in many more recent movies. Despite this, truckers have a strong culture, centered on masculinity and independence. Male truckers see themselves as strong, masculine figures who can work with great stamina, and have deep knowledge of their profession. On top of this, truckers see themselves as highly independent, shrugging off government
One challenge that the ELDs posed to truckers, employers, and law enforcement was the change in power dynamics. Employers gained the ability to question truckers’ decisions on the road by monitoring the truckers through ELDs, significantly reducing the autonomy that truckers had when driving. One example of this 38