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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

As 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.

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 overworking 3 to make ends meet, and neglecting aspects of the job that don’t directly result in getting paid.

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

regulations, labor unions 4 , 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.

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 logbooks 6 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.

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.

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

that Levy gave was of a story where a trucker was contacted multiple times by their employer within just a half hour when taking a break from driving and trying to sleep. The employers questioned him as to why he was taking a break even though he still had time before requiring a break. The trucker was then later admonished for taking another break from driving when a storm rolled over, resulting in the trucker and the employer arguing whether or not the storm was severing enough to warrant waiting for it to pass 8

The relationship between truckers and law enforcement also changed drastically, but in a very different way. For law enforcement, the shift to using ELDs to monitor truckers over logbooks was difficult. Because ELDs came in many different makes and models 9, officers would have a difficult time being able to access every type of ELD. On top of that, officers would now often have to climb into the vehicles themselves, or at least stay by the window of the vehicle, to access ELDs10. The closer proximity the truckers and officers had to each other, along with the shared frustration over the forced adoption of ELDs, made the relationship between officers and truckers much more cordial; however, it did not change truckers’ general distrust of oversight and enforcement.

Chapter six essentially lists the ways truckers would resist ELDs. Many truckers would smash their ELDs as soon as they were installed, with many even posting videos of them doing so on the internet for the public to see. These actions would likely result in the trucker getting reprimanded, and a new ELD being installed, though the brazen act of defiance seemed to be more important than its effectiveness at sabotage. Some truckers would go about trying to sabotage ELDs more covertly. Attempts would include cutting certain wires, covering GPS locators with tin foil, cracking into the ELDs and breaking devices that recorded engine activity, hacking into the ELDs to input incorrect milage and times, logging out of accounts and logging into new ones to effectively doubledip on available time, and more. This ended up leading to an arms race between ELD manufacturers and truckers. Some truckers would hack into ELDs in more harmless ways as an act of defiance, often leading to using ELDs to play videogames. Lastly, many truckers would actually work with manufacturers to make ELDs that track as little data as legally mandated11

Chapter seven is where the best conversations about the rules, their enforcement, and the importance of autonomy are found, focusing on how new technology is possibly changing the future of how trucking and tracking is done. The steady encroachment of AI has led to many jobs once thought to be safe from automation, including trucking, now being put at risk, especially as tests drives of self-driving trucks have already happened. While Karen Levy doesn’t believe that self- driving will be a complete death sentence to the trucking industry, she does believe that self- driving will force the trucking industry to change how it pays truckers12. This is because truckers get paid per mile driven, which is the most automatable part of their job. The other major development in

technology is that of bio surveillance. Many truckers that criticize ELDs and regulations against driving for too long without brakes often claim that the truckers themselves know about their own fatigue better than any clock or odometer ever could. In response, some law makers have suggested that devices should be attached to the truckers themselves to monitor their bodies and gauge fatigue from that.

While this idea was shut down for how intrusive it is, it still made many truckers fear how far others might go in encroaching on their autonomy and privacy, creating the myth of the “RoboTrucker13 .”

At the end of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, Karen Levy comes to a few key conclusions. First, autonomy and privacy in labor is important for laborers, and likely for employers as well; however, some amount of oversight is going to be necessary for employers, and different jobs or professions may have different balances to meet between autonomy and oversight. The second is that technology does have a role to play in solving institutional problems in labor, but that on its own it cannot do very much; technology requires other changes alongside it to make a meaningful difference. Finally, government oversight and regulation does have a place in solving labor problems, a position that puts Karen Levy very much in the industrial relations school of labor, but just enforcing rules more strictly and accurately does not make problems disappear. Human relationships and society are complex, and so to throw those dynamics away for strict enforcement of bureaucratic rules is not helpful. The trucking industry needs to change to better serve everyone involved, especially truckers, but doing so will require a change in the rules, a change in how the rules are enforced, and a change in mindset for how rules play out as a part of people’s lives.

Karen Levy’s Data Driven is a very well researched book about the trucking industry, going in-depth into how drivers work, are treated, and are regulated. Every point made in the book is backed up by research and evidence, including first-hand interviews and documents from the trucking industry. In fact, the appendices where Levy describes her journey through the trucking industry, interviewing truckers, employers, and manufacturers of ELDs, along with the notes she had for each chapter, takes up about 40 pages, almost a third of the rest of the books length. I went into this book knowing nothing about the topic, but I was fascinated throughout and came away learning a lot more than I expected.

Brian Lobato is an undergrad Economics major at Hofstra University.

NOTES

1 Truckers do not get paid for any activity other than delivering shipments. Truckers are not paid for refueling, making sure shipments are secure on their trucks, making sure trucks are maintained (they do not pay for maintenance), talking to people when the shipment is delivered, or helping unload shipments.

2 Negative incentives, in this case, include overworking and neglecting other, unpaid facets of the job.

3 Truckers are often known to overwork to such extreme degrees as to fall asleep at the wheel, or take extreme measures to not fall asleep, including consuming illegal substances.

7 Only a very small percentage of truckers are represented by a union. The labor union that typically represents truckers is the Teamsters Union.

5 ELD – Electronic Logging Device; device attached to trucks designed to track and limit the amount of time a single person drives a truck without breaks.

6 Trucker’s logbooks are used for truckers to log their time driving when working. These logs are inspected by law enforcement officers for discrepancies or obvious violations.

7 Employers would regularly give truckers deadlines that, if those truckers were following legal regulations, would be either nearly impossible, or completely impossible. This is to incentivize truckers to break those regulations, improving productivity.

8 The employer was monitoring the weather at the trucker’s location through a weather monitoring app. Whether or not the app accurate or not was not revealed in Data Driven.

9 Electronic Logging Devices are made by multiple different manufacturers. These manufacturers often have different User Interfaces(UIs), making it difficult for law enforcement, as they would have to learn how to use each UI available on the market. Laws were eventually changed, requiring some level of standardization of ELD UIs.

10 The screens in which ELDs are interfaced with are attached to the truck and cannot be removed. Some have extendable wires that give law enforcement some flexibility.

11 As per the law mandating ELDs, AOBRDs were also allowed to be used instead of ELDs. AOBRDs were an older technology that some trucking companies used to track their employees. AOBRDs tracked fewer types of data, so many truckers and trucking companies saw it as preferable to ELDs. Many in the industry also decided to only use trucks made in the year 1999 or earlier, as only trucks made after the year 2000 were mandated to use ELDs.

12 Truckers do other types of work on the job that are difficult to automate, including refueling, making sure shipments are secure on their trucks, making sure trucks are maintained, talking to people when the shipment is delivered, or helping unload shipments.

13 The “RoboTrucker” is the idea that companies or the government would force truckers to be connected to devices, or would have devices connected to them, to monitor their biological processes and signs as a way to better monitor their fatigue and tell them when they should take breaks. At its most extreme, the idea even treads into the belief that truckers would become cyborgs controlled by either the government or their employers.