Better Exploitation Through Technology

Lawmakers have long tried to rein in these risks through hours-of-service regulations that cap the number of hours a trucker can drive. As Levy explains, “most long-haul truckers today may legally drive no more than eleven hours per day and can be ‘on duty’ — a status which includes both driving and other job functions, like fueling, loading or unloading, and performing required vehicle inspections — for no more than one fourteen-hour window per day. After the maximum on-duty time is reached, a ten-hour break is required.” There are also weekly limits: “most truckers can work up to seventy hours in any eight consecutive days, and then must break for thirty-four hours (known as ‘resetting your 70’).”

For decades, hours-of-service regulations have been enforced through paper logbooks. “Columns correspond to hours of the day, a continuous line across the grid is drawn by a trucker in the appropriate row to represent the period of time he spent in that duty status,” explains Levy of the paper logs’ grid format. “When his status changes, he ‘jogs’ the line to the row for his new status and records the name of the city or highway mile-marker where the change took place.” Truckers tally the numbers spent in each duty status each day and are required to keep the previous seven days’ worth of logs available for inspection as well as filing their logs with their employer within thirteen days.

The only problem: paper logbooks are easily fudged to maintain the appearance of legal compliance by truckers who, in reality, regularly defy hours-of-service regulations. Importantly, logbooks are not the basis for pay, meaning that downplaying hours doesn’t reduce the amount of money in one’s paycheck. Such tampering is common enough that it, too, has appeared in trucker anthems: when C. W. McCall sang of tearing up “all of our swindle sheets,” he was referring to faked logs. One survey found that only 16 percent of truckers believed that logbooks were an accurate depiction of their activities; another found that nearly three-quarters of truckers admitted to hours-of-service violations.

While some truckers certainly pride themselves on their ability to drive past legal limits — “Sleep is for sissies,” as historian Alan Derickson summarizes the view — it is their employers who pressure them to commit such violations. Such falsification is all but required in an industry that only pays per mile and at a rate on which one cannot live.

Rather than changing that underlying structure, regulators have tried to better enforce the limits with new technology: electronic logging devices (ELDs), a “small device hardwired to the truck’s engine that captures data about (at a minimum) the truck’s engine status, location, and mileage.” The technology, mandated in December 2017, is Data Driven’s focus.

Levy conducted ethnographic work with truckers, trucking managers, regulators, and technologists at truck-stop bars, trucking firms, trade shows, and regulatory meetings. Her research allows her to demonstrate the consequences — and, in particular, the indignities — of the shift to ELDs. Data Driven recounts calls between truckers and dispatchers, showing how the abstracted data available from an ELD intensifies exploitation and overrides truckers’ expertise. Rather than a mere regulatory tool, the book argues, ELDs are a tool of managerial control; rather than addressing the economic causes of hours-of-service violations, the technology accomplishes something else: surveillance and data collection.

Examples of the managerial control facilitated by ELDs aren’t hard to come by. A trucker tells a dispatcher that a road is impassable because of poor weather, only to be told by the dispatcher, “I know the weather is not too bad to continue driving down I-80, because I see that I have four other trucks on that road now.” Another driver feels he is too fatigued to drive, only to be goaded by a dispatcher: “I know you aren’t (or shouldn’t be) too tired, because I can see that you’ve only been on duty for five hours.”

Not to mention the invasive nature of the technology, such as when Levy reproduces the transcript of a dispatcher calling a trucker who is sleeping. The dispatcher is able to do so because of the two-way messaging capability of the system — a major change from the days when firms had to rely on truckers to check in. “As one industry survey found, 68 percent of drivers reported being told by firms to drive longer, and 29 percent reported being awakened to be given these instructions.”

ELDs create new problems, too. For instance, say a trucker is reaching the maximum driving hours he’s allowed in a day. (“He” is intentional here: some 93 percent of truckers in the United States are men.) He pulls into a rest stop for the night but finds that it’s full (a common problem in a country lacking in truck parking near highways).

“A driver using paper logs, faced with a full truck stop, might hunt for parking at the next stop even while officially off duty,” writes Levy. “But because the ELD automatically detects a truck’s movement, doing this might thrust a digitally monitored driver from being off duty to being on the clock again — potentially putting him in violation of the rules.” The result is an increase in truckers spending their ten-hour break on a highway shoulder, a practice both dangerous and, often, illegal.

And, perhaps most importantly, ELDs don’t seem to necessarily make roads safer. “The best evidence we have demonstrates that the safety outcomes of electronic surveillance are mixed at best, and may actually lead to more accidents because of the inflexibility it introduces to trucking work,” writes Levy.

The reasons are not hard to understand: when you know there is a hard limit to your time, you will drive faster, take more chances, push through in bad weather, and skip breaks you desperately need. Rather than decreasing after the ELD mandate, the number of truck crashes stayed the same (they may have actually increased for small carriers).

One of the more comical sections of Data Driven comes when Levy shows why hours-of-service violations declined significantly following the ELD mandate, which was likely due to weaker enforcement by officers at weigh stations. While officers have well-established protocols for inspecting paper logs, many lack expertise in how to read ELD data.

Further, a paper-log inspection entails the officer approaching a truck driver’s cab, requesting the logbook and additional documentation, and then departing for their own vehicle or the weigh-station scale house to inspect the material. The process often takes half an hour or more. With ELDs, the officer generally enters the truck’s cab to read from the dashboard, as the trucker quite literally looks over his shoulder (and maybe a dog, the frequent trucker companion, yaps at his feet). “For both technical and interactional reasons,” writes Levy, these changes can mean that ELDs are inspected far less carefully.

An Over-the-Road Crisis

In comments opposing the ELD mandate before its passage in 2017, truckers wrote about their concern that ELDs, as Levy puts it, are “an affront to their privacy, dignity, and independence.” She quotes two truckers’ comments to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration: “I do not need a federal baby-sitter in the truck”; “I resent the need for a black box on my truck to track what I am doing. I am an honest and safe driver.”

The idea of the trucker as a cowboy-like figure, independent and free, barreling down the wide-open road, has long been fiction. Few workers are subjected to more pervasive federal regulations, drug and alcohol testing, and detailed employer rules and organizational structures, not to mention predatory leasing arrangements. But ELDs add a new means of control.

And they’re often bundled with “other performance monitoring and analytics functions — the same hardware unit captures all kinds of information other than timekeeping, and the same back-office software gives managers access to that data.” A trucker’s “road knowledge,” the source of what autonomy and independence he has maintained despite existing regulations, is abstracted, its ownership transferred to management, leaving him more replaceable than ever.

Big Bill Haywood, a radical labor leader and one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World, once said that “the manager’s brains were under the workman’s cap.” Decades of managerial innovation has been about finding ways to dispossess workers of all kinds of such knowledge. How much can management’s extraction of knowledge, recast as data, reduce workers’ leverage as the only ones who truly know how a job is done? If ELDs are anything to go by, the answer is “a lot.”

For all the talk of self-driving trucks, the automation of driving looks more like the integration of humans with machines rather than the replacement of the former with the latter. As Levy notes, the shift to automation is “a slope, not a cliff.” But efforts to automate trucking suggest that if “robotrucks” do ever make it out of testing, it won’t be on local roads but on the country’s highways, across the miles truckers depend on.

That possibility only underscores the urgency of the need to change the structure of trucker pay, bring truckers under the FLSA, and end trucker misclassification, too. Writes Levy, “The problem’s roots are economic — to make a living, truckers have little choice but to break the law and to put themselves, and the motoring public, in danger.” Unless those root causes are addressed, the crisis in trucking will continue.