Karen Levy

Fascinating look at how technology changes a workplace and the self-definition of workers, even as they resist it. Digital tracking “upends the occupational autonomy truckers have traditionally held, reconfigures information flows within trucking firms, alters how truckers and law enforcement officers interact with one another, and creates new sites of contestation and resistance.” Although “we often depend on rule-breaking to make the world function,” technology changes how that works (an obvious comparison is the rise of fake license places/license plate obscuring practices in order to defeat automated enforcement). Here, technology serves to substitute for actually better workplace practices, specifically the fact that truckers aren’t paid for the time they spend at depots waiting for their cargo to be loaded/unloaded. Truckers are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act and are only paid per miles driven on duty. This means that shipping companies have no incentive to be careful with truckers’ time, and they aren’t, but truckers’ service hours are now sharply limited both by regulation and by tech that tracks driving, meaning that they are increasingly pressured. Instead of tech, we need to pay truckers for wait time.

Truckers’ reactions are influenced by the fact that many truckers see trucking as an identity: “an enactment of masculinity, a form of economic provision, and an extension of sexuality.” (She mentions another book specifically about queer truckers, Anne Balay’s Semi Queer, which also sounds good.) For working-class men, their bodies are their productive assets, and “the ability to push their bodies up to and past the limit is how they maintain economic autonomy.” But driver tracking reduces this autonomy “and impugns the self-knowledge on which it relies.” Truckers resist unionization because it conflicts with their fantasies of independence even as that independence recedes further (they are also often stuck in predatory contracts as the industry consolidates).

Deregulation depressed truckers’ wages; the job is both dangerous and lower-paying than it was. One out of every six people killed on the job drives a truck, and truckers also have high levels of health problems. They’re also dangerous to others: “a third of long-haul drivers admitted to falling asleep at the wheel at least once in the previous month,” and working truckers average only five to six hours of sleep in a twenty-four-hour period. Truck crashes kill about 5000 people per year and injure 150,000, and the numbers keep going up. It’s a toxic mix of economic desperation and individualistic, masculinized bravado, made worse by the fact that parking places where truckers can sleep are sharply limited.
Tracking promised to stop the widespread lying on logbooks, but created its own problems. A trucker who needs to stop driving for the night might be in violation according to the tracker if he drives to a safe place to sleep, so instead many truckers pull over to the side of the road, which is more dangerous. Tracking as a response to rule evasion “viewed [truckers]—the least powerful members of the industry—as untrustworthy liars who needed to be better policed, rather than professionals doing their best to negotiate difficult logistics in the face of countervailing demands.”

“Rather than responding by making conditions more humane or wages more competitive, the industry has responded by trying to compel new pools of potential drivers to enter trucking—for example, newly licensed eighteen-year-olds—often to the detriment of public safety.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise that crashes didn’t decrease after electronic tracking mandates were enforced, and actually increased for small carriers. Although time-in-service violations dropped, “citations for speeding and other forms of unsafe driving increased dramatically across all firm sizes; most notably, independent owner-operators saw a 35 percent increase in unsafe driving violations.”

But there are some non-obvious twists to the story. Because the tracking devices are fixed within truck cabs, as opposed to logbooks that could be handed over, inspections now put the inspector in the cab with the driver, and also highlight inspectors’ common lack of expertise in interpreting the devices. When logbook inspections occurred outside the truck, the inspector felt no time pressure; when inside, they were more cursory. The increased social discomfort of inspections then increased the chances that drivers could get away with specific kinds of evasion. This means that what looks like fewer detected violations with electronic monitors might just be less detection. You might think that monitoring could be made electronic-only, but violations aren’t automatically reported by the devices, and some sort of actual inspection seems necessary on a continuing basis because inspectors also need to look at the actual truck to see if anything is wrong, which won’t show on a device.
“Officers told me that many significant trafficking busts (human-and drug-related) occur when an officer detects ‘something hinky’ in the course of a routine inspection,” though they have a lot of discretion about which drivers to wave through. Before the electronic tracking mandate became universal, some drivers gamed the system by using decals indicating they had electronic monitors, which made it more likely that inspectors would wave them through so as not to deal with them.

Other interesting responses: Firms have gamified the system and created competition among truckers for the best ratings, “sometimes backed by a modest financial reward or public recognition”—they even text truckers’ partners or send them checks as a way to make it seem like competing for the top spot is part of truckers’ masculine, breadwinning duty. Tracking also allows employers to harass drivers: “Even when drivers are off duty, employers can see where they are, and can contact them using systems’ communication functions—which sometimes
lacked a ‘mute’ function for drivers to silence employers’ attempts at communication, even during sleep breaks.” Dispatchers can now deploy their own knowledge of reported road conditions to dispute driver reports.

Truck stops used to be first-come, first-served, but now there is more reserved parking, which can be booked online (for a price, of course).
At least initially, drivers often destroyed their devices, trying to make tampering look like accidental failure. Levy connects this to the routine “failure” of police dash and body cams (she cites an investigation in Chicago finding 80% of videos missing audio due to “officer error and intentional damage”), though it doesn’t seem like enforcers are trying to correct that for cops as they do for truckers.

Trucking companies also have some incentives to assist truckers with evading the rules. Levy recounts an instance in which a dispatcher instructed a driver to “roll” at less than 15 mph to avoid triggering the monitoring device from registering the truck as “driving.” Then, the driver loaded the freight, which also couldn’t be detected by the device. All this was work occurring officially off-duty and unpaid—during his rest break. “What was especially striking about this incident to me was that the dispatcher had, not an hour before, told me that the carrier for which she worked ‘ran 100 percent legal.’” And, Levy reports, she orchestrated this evasion without any indication of irony, shame, or other acknowledgement.

Also, there’s evasion in equipment: The rules only required retrofitting trucks if they had engines that were newer than a certain date. This created a conflict with environmental aspirations by increasing the incentive to build new trucks with old engines, making them exempt from emissions requirements (they’re up to 55 times more polluting) and driver monitoring requirements.

What’s next? Levy discusses devices that are worn on the head to detect fatigue, which can send an alert to a manager, flash lights in drivers’ eyes, sound alarms, or vibrate to jolt the wearer alert. The promise of AI is not self-driving trucks—that still seems too difficult—but “using AI to address human ‘weakness’ through constant, intimate, visceral monitoring.” “Autonomous” systems are in fact pervasively surveilled systems. And there will still be evasion: driver monitoring can be tricked with ankle weights and glasses that have eyeballs on them. “[D]iscussions about the desirability of autonomous systems must necessarily also be discussions about how much surveillance we are willing to stomach to make these systems work.”

As Levy concludes, “all too often, we impose top-down solutions to social problems based on how we think the world functions (or at least, how we think it should function)—while disregarding, deliberately or out of ignorance, how the world actually functions.” The supposed problem is that drivers are untrustworthy; the actual problem is that the industry is organized in a way that incentivizes dangerous driving. Levy also emphasizes that the effects of technological interventions, like other interventions, may depend on larger cultures. She discusses a study finding that, in individualist workplace cultures, posting everyone’s performance publicly increased competition and improved performance, but it had the opposite effect in a collectivist workplace. High performers in collectivist work cultures apparently didn’t want to cause low performers to feel bad, or to damage team spirit through competition. This wasn’t trying to make an anti-collectivist point, but rather to emphasize that the effects of monitoring technologies vary depending on how people behave towards each other.… (mehr)