Technology Harms Truckers
By Anne Balay and Mona Shattell
Trucking was one of the last good jobs. It provided autonomy and a decent paycheck to those willing to live with the danger and the time away from home. But new technologies and mounting regulations have changed all that.
Another regulation began to be enforced just this week, putting additional pressures and controls on an already burdened and stressed workforce, the 3.5 million long-haul truckers whom we depend on to transport almost everything that we consume — our food, our clothes, and our computers and phones, etc. We study trucker life and health, and we believe that these increasing regulations clash with trucking’s stable work demands, posing significant public health risk.
Truckers’ work lives are highly regulated and surveilled. The Hours of Service regulations from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration shape any trucker’s work day. Each can drive 11 hours, and work 14. Starting December 2017, all trucks must be outfitted with Electronic Logging Devices (ELD). Beginning April 1, truckers found without an Electronic Logging Device will be penalized by the Department of Transportation. Now, if an enforcement officer finds a truck with only paper logs, that trucker will be placed “out of service” immediately for 10 hours. They must simply stop driving immediately, and they can be fined. After the 10 hours expire, they must drive immediately to the closest service area to get an ELD installed.
Once a truck has this ELD installed, an onboard computer keeps track of any instances in which the trucks wheels are rolling. And with Electronic Logging Devices, the time truckers spend getting loaded or unloaded appears on line 4 as “On duty, not driving.” Truckers are paid by the mile, not the hour, so they are anxious to spend as little time sitting still as possible.
We believe that this new enforcement will place truckers, and everyone who shares the road with them, at immediate and severe risk. Further, we believe that truckers now do their work in an ongoing state of fear. The rate and precision with which they are surveilled puts the entire industry in a state resembling post traumatic stress disorder. Since truckers, in essence, wield enormous, deadly weapons on our public roadways, their stress is something that we should all be concerned about.
First, some background. Starting in 1978, legislation has shifted its attention away from freight and its movements (goods, companies, and logistics) toward individual truckers. Rather than regulate what goods should be moved from ports or distribution centers, how, and at what cost, the Department of Transportation now focuses on when truckers sleep, where they are, and how they manage their time. Only the micro-level is controlled, and the macro-level is left to the “free” market.
However, the demands on truckers hold fast: they must get a load from point a to point b safely and on time, without running afoul of inspectors. Though truckers still consistently pull this off, they do so only by virtue of extreme personal sacrifice and carefully calculated risk management (with pay that is not commensurate with level of occupational stress). We fear that the recent ELD enforcement added to their already huge regulatory burden will tip the balance, critically increasing highway danger for us all.
With paper logs, there was some flexibility implied and certainly practiced, if not officially legal. Truckers could massage their working and waiting hours so that they could get enough miles driven each day to survive. The technological fix is much less forgiving, and it already forces truckers to spend much more time waiting (parked in safe and legal places or not) for their drive clock to have more time on it so that they can make their deliveries. Now, once 14 hours have passed since they started driving, even if they spend large hunks of these 14 hours sitting at a dock somewhere, they can’t drive again until they have logged 10 consecutive hours as “Off duty, in sleeper berth.” BUT the other fact is still true: to keep their jobs, truckers need to deliver on time. They are being squeezed into an impossible corner. Many will be forced to drive tired, or in bad weather, or too fast. And all will drive in continuous, nearly intolerable levels of fear and stress.
To be sure, we need to care about the number of hours that truckers drive to maintain safety on our highways, but if truckers were governed by the Department of Labor instead of the Department of Transportation, they could be paid by the hour or job, instead of by the mile, and Electronic Logging Devices would be unnecessary.
The legislative solution now offered is a new bill proposed by Bruce Babin (R, Texas), who wants hours added to the drive clock. Under it, instead of stopping at 14 hours, truckers would be allowed to drive 17. In trucks. On ice. At night. On a road near you. If that makes sense to you, then you are not paying attention. If truckers were governed by the Department for Labor, this would be disallowed and this technology not needed.
We need to stop thinking of technology as only good. People need some flexibility in order to do our jobs, and we need respect and to be trusted. Americans are asking the people who drive trucks to risk their lives and to leave their families so that we can have goods where and when we want them. Instead of hemming them around with so much technology that they live in constant fear and spend untold energy puzzling out how to do their jobs within the rules, we should set reasonable rules and then trust truckers to follow them.
Anne Balay, a former long-haul trucker and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College, has written a book about queer and black truckers that will be released this fall. Mona Shattell is a professor of nursing at Rush University.
