Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance (A Review)
12.09.22
In late 2017, long-haul trucker “Big Jon,” a popular YouTuber with 5.54k subscribers, posted a tutorial that promised to free truckers from the indignities of Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs, colloquially known as “e-logs”).
“Are you tired of being on e-logs and wish you were back on paper? Or do you just wish that you could drive a little bit farther?” narrates Big Jon. Picking up a sledgehammer, he explains how to cheat the system in 60 seconds or less: “So basically, what you do is, you take your tablet, and you take this wonderful hammer, and you just beat the crap out of it. And what do you know, after a couple of good strong hits, you can break your tablet in half and go back on paper. No more e-logs!”
Other drivers utilized more subtle means of resistance. Some covered the tablet with a small bag of dry ice before tapping it with a rubber mallet, leaving the machine’s “solid-state innards shattered into a billion pieces” while showing “no outward sign of assault.” Still others resorted to clever means of data manipulation or colluded with employers and gas stations to “beat the box.” While their methods varied, their sentiments were the same: “[We] do not need a federal baby-sitter in the truck.”
Once considered the antithesis of organization men, long-haul truckers have found their formerly autonomous, counter-cultural work environment upended by a slew of new federal regulations. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), reacting to years of climbing fatalities (each year, nearly 5,000 people are killed and 150,000 are injured in truck crashes), took action, mandating that each truck carry an ELD in its cab to prevent truckers from fudging their hours.
Designed to prevent sleep-deprived workers from staying on the road, hours-of-service rules mandate that a driver can work no more than 60 hours in a seven-day period, must allot ten-hour breaks between shifts, and must fit their 11 hours of driving for the day into one consecutive 14-hour slot.
The results have been mixed. While compliance has (allegedly) increased, highway safety saw no improvement, and crashes actually increased with small carriers (the number of fatalities in large-truck crashes hit a thirty-year high during the first year of the ELD mandate). The issue, contends Karen Levy, an information science and law professor at Cornell University who spent years interviewing drivers at truck stops, is that surveillance devices treat a symptom of the problem, not its cause.
“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,” writes Levy in her new release, Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance. The “solution on which hopes have been pinned is not economic, but technological. Rather than change the underlying conditions that give rise to lawbreaking, regulators and companies have tried to make it more difficult for truckers to falsify their time records.”
This week, in the wake of the first Tesla Semi all-electric Class 8 truck delivery to PepsiCo last week — an event that spells still longer, unpaid hours for 2 million long-haul truckers as they idle while recharging batteries — we review Data Driven, an “exceptional exploration of how new rules and AI are transforming modern long-haul trucking, and how almost everyone who talks about the future of robots and work is getting it wrong.”
The Extinction of Asphalt Cowboys
Truckers did not always work under such difficult conditions or hold such low cultural regard. Unlike the serial killer image of today (thanks in no small part to the FBI’s Highway Serial Killings Initiative), long-haul truckers were once regaled as the “knights of the highway,” respected for their mechanical expertise by the newly motoring public. In 1938, a promotional film by Chevrolet pointed to long-haul truckers as a benevolent source of professional expertise.
“These truckers go out of their way to help others on the road. The driving public has come to know them as the most courteous drivers on the highway,” boasted the video. “They have established some of the finest safety records in the country… for dependability, endurance, courtesy, and skill, we will look far before we find a class of drivers who handle themselves and their vehicles with greater safety than the men behind the wheel of the big interstate trucks.”
Today, this long-forgotten image seems like a myth straight out of Camelot. Following deregulation by the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, trucking quickly dropped from one of the most respected blue-collar professions in the country to one of the most derided. According to Levy, in 1980, truckers made roughly $100,000 in today’s dollars, whereas today’s median salary has tanked to $47,000 per year, a number that hasn’t inched upwards in fifteen years and helps explain the 100% yearly turnover rate for large firms.
While service quality improved and shipping rates declined by 25 percent in 1982, these consumer benefits were paid for at the cost of the trucker. “The industry fared far worse than other blue-collar jobs,” writes Levy. “Between 1977 and 1995, the decline in truck drivers’ average real earnings was four times that of demographically comparable workers in manufacturing production… During the ten years immediately following the advent of deregulation (from 1977 to 1987), truck drivers’ wages dropped by an astonishing 44 percent, forcing truckers to drive much longer hours — and, as we will see, often to break the law — to make economic ends meet.”
Paper logs, long the industry’s method for enforcing hours-of-service rules, were routinely tampered with, so much so that they were referred to as “comic books,” “coloring books,” or “swindle sheets.” Perhaps most significantly, however, deregulation cemented the dominant mode of compensation in the industry: pay-per-mile. As truckers put it, “if the wheel ain’t turnin,’ you ain’t earnin’!”
“Truckers must complete repairs and inspections, fuel up at truck stops (hundreds of gallons of diesel at a time), coordinate with shippers and receivers, and wait to be loaded and unloaded at terminals (a practice called “detention time” that can regularly stretch into several uncompensated hours),” writes Levy. “Before deregulation, many truckers did earn hourly pay for nondriving time, in addition to mileage pay; after deregulation, the market ‘competed away’ such pay, shifting the burden of market inefficiencies, unforeseeable delays, and mechanical risks to drivers.”
A 2018 DOT study estimated that detention time alone cost drivers and carriers up to $1.3 billion in earnings each year. And now, with the inflexibility of ELDs — which do not account for facility delays, traffic, and the like — many drivers feel compelled to drive “like a bat out of hell” to comply with hours-of-service rules.
As one trucker explained, “There are things that happen in the life of trucking that can’t be overcome… Accidents on the road, breakdowns, flat tires — anything that will slow you up. From Point A to Point B it’s, say, two hundred miles. You’ve got four hours to get there. That’s fifty miles an hour, that’s a good average for a truck. If anything happens between that — a wreck, anything where you’re just sitting in the middle of the road wasting your goddamn time — excuse me, your time — you can’t make that. And then they want to know why not.”
Can ELDs Highlight Structural Problems?
One positive side-effect of ELDs is that they have incidentally highlighted the inefficiencies of other parties and brought greater visibility to the massive number of unpaid hours absorbed by truck drivers. Rather than advocating for the abolishment of ELDs, Levy envisions a more flexible iteration as a future tool for pay and labor reform.
“Though ELDs primarily surveil truckers, they incidentally offer a window into what shippers and receivers are doing, too (a phenomenon called refractive surveillance),” observes Levy. “We can safely assume that if a trucker’s ELD records him sitting idly or making small yard moves at a shipping terminal for hours on end, he is there because he is being detained by the customer. ELD data can thus provide ‘hard evidence of a trucker’s wait time.’”
Several organizations have already taken steps to leverage the data for legal reform. The American Transportation Research Institute, one of the oldest non-profit research organizations focused on trucking, is using ELD data to push for changes to the hours-of-service regulations, “demonstrating how the strictness of the rules (coupled with digital enforcement) forces truckers to drive during congested periods, rather than waiting until the traffic clears.”
Motive — the preferred ELD company for owner-operators — aggregates its data to give truckers visibility into delays, allowing them to choose between shippers and, ostensibly, pressurize them to improve wait times. It also urged DOT to allocate drivers two additional hours of work time, showing that “its users were detained more than two hours about seven times each month — and that drivers drive faster after a detention period to make up for lost time.” Besides hourly reform, ELD data has also been used to offer more reserved parking, provide load matching, and to offer “collective intelligence” on road conditions.
As the industry inches closer towards automation, Levy believes structural pay reform will be more important than ever. While Stephen King envisioned a bloodthirsty, autonomous truck as early as 1986, Levy believes the transition to self-driving will be more cyborg than Maximum Overdrive.
While autonomous trucks may be capable of covering highway miles in the near future, Levy believes truckers will continue to play a significant role so long as less routine tasks — local miles, safety inspections, freight monitoring, truck repairs, etc. — continue to eat up much of their day. And, in the near term, only when truckers are paid for their work rather than their mileage, will they be less incentivized to reach for the sledgehammer or continue driving while fatigued.
As one reader concludes, “What we’ve learned from the ELD experiment is very important for policy: Surveillance just doesn’t work that well as a safety tool. Yes, it gives the company more information. But as the saying goes, you can’t fatten a cow by weighing it; you can’t improve safety by forcing drivers to have their rest stops recorded.”
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