‘‘ L
IKE most of us, Karen Levy hadn’t spent much time hanging around truck stops when she first decided to explore
them as a research site more than 10 years ago. A scholar of surveillance, law, and technology, she was seeking a new research topic when she heard a radio story about ELDs – Electronic Logging Devices which capture data about truckers’ activities for regulatory purposes.
Intrigued, Karen visited a truck stop in Portland, Oregon that same week – and plunged into the fascinating, dangerous, and complex world of her new book, Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance.
“A lot of my first interviews were in the bars at truck stops,” Karen explains, “because that’s where truckers go when they’re on a break. Time is so important to them, I didn’t want them to feel they’d be losing money by sitting to let me interview them.”
A friendly bartender helped Karen to find contacts for her ethnographic research. Truckers were fun to talk to, with a swaggering cowboy identity and a rich slang; Karen was given the CB (Citizen’s Band radio) moniker “Road Scholar”. But, as one of Karen’s informants pointed out: “It may seem really fun, but we only have this attitude because this work is frightening as hell.”
As her research went on, it turned out that US truckers were not so much “imprisoned by the freedom of the road”, as by increasingly challenging working conditions which took a physical, emotional, and financial toll. Truckers’ much-vaunted independence also led to “self-sweating”, where workers under pressure become complicit in their own exploitation. The introduction of ELDs was meant
January-February 2023
Historically, truckers have been among the most autonomous and independent workers in the American economic landscape...
to address these issues by capturing data about truckers’ activities, and especially their heavily regulated work hours, which have historically sometimes been fudged to “get the job done” in the pen-and-paper era. But could digital monitoring solve the underlying issue?
“Because we’ve been unwilling to solve the harder problems about economy, politics, and industrial organisation, we’re left with technology as a kind of duct tape on the system,” says Karen. “Twenty- five years of debate over whether we should have electronic logging is almost a sideshow to avoid solving the actual problem, which is: how do we pay people for the work that they do and ensure that they don’t, sometimes quite literally, drive themselves to death because they can’t keep the lights on at home?”
ELDs created new dynamics within American logistics. Law enforcement officials could be perplexed by the new technologies, whose displays were unfamiliar compared to traditional logbooks. This sometimes created a strange camaraderie between drivers and officials in the face of the machine. Truckers and dispatchers also found new ways to circumvent the mandate – like the driver who, having hit his limit of hours for the day, was directed to “slow roll” at fifteen miles per hour to complete his journey without triggering the device.
Truckers did glean some benefits from the new regime. Data revealed which shippers and receivers cost drivers the most “detention time”, the hours of loading and unloading for which they are unpaid.
“It doesn’t redeem the entire project of the ELD mandate,” Karen says, “but it does create a silver lining, because arguably that data can be useful to truckers as they make a decision about whether to accept a load, or how to
Matt Finch (@drmattfinch) is a writer and consultant who specialises in strategy, foresight, and innovation work with institutions worldwide. See more at
www.mechanicaldolphin.com
negotiate terms with that entity.” Historically, truckers have been among the most autonomous and independent workers in the American economic landscape, self-styled heirs to a cowboy tradition which is writ large in trucker culture. By giving an account of how such workers have wrestled with the introduction of new regulations and digital monitoring, Data Driven provides a stark and vital case study in the new dynamics of workplace surveillance and information management, with insights and implications across a wide range of sectors.
Karen Levy is an associate professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University, associate member of the faculty at Cornell Law School, and field faculty in Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, Media Studies, and Data Science. Data Driven is available from Princeton University Press. IP
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