 Karen Levy was a 2019 New Arizona Fellow at New America. She is a faculty member in the Department of Information Service at Cornell and associate faculty at Cornell Law School. To get started, Karen and I are going to read a really illuminating transcript from the book. Karen, would you rather be the firm or the driver? Thanks for asking. I will be, what do you wanna be, Tori? I'll be the firm. I'm gonna read this before. You'll be the firm? Okay. All right, so this is going, an exchange between a firm and a truck driver. 1257 p.m., are you headed to delivery? 102 p.m., please call. 233 p.m., what is your ETA to delivery? 234 p.m., need you to start rolling. 235 p.m., why have you not called me back? 325 p.m., I can't talk and sleep at the same time. 337 p.m., why aren't you rolling? You have hours and are going to service fail this load. 344 p.m., you have hours now and the ability to roll. That is a failure when you are sitting and refusing to roll to the customer. 351 p.m., please go in and deliver. We need to service our customers. Please start rolling. They will receive you up to 1130. Please do not be late. 414 p.m., bad storm, can't roll now. 434 p.m., weather channel is showing small rain shower in your area. One to two inches of rain and 10 mile per hour winds. Question mark, question mark, question mark. Karen, to get us started. Dramatic reading. That was a blast. Let's keep going. Tell us a little bit about that transcript. What does that exchange illustrate about what's happening right now with truckers and surveillance? Yeah, well, first, thanks for doing that with me. I like reading that transcript. You definitely selected the tougher part that has more to say, so I appreciate you doing that. The first important thing about this transcript is actually, I think that it exists at all. So this was a conversation that was recorded on an electronic logging device, which is this sort of technological device that is the centerpiece of the book. It is this piece of technology that's now mandatory in all trucks in the United States. They all have to buy, install, and use these devices. And it keeps track of things like where a truck is and how long it's been being driven as well as a whole bunch of other types of data, which I know we'll get into in a little bit. And the book Data-Driven that I am talking about today focuses on this technology and kind of how it's changed a lot of what it means to do trucking work. So in that transcript, there's a few different things that are happening. First, the fact that the firm is reaching out to the driver repeatedly, sometimes at one-minute intervals, I don't know if folks caught that, but some of those messages from Tori are coming at one-minute intervals while the driver is ostensibly trying to sleep. Truckers are notoriously overworked and underslept more than maybe any other job in the United States. In part, there's a bunch of reasons for this, but in part because of kind of just the speed of business that we all demand of them, right? We all want to get our goods as quickly as possible. We have all come to depend on things like Amazon Prime and Next Day Delivery. And in part, they're so tired because of the pace structure of trucking, which incentivizes them to just remain behind the wheel as much as possible, even when they're too tired to do it, which is something I think we'll talk more about too. So in this case, the driver's saying, I need sleep, I'm sleeping, and the firm is seeing many, many times over, no, you need to get back out there, right? You need to deliver this load, you need to roll, right? Which is kind of trucker lingo for driving. The other thing you see that's really important in this exchange is that the dispatcher, the dispatcher Tori is invoking several different types of data in making this argument to the trucker that he needs to get back on the road. So she says a couple of times, you have hours, right? And what that's referring to is the fact that the back office, right? So Tori in this case has this record of how much the driver has been driving, has access to that from the home office, you know, which is probably hundreds of miles away. And she's using that to make an inference about whether or not it's legitimate that the trucker says that they're too tired to drive, right? Like she's making that inference based on data she has. That's very different from the way things have traditionally gone in trucking. Traditionally, the idea has been, you know, these workers are kind of, it's like they're kind of like the captains of their ship, right? Like they get to make safety relevant calls because they're the only ones that know the conditions of their body, the conditions of the road around them. And that has really changed, right? And I think the transcript makes that really clear. You see the same thing when Tori says, oh, the weather channel is showing this small rain storm in your area, small rain shower in your area. This is probably referring to like an overlay map that she has on her computer screen that shows kind of what the weather conditions are around all of the fleet's trucks. And again, here you see like that the dispatcher is challenging my accounts, right? Challenging the driver's account about whether or not it's safe for him to do his job, using this kind of abstracted data that's not right based on being in the truck or kind of knowing what the trucker is experiencing. And that's just, again, a very different model from what truckers are used to. And it really changes what it means to kind of do the work of trucking. And so we're gonna get into all of that in more depth. I just wanted to start with something that really shows kind of the magnitude of what we're going to be talking about and the granularity of this data, which is just really astounding. But, so as you say, trucking is a hugely important industry in the US and everywhere in the world, essentially. As you point out, there's a common saying in the industry that if you bought it, it's been on a truck. Almost everything we touch has spent some time on a truck waiting to get to us. But this is what you're talking about here in terms of the workplace surveillance is about more than just the trucking industry, right? Yeah, absolutely, right. So the trucking industry is, of course, itself a very rich and very important site. As you mentioned, it's incredibly essential to the way the economy functions. The folks who do trucking work are like really the backbone of the economy in many ways. But the things that they're experiencing are really, in some ways, they're like canaries in the coal mine for what lots of people are experiencing in their work. You see more workplace surveillance in contexts like retail and warehouses and food service and office work and even professionalized industries like law and medicine, finance. And to be honest, actually, truckers are in some sense kind of catching up with their peers in other low wage sectors. So for a long time, the nature of trucking work is that it's been geographically distributed and mobile. And that has kept truckers in some ways insulated from the kinds of oversight that folks in warehouses or in other, what we sometimes think of as kind of low skill work, although I think that's a misnomer, but in kind of blue collar work, folks have been kind of experiencing these types of surveillance over their work for a long time. And truckers have been able to maintain kind of a level of autonomy that some of their brethren haven't. So there's definitely a sense that truckers' experiences are indicative of this broader and pretty longstanding dynamic. And in the book, I go into some depth about kind of, workplace surveillance isn't new, like it's existed in one form or another since before the age of industrialization. But there are things about contemporary workplace surveillance that are new. And I talked through several of them in the book, but among them are first, that it's reaching into these new workplaces. So places like trucking, places like our own homes, right, when we do hybrid work or when we do work from anywhere now, that also often entails greater surveillance into these new types of workplaces. New types of data, including as you mentioned, this really granular data, often biometric data or data about our bodies. New types of analysis, including notably predictive analytics. So not only knowing kind of what a worker has been doing in the past, but then using those data to make predictions about what they'll be doing in the future and acting on that data. And new kinds of forms of entanglement, right? Or kind of blurring the boundary between what counts as the workplace and what doesn't, including things like, you know, employers keeping track of an employee's LinkedIn profile to know if they're likely to start looking for other jobs or something, which is a service that we know a lot of companies take advantage of or things like that, right? Sort of looking at employees' social media profiles, those types of things. So all of these things, I think, suggest that workplace surveillance isn't new, but there are like new flavors of it or new ways in which it's kind of embroiling itself in many workers' lives that are worth noticing. And so how did you first get interested in truckers and surveillance as a topic? Yeah, I mean, quite honestly, it was like a little bit of a fluke for me. So I don't have any family background in trucking. I'm from Indiana, and there's a lot of truckers in Indiana as there are kind of everywhere, but like I have no truckers in my family. I got involved in the industry because, excuse me, I was, so my background is in law and in sociology. And when I was in graduate school, this was back in 2011, I was really interested in kind of rules and how they work, and especially what it looks like when we use some sort of technology, whether that's surveillance technology or some other kind of digital means to enforce rules or expectations in ways that are new. So maybe we don't change the underlying rule, but we change how it is that we're enforcing that rule. And this is the kind of thing that we see happening across all kinds of different domains, including the workplace, but also just all over the place, healthcare, criminal justice, employment, all kinds of contexts. So I was kind of casting around looking for a good site where I could understand how this change and how we enforce rules is impacting the way people relate to one another on the ground, excuse me. And one day I was just listening to the radio and I heard this story about how truckers were upset that there was like a digital surveillance mandate that was being debated in Washington and like they weren't excited about it. So I felt like, oh, maybe that's like an example of this kind of thing that I've heard about that, but I didn't know anything about it. So that day I went to a truck stop after work and I just thought like, let me talk to some people. Like let me see what it feels like to talk to truck drivers. And it turns out it's great. Like it was a lot of fun to talk to truck drivers. They were so thoughtful and generous and forthcoming. They had such interesting stories that I didn't feel like I knew anything about, right? I don't think a lot of people had thought about before. So I was just immediately hooked and it was such a rich site where there were so many interesting dynamics going on that I just like stuck with it. And that's 11 years ago now. So it's been a substantial portion of my life that I've spent thinking about and writing about the trucking industry. For the reasons we'll go into it, it ended up being just the perfect moment of change to dive into it. So as these NLDs are starting to become legally required, certainly required by a lot of the big companies. So you were able to just kind of watch this all unfold and talk to people as they went through it. So, I mean, can you tell us a little bit about how you researched and reported the book? I mean, one thing that you know is that a lot of truckers have these really strong libertarian and kind of like anti-elite points of view. You're a professor at Cornell. One of my favorite details is that you started appearing on a serious trucker radio show and they gave you the handle Road Scholar, which is just so perfect. But so can you tell us a little bit about kind of how you reported it out, how the truckers responded to you, what the experience was like? Yeah, definitely. So I was, I definitely made a lot of mistakes but I learned a lot over time. When I started, as I mentioned, I didn't know anything about trucking. I also was like a pretty green social researcher, when I was in graduate school. So I started by just talking to like anyone who would talk to me about this, right? Like, and that included a ton of truck drivers but also anybody else who kind of had some role in the industry. So I talked to dispatchers, I talked to regulators who sometimes were limited in how much they could say but some of them were pretty forthcoming. I talked to lawyers and insurance agents and lobbyists and sales representatives and just like anybody whose work touched the industry or touched the technology that's used in it. I ended up going to 11 different states over about three years. Just, I mean, truckers are everywhere so in some sense they're like an easy population to study but I went to like a bunch of trade shows. I did observations at four different trucking companies that were like variable in different ways. I went to like regulatory meetings. I just kind of went and talked to whoever. I also did a bunch of review of legal and regulatory documents. So part of the story is about kind of how the federal regulations have integrated digital surveillance into the rules that govern what truckers do every day. And I was really interested in that element. So I reviewed a bunch of like thousands of documents that have been either created by the government or submitted to the government in the course of them considering these different rules. So I just talked to a bunch of different people and to your point, which I think is a really good one about kind of how to establish trust with folks who often, you know, I had a different, a different educational background, often a very frequently a different gender identity. Certainly my race and my youth at the time, right? This was 11 years ago. And my background were huge advantages in a lot of ways. And I think it's really crucial for any researcher, right? Or anybody who's learning about other people's lives to be reflective about kind of what their position affords them. There were definitely ways in which I think being a younger woman was advantageous, like got me access to different places. I wasn't really perceived as a threat. Sometimes what you want when you're doing social research is to just have people explain stuff to you like you're stupid. And I definitely was stupid at first. Like I didn't know what I was talking about. And over time I learned, but people often still just assumed I didn't know anything, which could be advantageous. But there were also ways in which it was an impediment right where I had to think sometimes about safety. I was pregnant for part of the research and that was an impediment in a lot of ways. There were things I couldn't do because like I used to buy folks beers in truck stop bars a lot because that's when they would have time to talk to me. I had to stop doing that. There's a whole methodological appendix in the book where I kind of reflect on what the process looked like and what strategies worked and what didn't work by virtue of kind of who I was and how I was relating to these folks. Yeah, and as a journalist, the appendix might have been my favorite part, right? Cause that's what I always want to know is kind of how did someone conduct this research? You're reading the appendix, you really get a great sense of how you were able to pull together so much disparate information while not losing the voice of the truckers, which is I think what really makes the books so special. Thank you. Going for the truckers, safe for the appendix. Exactly. All right, so to get kind of into the details a little bit more, so surveillance, as you mentioned among truckers really predates technology with log books. So how did the log books come to be and why did the government start to see them as not quite good enough at what they were supposed to do? Yeah, so a really big issue in trucking, maybe the biggest issue in trucking is fatigue, right? So for obvious reasons, right? You don't want people driving these 100,000 pound vehicles down the highway, down the public highway who are too tired to be safe, right? And thousands of people a year die in truck-related accidents. They cost many millions of dollars and the federal government has recognized for a long time that in this industry there need to be some limits on how much people can drive. And since the 1930s, actually there have been regulations in place that are called the hours of service regulations that limit the amount of time per day and per week that truckers can drive. They're a little complicated, but like the general kind of parameters are that truckers can only drive 11 hours a day and 70 hours a week. But there's like more detail to it, but that's enough to know. And as you mentioned, right the way that since the 1930s truckers have kept track of this is via like paper and pencil log books. Actually I have one I can show you right here. You can buy one of these like at any truck stop for a couple of bucks. And I know you can't really see it, but basically it's just like a little form you fill out with a pencil and a ruler. And it has this little like grid in the middle. This is time. And then there's these four horizontal rows that correspond to like different statuses. So whether you're driving, whether you're off duty, things like that. And if we had more time and if people really cared we could like go through what it looks like to fill these out. It's really pretty easy. Like it only takes a few minutes to figure out. The issue is that as you mentioned, like this sort of has come to be seen as not a great way to like compel compliance with these rules. So why is that? It's like an open secret in the industry that nobody takes log books all that seriously. These documents are not connected to how truckers are paid. This is just a regulatory compliance document. And it's very, very easy to tweak it post hoc, right? To like make it look as though your trip was legal or you complied with the rules without actually doing that. And like why would truckers do that? So a couple of reasons. One is that like everybody who's ever driven on the highway knows that like life on the road is unpredictable. So you hit traffic, you hit bad weather. Who knows what happens, right? You get a flat tire, things don't always go the way you anticipate they're gonna go. And so, you know, you still have to do your job, right? If you're doing your job, if you're a trucker and you're on the road 70 hours a week, like you still gotta get the stuff where it needs to go. So that's one reason that sometimes people kind of fudged these. They make it look like they made a trip in 11 hours when they really didn't. The other thing is that truckers are incentivized to drive as much as they can. So they have the saying in the industry, which is if the wheel ain't turning, you ain't earning. Truckers are paid by the mile. So they are really, really incentivized to drive even when they're too tired, right? Or even when they're past their legal limits because that's how they're getting paid. They're not getting paid to sit around resting or to be stuck in traffic. That's like unpaid time for them. Truckers' wages have declined really precipitously over the last several decades. So truckers in 1980 made about $110,000 in contemporary dollars. Truckers now make about $47,000. So it's just like a crazy decline and it really has not moved very much. So obviously in those conditions, that's like setting the stage for people to kind of keep driving as much as they can because they have to keep the lights on at home. So that's all kind of setting the stage for the government to say like, this is not working. This is not the solution to getting folks to comply with these rules. So when did this idea of, hey, we can actually install a device in the cab to make sure we're keeping an eye on someone? When did that idea start to kind of percolate and how long did it take for it to become a requirement in the US? Yeah, so you start to see like inklings of it in the 1980s, like there's some early regulatory moves seeing what if we were to... And obviously the technology was a little different then but saying, what if we were to do this or what if we were to do this only for certain drivers or drivers who have a bad safety record or something? And it gets debated for a really long time like for about like almost 40 years there are like different kind of iterations of these regulations that are in Washington in the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration which is the regulatory agency that oversees this kind of thing. But it isn't until 2017 that the federal government finally mandates that these what are called electronic logging devices or ELDs become mandatory for all truckers. And as you said, right? That's basically a digital version of this logbook. It's hardwired into the truck. So the idea is supposed to be that, the trucker can't tamper with it or at least it's much more difficult to kind of falsify than the paper log would be. Now, one thing that's important to notice about that is like what approach the federal government didn't take. Like what they could have done, for example would be to say, one problem in trucking is that people are incentivized to drive a whole lot even past the point of exhaustion. Maybe we should change the pay structure of trucking. So they're not incentivized to do that, right? Or maybe we should ensure that they're paid for all the kinds of work that are currently uncompensated. Truckers are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act, which is the law that makes sure that people get overtime pay and provides all kinds of other important workplace protections. Truckers don't have those protections, right? They're exempted from it explicitly in the law. One thing that the federal government could have done is like to roll back that exemption to ensure that people are paid for their work. They could have provide more safe truck parking which is another reason people sometimes drive past the point of being too tired is because there's like no place for them to pull over. There's all kinds of things they could have done to sort of address these core problems that fatigue and overwork, right? Sort of these root causes of the problem. But they didn't take that approach. Instead, this approach has been this kind of top down policing strategy where they say like, well, we're not gonna actually do anything to make you less tired or to address the causes of fatigue. What we'll do is we'll try to make it harder for you to lie about it. And before I forget, in a little more than 20 minutes, we're gonna segue over to Q&A. So please, as you have questions, leave them in the Q&A function and then we will get to them in a little bit because I'm sure everyone has lots of great questions for Karen. As you referenced a little bit earlier, truckers have like a very particular ethos. They spent a lot of their time with the acceptance of these love books, really having a lot of freedom to make their own decisions. And then all of a sudden they become really one of the most heavily surveilled workplaces. So can you talk a little bit about how that kind of like trucker pride and point of view ends up intersecting with this really rapid rise in surveillance? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I really like that question. I feel like one thing that's really important to recognize about the trucking industry is that it's not a workplace in the same sense that like, I have a workplace, right? Or that you, Tori, have a workplace. Like truckers live in their truck cabs for days or even weeks at a time, right? So first of all, like there isn't this clean separation between home and work that might make us say like, okay, well, maybe I'm under a certain kind of supervision at work, but not at home. Like truckers don't have any escape from that. The other thing is that many truckers, if you ask them why they got into the industry that they did, they'll answer like, I mean, almost without exception, a lot of folks I've talked to have said something akin to I didn't want somebody looking over my shoulder all the time. I wanted to have some autonomy in the way I did my work. I didn't want to be treated like a child. I didn't want to be treated like a criminal, right? Like many of them have had experiences in other workplaces where they like really resisted this notion of kind of constantly being like very closely supervised, having somebody like always over their shoulder. And so many of them kind of self-select into this industry where they didn't have that for a very long time, right? Where for decades, truckers just were able, as I mentioned, to have all this autonomy and how they made decisions. And so this digital surveillance really flies in the face of this, you know, I mean, one thing that really has struck me post pandemic is how much we like to talk out essential workers and how valuable they are and how much we trust them and how much risk they take every day for us. Truckers are like about as essential as it gets, right? Like we need truckers to like move our toilet paper around and like literally everything else, right? As you mentioned, like literally almost everything was at some point on a truck being driven by a trucker. And yet we like haven't met that. Certainly we haven't kind of met that notion of essentialness like with wages, right? We don't necessarily pay people what they deserve for doing that work. And then also digital surveillance kind of flies in the face of this idea that like that work is really valuable, right? Like we don't value it financially and then we don't afford it the dignity that many truckers feel that they deserve. So because of that, I think surveillance hits especially hard in this context. You know, something else you talk about too is that while most probably individual truckers were against the ELD mandate and lots of the owner operators and much smaller companies that would have to then pay to install these devices were really reluctant for financial reasons, for independence reasons, et cetera. There's a lot of really large companies within the trucking industry. And while they were initially a little skeptical of the ELD mandate, eventually they embraced it themselves because it allowed them to also institute lots of other types of surveillance, some of which of course, you know, like the weather channel, the transcript we were allowed gestured to. But you know, so what are some of the other kinds of surveillance of the drivers, especially for these really big companies are now facing when they get into a truck? Yeah, it's a great point. So large firms, right? Like first of all, it's easier for large firms to sort of stomach the costs associated with this mandate than it is for like a small mom and pop shop or just one driver driving by themselves. So competitively it became advantageous for them to kind of boost this mandate, which was gonna raise costs that they were able to sort of internalize more efficiently. But then the other really big thing that you point out is that this becomes like a scaffold or a backbone that supports all kinds of different other data collection that firms themselves want. So this can include things like, you know, how fast a driver is going, whether they're changing lanes without signaling, whether they're going out of some pre-specified routes, how much fuel they're using. That's like huge in the industry. They care a lot about that, of course. How hard they're breaking up to and including stuff like even biometrics and camera-based systems. So things like, you know, an AI augmented camera that's trained on the driver's face that is detecting like how often his eyelids are kind of, you know how when you're tired, you kind of like your eyelids kind of sag or like your head sort of nods. Cameras that are equipped with those types of technologies to assess whether a driver is tired and then send a signal back to that driver's dispatcher to like sometimes dock in a point or something if they have like a productivity management system or to just alert, you know, the dispatcher that the person is tired. Some of them will sound alarms or like vibrate the seat to wake the driver up, things like that. All kinds of stuff, right? Like there's just a huge variety of systems that kind of plug into or like modules within this kind of broader ecosystem of the electronic logging device. And so all that stuff isn't mandatory. The government doesn't require it. But the fact that the government has required something makes it pretty convenient for large firms to kind of use that as like a scaffold for this additional surveillance. And then they use it not just to sort of like nudge them or yell at them through the devices but then also to have them compete with one another, right? You know, they'll get these rankings showing where you are in terms of fuel efficiency or there's one thing you mentioned that was just horrifying which is that they'll send bonuses to the trucker's wife if they're sort of meeting all of their metric targets. Yeah, that's one of my favorite examples. That was just one firm that I talked to where, yeah, they talked about this where they said, well, you know, we really wanna, and many workplaces do this, right? We really wanna kind of incentivize that drivers should be meeting these organizational goals especially around fuel efficiency as you mentioned. And some of them will do it by like giving the drivers a gift card or like an employee of a month sort of thing. But yeah, this one company had this very creative approach which was let's issue, they weren't even big checks. They can't remember how much they were for. But let's issue these little bonus checks to drivers' wives and the wives' names because their thinking was if the wife is on board, like that'll compel the driver in a way, in a different kind of way, right? That'll bring in this kind of other aspect of his life in service of the goals of the company. Right, so it's a really wonderful way of sort of sneakily bringing these pressures to bear which is, I mean, extremely clever but absolutely horrifying. You know, you spend a lot of time talking about this really rich culture of truckers sort of evading surveillance. So, you know, what are some of the ways that they found to get around the ELDs or other types of surveillance they're subject to in the cab? Yeah, so one of my favorite chapters of the book actually talks about the different strategies that truckers use to resist. There's like many of them and I won't talk through all of them of course. Now there's like a dozen in the book but there's a huge range of things. Like one of the most or maybe the most direct thing folks will do sometimes is like smash the thing with a hammer like smash the device to destroy it which like is not really sustainable. You can't do that a lot of times but it does certainly send a message, right? It's very evocative but it like definitely says to your employer like, I don't like this thing. You're probably not gonna be in that job for very long but that's like, that's one strategy up to like all kinds of other strategies that involve like trying to kind of sneak extra time, right, so these devices, you know, cap or are intended to cap the amount of time drivers can drive but there are lots of ways that drivers can get around that. Like one strategy that's pretty obvious when you think about it is what drivers sometimes call ghost logs. So this is something they would do with the paper log books too which is like you record your 11 hours as Karen if you're Karen but then like when you run out of time, you record, you just change, you do another log and you record it as Tory, right? And now like you doubled your time and many companies will have like a demo mode or something like a John Doe kind of account that they use when they were setting up the ELDs and that some of them will tell truckers like, you know what you should do if you run out of time like sign into John Doe and you know, it's not uncommon that truckers do sometimes like they call it driving team like where there's more than one driver for a truck so it's like not so weird to have more than one driver assigned to a truck at any given time. That's one strategy. Another one that's kind of, I don't know if it's fun but it's interesting is sort of gaming the thresholds that these devices used to detect driving. So I remember one time I was at a trucking firm and I was sitting with a dispatcher like watching the dispatcher do their work and the dispatcher was like, we run a hundred percent legal here like he will not see any of my drivers break in the rules at all. I was like, okay. And then she talked to this driver and the driver said, you know, I'm still like four miles from where I need to get to to like pick up this load and I'm out of time. And she said to him, okay, no big deal, pull over and then what I want you to do is roll, like drive at less than 15 miles an hour like kind of on the shoulder the last four miles to the pickup point. And the reason she told him to do that was because she knew that the device, the ELD only would log him as driving only would count as driving if he was going more than 15 miles an hour and less than that, it wouldn't count it. So I have to tell you, like when I saw that I was like, oh my God, I felt like Woodward and Bernstein or something. I felt like I have just seen the smoking gun but she really didn't see it that way, right? Like when she said she ran a hundred the firm ran a hundred percent legal in her mind, like that wasn't breaking the rules, right? Because the device wasn't detecting a breakage of the rules. And so in her mind, like there's wasn't one. And I certainly saw it differently. I think, you know, the law enforcement officers might see it differently but that just wasn't how it was interpreted. Yeah, so there were basically two times of resistance here, right? Which is the resistance from a driver who's saying, hey, look, I went into this industry because I want to be able to drive the route I think is best. I want to be able to stop when my body tells me to stop and keep going if I say to keep going. You know, as you mentioned, most truckers are on the older side. Many of them have been doing this for decades. And so, you know, this sort of sense of freedom that they used to have has been taken from them. So there's the people who resist that way. But then there's this other type of resistance that's kind of in collusion with the trucker, with the companies that really just goes against their interests. Yeah, the companies really kind of want to have it both ways, right? Like they want the extra control that the device affords them. They want this oversight into what their workers are doing. But they also like want the stuff to move, right? Like they want to meet their deadlines. They want to deliver on time. They want to be competitive and like bidding for different jobs, stuff like that. And so they kind of want to have it both ways. And sometimes that does make it make resistance. Resistance is kind of a funny thing because we think about it often as this like bottom up strategy against a powerful party. In trucking, it's a little more complicated, right? Because as you point out, sometimes the companies are actively telling the workers, here's how you break the rules, right? Because they kind of want it that way too. And there are some interesting, I think conceptual questions about like what resistance is for, right? If truckers are either compelled to participate in it, maybe against their will or if they're participating in it, but what they're doing is kind of like getting themselves more hours in the sweatshop, right? Like there's a really wonderful book by a transport economist named Michael Belzer. It's called Sweatshops on Wheels. And I really love this book. I informed a lot of how I think about the industry. And he makes this argument that if you look at trucking in terms of the number of hours people work and the amount of physical risk they put themselves at and the amount of pay that they make, which is low, that it's like basically equivalent to sweatshop labor. It's like pretty comparable. And I totally buy that in trucking. And so if a worker is like basically cheating the system or being told to cheat the system so that they can continue to sort of self exploit, that leads to some difficult questions, I think about what that resistance is useful for. And when you asked truckers about being pressured by their companies to engage in this kind of resistance that goes against their better interests, how did they feel about it? I mean, I know they're not monolithic but I'm curious about representative response. I mean, truckers I think are very used to doing what needs to be done to get the work done, right? Like there's a long history of truckers being extremely resourceful, using substances to stay awake, like using all kinds of different strategies, talking to each other, supporting each other and figuring out kind of how to get around some of it. Telling each other when there's law enforcement out, when there's like a smoky out so that to take a different route. Like truckers know that they are kind of like up against the wall when it comes to doing their work but they have to do it because they have to make a living, right? They have to keep the lights on at home. They have to feed their families. So in some sense, this is like not so different from a lot of the other constraints that they find themselves under. It's just like another way in which the work is extremely difficult and sort of unappreciated. But that too, that there's this idea, right? That like you're in trucking because you are going to be strong and pushed through and done no matter what. And so, there's like a moral reward to it. Yeah, I think it's one of those industries in which like stamina, the idea of like, I'm just gonna get this done no matter how hard it is is like extremely essential to the way the industry functions. It's a very masculine industry. So it's about like roughly 95% male and the culture, if you look at like trucking iconography from even movies like Smokey and the Bandit or like other trucking movies from the 70s, but like including more contemporary examples, there is this big emphasis on like along with autonomy, this kind of like the ideas some people sometimes talk about like the asphalt cowboy, right? Or the idea of like, I will break the rules and I'll do whatever I have to do to get this done. But what's important to recognize about that and which a trucker pointed out to me actually is like that is a kind of a gloss, right? Like that is a strategy that is important because of like the economic straits that people find themselves in, right? It's because like there is no other way to do it besides breaking the rules, right? That's just like the industry we've designed and that we all depend on. And so it's not surprising that truckers kind of build up this cultural mentality that kind of justifies that rule breaking. And so this rise of surveillance is taking place against this kind of like looming threat of automation. So, as a technology journalist, I think that the industry we often hear about that's most at risk of automation is trucking, right? That with the advances in self-driving cars, trucks are the best place to really start that. What's the best argument for why truckers are really at risk of automation? And what are the reasons why that argument could be overstated? Yeah, so this is a great point. So, it's clear that like the status quo in trucking isn't great, right? I've given you all this detail about how it's like underpaid and it's difficult, it's dangerous. Truckers have like the sixth highest rate of occupational fatalities in the country. We don't have enough truckers. People like to talk about what they call the labor shortage in trucking, which is to say there are many hundreds of thousands of jobs every year that are unfilled in trucking. Truckers will be very quick to correct you and will say, no, it's a wage shortage. It's not a labor shortage. There are plenty of people who have commercial driver's licenses. It's just that the job like turns people out, right? Like it's not a job that people can stand for very long because the conditions like are not amenable to that. But it's such, I mean, like there's enough that's messed up about the industry that it makes sense that it might be an industry that's kind of ripe for disruption in some sense. And so I understand why people have kind of looked to autonomous vehicles as like maybe the solution to the industry. And there's been certainly a lot of interest and investment in autonomous vehicles. But to your point, right? I think there are a lot of reasons why, like I personally don't expect autonomous vehicles to take over the industry in like the short to medium term. Some of those are technical, right? Just that the problem of autonomous vehicle driving is like hard and potentially intractable. There's been a lot of research in this that I cite too in the book about kind of this idea of the handoff between the human and the machine and that there's still, you know, the state of the art in autonomous vehicles is still not so great that you can't have a human, like there still has to be a human who's paying attention all the time. And that's problematic because number one, humans are really bad at paying attention to systems where there's not very much for them to do. There's like a bunch of really interesting psychological and cognitive research showing that people are just terrible at that. And two, it doesn't really solve the labor problem, right? If the goal is to like take somebody out of the truck so you don't have to pay them, but you still need somebody watching the truck all the time, like that doesn't work. And there have been lots of startups that have like opened and closed, right? Because this problem is like so difficult, right? Among other problems, like this is one of the most intractable problems. So I'm not that like bullish on autonomous vehicles sort of taking over anytime soon. What we do end up seeing in the cab, like what we do end up kind of seeing the role of AI being in trucking really is kind of this continuation of surveillance, right, or a deepening of surveillance. So it's not the truckers are displaced from the cab. It's that they're kind of joined there by the types of technologies I alluded to earlier, right? Like things like camera systems that watch their eyelids or wearables that monitor their brainwaves or all this kind of fatigue tracking stuff, like that's really how AI is sort of being felt in the industry now. And it's in a way sort of turning the human into the automaton, right? So like removing the ability to make these decisions and then just kind of like channeling the work through them instead of depending on them. Exactly, exactly. It's like this forced kind of hybridization or integration of the human and the machine. And it does that as you point out by like making sure the human is like fulfilling its role kind of in like working with the machine rather than having autonomy themselves. So in about five minutes, we're gonna move to Q&A. We're getting some really great questions but of course, wanna keep them coming. So I just have a couple more questions before we move to that. I mean, first before we go to some bigger picture stuff, you know, what are some of those changes you think should happen in the industry to improve conditions for workers? Yeah, I mean, as I kind of alluded to earlier, there are some really clear changes that we could make in the industry that would make real differences like literally millions of workers as well as all of us who use the public highways, right? If our interest is really in safety, which I think everybody at least says that they're interested in safety, you know, an easy way to do that or at least like a pretty uncomplicated way to do that would be ensuring that drivers are not so tired in doing their day-to-day work. A way to do that would be to change, like I mentioned this exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act. They're currently in Congress introduced bills in both the House and Senate. They were introduced earlier this year that would remove that exemption. I haven't heard whether anything's happening with those bills, right? There's a big distance between introducing a bill and actually having it become law, but I have a lot of hope that something like that might actually happen, right? Because that would address these root problems of fatigue and overwork in ways that are really important. It would help to kind of restructure the industry in ways that are more worker-friendly. There are other things that the government could do too, right? Right now the government does a lot to sort of subsidize driver training, which is like kind of a way to address a problem that's been created by the job being so difficult that people churn out of it, right? So like it's nice to have new drivers. It would be nicer if we created the conditions so that people can actually stay in this kind of workplace for a longer period of time. And that might include things like providing more essential infrastructure. Right now it's hard for truckers to park, right? I mentioned this because there's a lot of nimbyism around kind of truck parking and truck services. People don't wanna truck stop in their neighborhood, but they definitely want their deliveries on time. And you kind of can't really have it both ways. So those types of things I think are, these are economic problems and we should solve them with economic solutions. I think a technical solution like the electronic vlogging device on its own is just like never gonna square the circle. I just don't think that that's ever gonna like get us where we need to be with safety in the industry. So I wanna wrap up before Q and A by going back to something you talked about earlier, which is that truck drivers are the canary in the coal mine here, right? That what they're seeing this really rapid rise of really granular surveillance on them is something that we often talk about in the context of what's erroneously called low-skill work, but really everyone is at risk of it. So what are some of the ways we might see this in other white collar types of environments? And what are some of other kind of like blue collar, low-skill jobs that might be at risk of this sort of thing too? Yeah, so there's this really wonderful article that came out in the New York Times a few months ago that maybe folks saw by Joni Cantor and Ariya Sundaram about kind of the rise of productivity monitoring. It was a wonderful piece and it got a lot of attention, which I think is super well-deserved that talks about kind of the proliferation of counting and measuring and tracking of work across all these different professions, including the things like hospice chaplain, like things that you wouldn't think are especially amenable to like being data-driven. And yet, right, like they are, right? And many of us, I think actually post-pandemic or to the extent that we're post-pandemic, people who are, you know, homework arrangements are changing, people are much more mobile than they used to be. Many people are now dealing with the proliferation of productivity tracking in one form or another because, you know, employers get worried about shirking or they think like, well, if I'm not there looking over somebody's shoulder physically, how do I do that digitally? And so kind of one common theme among tracking in some of these other industries, I think, is that in looking for things to track or to measure, which employers often do, oftentimes the things that are most measurable are not actually the things that are most essential to high quality work or to creative work. So we know that like counting the number of visits a hospice chaplain makes to their clients or to their patients, like counting, like almost doesn't, it doesn't really make sense in that context, right? Or it can incentivize kind of the wrong kinds of behaviors and that workers end up spending a lot of time making themselves legible to these systems to the expense of doing kind of more meaningful or high quality work. We also know that systems where people feel kind of constantly under the eye, like people don't like that. Like we're not cognitively, we don't like it. It drives our stress levels up. And so people leave those professions, right? Often, especially the folks who are the most experienced or in tracking like the safest, right? The people who we most actually want doing that work are not likely to stay in professions where, you know, they're under so much oversight all the time. All right, so I think we're gonna head to questions now. So this first question is really fascinating to me. So somebody writes, I'm curious that Karen has had experience interviewing slash researching truckers who identify as women. How does their experience with surveillance differ from men? Oh, I love that question. Yes, so I have talked to, as I mentioned, like it's a fairly male dominated industry by the numbers, but there are still, of course, many thousands of drivers who identify as women and non-binary drivers. On this, I feel like I always wanna sell this book. There's this incredible book by a researcher named Ann Ballet. Her last name was B-A-L-A-Y called Semi-Queer. That looks at the experiences of black, trans, gay and women drivers and how they differ from the experiences of male drivers or white drivers. And that book is just, it's a beautiful oral history. It's really informed a lot of how I think about drivers. So I definitely encourage folks to buy Ann's book. But certainly, you know, there's a lot of burdens that folks who are in trucking, who like don't, you know, fit the mold in some way experience. I saw just this morning that there's a new study that the federal government did about kind of what are the burdens that women truckers face. And they very, very commonly include things like, you know, sexual harassment and sexual violence. You know, they're on the road solo all the time in truck stops, which are not always especially well lit or especially safe places. You know, harassment is super, super common, right? Like so common that people like sometimes just think of it as like a right of passage or something, right? Which is obviously problematic. But there are definitely like big additional burdens that folks in the industry face if they come from marginalized groups are vulnerable because of their identities. So we have another anonymous question which says, I know that some truckers own their truck or are leasing their truck. And I'm curious how that influenced their perspective on surveillance. Yeah, that's a great question. So there's another, I feel like I'm just naming other people's books, but there's one other really great book about this, which is by a researcher named Steve Vaselli called The Big Rig. And Steve kind of writes about like the very difficult financial situations that people get into when they buy their own trucks, which is often like has all this promise, right? Because people are attached to this idea of independence and people think that owning their own truck will sort of enable them to escape some of this, you know, oversight or surveillance and it will give them more control. But oftentimes they're in these predatory financial agreements that make it like that are just ruinous financially, right? Or that compel them to kind of lease what's called leasing on to companies that still end up controlling what they're doing and they don't have the financial security. But as far as the ELD is concerned, you know, if you're driving your own truck, like you don't benefit at all from some analytics that tell you how fast you were going all the time, right? Like a lot of the comparative advantage here goes to these big firms, right? If you have thousands of trucks across the country, you know, workplace analytics are much more value to you, right? They're really not that valuable if you're just kind of like doing your own thing or it's just you and your uncle or something, which is a lot of companies, right? So there ends up being this kind of interesting, you know, like conglomeration of power, right? That also is kind of engendered by the ELD because these large firms have so much more to gain than the small players do. So it also is kind of a competitive tool that increases the barriers to entry for these smaller players who like don't see the same benefits and have a harder time stomaching the costs associated with them. So next I'm gonna join two questions. So the first one is, you know, have you observed any significant collective action by truckers against surveillance and working conditions? And the second is it seems like there are similar surveillance issues with taxi drivers and rideshares, such as Uber limiting hours or mandating certain routes. Are truckers and other drivers uniting to advocate together? So curious where we might be seeing organized pushback both within trucking and then more broadly among others who drive too? Yeah, it's a really good question. So collective action and trucking is an interesting story. You know, trucking used to be very heavily unionized. Like the Teamsters were originally like a trucking union, right? So there's a very long history of unionization in the industry, but it has all the dried up, right? Like from about the 1980s onward, for reasons that I talk about a little bit in the book, right now the unionization rate in trucking is like low single digits. I don't think I've met honestly a single driver, a single long haul driver who was in the union. And long hauler, the focus of my book is about long haul drivers who are the folks who drive like many hundreds of miles at a time. Where you do see a little more unionization and collective action is in delivery work. So like FedEx and UPS, right? The folks who are bringing packages to your house. That's like, those folks are truckers, right? Like, or they may be truckers, but there's a kind of different set of, you know, concerns that they deal with. They're more likely to be unionized and some of their agreements actually like have kind of addressed the type of oversight and surveillance that is similar to kind of what long haul truckers are facing as well. So I think there is some, you know, there's definitely some important room for the power of unions and collectivization in delivery driving. I don't, I'm not like holding out a bunch of hope for it in long haul. Of the folks I've talked to about unions, a lot of them are like pretty skeptical, right? And I think that that sort of connects to just their general sort of suspicion about, you know, institutions or big organizations that are gonna kind of constrain the way they do their work. Like there just isn't a lot of drive to unionize. I think it would be a difficult industry to unionize because people hop from job to job a whole lot. So, you know, it's just not, there certainly are, there are still teamsters in trucking, but there just aren't that many of them. So I think because of that, rather than sort of waiting for collective action or using that as a primary tool as we might in some of these other industries you mentioned, I really think what we need is some more top-down like regulatory reform. So we have another question that says that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which of course is what sort of instituted these ELDs, is currently considering a petition that seems from this link provided by the questioner would force every commercial motor vehicle to install an electronic device that would wirelessly transmit location data and other personal information to police on demand. The law enforcement angle is something you talk about a little bit in the book that we didn't go into here. But I'm curious if you've heard anything about that and also as this person asks, are such are things getting even worse in terms of this kind of like in-unit surveillance? Yeah, it's a really good question. So yes, the FMCSA is currently considering this proposal. My understanding is that it's like still kind of in the formulation stage. So I don't think its specifications are like super, they're not super concrete yet, but certainly this is, I think the time to kind of file comments or to petition the FMCSA around these things. And yeah, what this would do essentially is assign each truck like this identifier, it would almost be sort of like an easy pass kind of deal where like when you go by a certain place there's some transponder that communicates this information wirelessly. I have my concerns about that because I think as of now, at least the proposal as I've read it, doesn't necessarily include things like hours of service information, right? It's more about the truck itself, but like these things are always very, like there's a slippery slope there, right? Or like these things are very then easy to integrate if you're already collecting some data, the argument to not collect additional, this is like what has happened with the ELD, right? Like well, once we have this government surveillance, let's add on this commercial surveillance cause we already have the device. So that type of thing I think happens a lot in trucking. There has also been like, you know, Tori, you alluded to like I have one chapter in the book where I went and hung out with commercial vehicle inspectors for awhile to like watch them do trucking inspections. And one thing that was really interesting about watching them do their work is that there's a lot of stuff that they need to inspect that is you couldn't do it wirelessly, right? Like you need to see the truck to know if the truck's tires are bald, right? Like you need to see, they said even things like, you know, I need to like see if the truck, like see how the trucker is behaving to get a sense for whether there's some, like something I need to do, right? Like some concerns, like there's often concerns about trafficking, things like that. So I'm suspicious about the use of kind of this more digital, like suck up all the data approach, right? And I think, you know, we see a lot of the same concerns there as we do in other contexts where policing, you know, kind of relies more on this like vacuum like data collection and then it's supposed to sort out who the bad actors are to target later. Yeah, so part of a follow-up question from that questioner was, are there any fourth amendment concerns with all of this? That's a good question. So currently there have been fourth amendment challenges raised to electronic logging that have been unsuccessful and the argument has been that, so the fourth amendment has what's called a regulated industries exception. So in the same way that like, there's no fourth amendment problem if somebody, some government inspector goes in and like examines a restaurant for health violations. The idea is like, well, that's an industry where the government has this, like that doesn't raise a fourth amendment concern. And the same thing has been said in trucking. It's like, yes, you know, this is kind of like a different sort of space because it's kind of like a home, kind of like a workplace, but the argument has been that electronic logging doesn't create a fourth amendment problem for this reason. I have to imagine that probably the government would rely on that same rationale of such a challenge were posed about this new technology. But of course this technology like isn't on the books yet. So I'm a little hesitant to make that claim with too much certainty right now. Lindsay Cameron from Wharton asks, can you talk about freedom slash autonomy drivers think they might still have even with all of this technology? Oh, what a nice question. I really like that kind of turning the tables a little bit. What freedom and autonomy do people still have? One thing that's been kind of like an interesting silver lining to see developing is like there are things that all truckers know are problems in the industry. Like one of the big ones is this thing called detention time which is that drivers will often like pull up to where they're supposed to pick something up or drop something off. And they have to wait like sometimes five, six hours, right, like the shippers and receivers just make them wait a long time. It's like when you get to the airport and then you're like taxiing for ages even though you're there. Like that's work and that's unpaid work because remember they're not really moving. But any trucker will tell you like that is the real cause of fatigue in the industry is like all this time that we've been sitting there like we can't go to sleep but we're also like not really working. So like that's making us really tired and it cuts into our driving time. So truckers have known that for a long time what has been kind of neat to see I suppose need is like a weird word to use but interesting to see is that because we now have all this data about like basically every truck, right and where they are and how long they're waiting in different places we now have this like kind of big data source about detention time, right? Like we can quantify it in ways we couldn't earlier. And so truckers have done things like develop tools that like it's almost like on Google when you see how long it takes at a restaurant like what's the average wait time at a restaurant. You can kind of see things like what's the average wait time at a particular terminal. There have been some NGOs that have sent that data to the government to be like look at how severe this problem is quantifying the problem doesn't make it go away but it does like maybe create the types of data that the government might be able to act on if they were so moved to address that problem. And it can create some additional transparency for drivers to like avoid those shippers in theory. So I don't think that like redeems the situation but it is interesting to see these sort of driver empowering applications. A slightly different fun question from Brian Guinness who says it is so neat to hear you speak about trucking. How do you help your students to find a similar passion or excitement for the topics they pursue? You have one or two tips. Well, Brian used to be my student so I should ask him. I wish I could turn the tables back on him. It's nice to hear your voice in via Tori Brian. I mean, I think, I don't know. A lot of what has been fun for me about working on this is just like you don't, I didn't realize going into it that qualitative research would be so humbling in a way that like there is so much generosity that people have to give you to like tell you they have like very little immediate reason to talk to you, right? Like they're not benefiting in a really concrete way from spending time explaining their lives to you or the things that are difficult about their work but like so many people do, right? Like I could count on one hand the number of people I've tried to talk to you that said no, right? Like most people just are really generous at their time and that was like an incredibly wonderful experience for me and like very life affirming in a way. So I think finding, you know, I know people do all kinds of different work and not everybody does work that allows them to talk to people. But I think honestly finding ways to actually connect to the human beings that you research or write about is like for me like the only reason to really do this stuff like it really makes it. And like on days where I'm like, oh geez, I really don't want to sit here and write this book. I mean, it's very easy for me to say that but then I remember how hard these people work every day in all kinds of crazy conditions and that makes it easier for me to, you know, want to try to put some of those stories to paper. Well, I think that's a perfect note to end this on though. Of course, I would have about a thousand more questions and I think we have a whole lot more questions from the audience too. But the book is data driven, which is instantly, we didn't get to talk about the title but what a perfect title for the book. Karen, thank you so much. If you are looking for a holiday gift either for loved ones or just for yourself, there's so much to enjoy in this book. Highly recommend it. Thank you so much, Karen. Thank you, Tori. This was a lot of fun. And thank you to everyone who joined us. Have a great day.