In it for the Long Haul: Workplace Surveillance in Trucking

The pandemic demonstrated just how vital the trucking industry is to our economy, with truck drivers working longer and more strenuous hours to keep up with consumer demand. Truck drivers are also now under increasing surveillance as new digital technologies emerge, impacting the autonomy of the trucking industry. In this extended Q&A from The Fifth Draft — the National Fellows Program newsletter — New America National Fellow Karen Levy previews her forthcoming book, Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, focusing on the trucking industry and the role of automation and data collection. Sign up for The Fifth Draft to hear how the world's best storytellers find ideas that change the world.

Can you share the origins of your forthcoming book and why you chose to focus on the trucking industry?

Trucking is a fascinating industry — most of us don’t think about truckers all that much in our daily lives, but we’re unbelievably dependent on them. I don’t think most people realize just how hard these people work, under all kinds of strenuous and dangerous conditions, and for very low pay. They’re a group of workers who really prize their freedom and autonomy, but increasingly they’re under many watchful eyes — from the government, from the companies they work for, and from third parties. I got interested in trucking in 2011 when I heard that the Department of Transportation was proposing required electronic monitoring of drivers to ensure they didn’t drive beyond their legal time limits. I heard a story about it on the radio, and went to a truck stop that afternoon to see what it’d be like to try to talk to truckers about their work and lives. It was a lot of fun, and from there I was in it for the long haul.

What changes have you seen in automation and data collection since the start of the pandemic? What benefits or challenges have come from these changes?

One thing that’s become very salient is just how blurry the line between work and home has become. This has always been the case for truckers, who may live in their truck cabs for weeks at a time. But it suddenly became the case for whole groups of workers who were suddenly working from bedrooms and kitchen tables instead of offices and cubicles. This has given employers all kinds of insights into workers’ lives that they didn’t have before because they’re looking into your home during the workday. And because workers and managers aren’t located in the same place as often, it has increased managers’ reliance on data collection to keep tabs on workers’ productivity — things like keystroke logging, attention detection, and all kinds of other tools to monitor and measure what workers are doing.

You wrote last year for the New York Times about dating apps making it easier for users to find data on potential partners and how it could create more problems than it solves. How do we balance our very-online personal lives with safety and privacy?

It’s a very difficult question. One key is to be honest with ourselves about what problems we can solve with data and what we can’t. For example, problems like sexual violence are incredibly severe and pervasive, so it’s understandable why we might feel like we want to turn to technology to try to address it. There have been a variety of tools proposed, from background checks integrated with dating platforms to “consent apps” that are supposed to document mutual consent to sexual activity. But these approaches tend to fail because technology is not the right tool to address the realities and complexities of a social problem like sexual violence; they oversimplify what the issues are and can cause very real harms to people.

You are also a lawyer and teach at Cornell Law School. How can the law keep up with the social, legal, and ethical dimensions of new technologies?

It’s really tricky! This is sometimes referred to as the “pacing problem” — technology evolves so quickly, while law is relatively slow and reactive. So policymakers always have to balance between making rules that address the challenges raised by particular technologies but will become outdated quickly, versus making more general rules that can apply even when the technology changes. Another way I think law can keep us is by addressing the root causes of the problems that new technologies exacerbate. A lot of what we think of as technology policy problems are really much deeper issues that relate to whether people have access to opportunity or the social and economic support they need to live. So, law can do a lot to address those core conditions through things like progressive economic policy, labor rights, and access to justice.

Much has been written recently about the “future of work.” How does your book fit into this conversation? Do you have any predictions?

I always find it interesting that we tend to talk about the “future of work” as though it’s something far away. But the fact is that the future of work is not likely to be categorically different from the present day, and in many ways the present day is not so different from the past. Management practices have long been motivated by goals like efficiency and loss prevention, and managers have long increased oversight over workers to try to eke out some extra productivity. But there are new aspects too. For instance, increasingly, new kinds of data are being used for workplace management — including things like biometrics and location tracking — and they’re fueling new kinds of analytics, including more predictive analytics designed to forecast what workers are likely to do in the future. And these are affecting new kinds of workplaces — including mobile workplaces like truck cabs, which were previously immune to this kind of oversight.

Follow The Thread! Subscribe to The Thread monthly newsletter to get the latest in policy, equity, and culture in your inbox the first Tuesday of each month.