How Labor Protections Get Weaponized Against Workers

Karen Levy, the author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, joins the program to discuss how exploitative the trucking industry is to its drivers. Specifically how labor regulations designed to help truck drivers from being overworked are being used to track their every move.

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So with Washington getting involved that kind of brings us to the surveillance that you talk so much about in your book. Instead of regulating the industry to pay their workers and to give them lodging bathrooms as you describe, there has been a different approach that's been taken and it's quite troubling. And also it's you know this is cross-industry essentially this kind of worker digital surveillance that that we're seeing. But it's more pronounced because of the conditions of this industry that we laid out previously. They talk a bit about the rise in surveillance technology in the trucking industry. Yeah so you know one of the biggest kind of most pervasive and long-standing problems in the industry is fatigue, right? So truckers are by and large paid by the mile that they drive. Like at like you know a certain number of cents per mile. And so they're not they're only paid for the time that they're actually moving right? So they're very much incentivized to stay on the road as much as they possibly can. They don't get paid to sleep. They don't get paid while they're waiting to be loaded or unloaded or while they're doing an inspection or any of the other things that are definitely part of the job but they're just not compensated. So they're incentivized to do all this work and because of that because that's the compensation structure in the industry and because as you point out right these are folks who are severely under-compensated for their labor. You know there's a drive there's an incentive to drive as much as you can because that's what you have to do to kind of keep the lights on at home right or to feed your kids. In response to that problem right the government doesn't government there are federal rules that limit how much truckers can drive. and instead of addressing these root causes of overwork and the fact that a lot of people were kind of violating those rules pretty regularly the federal government has since 2017 required truck drivers to be electronically monitored and the goal is right to make sure that they're complying with these timekeeping rules. Before that, they used paper and pencil logbooks and kind of nobody took those requirements very seriously because they had to put food on the table.