Stats for nerds
1recommend
2mentions
2people
2023–2025years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Recommend the book Data driven: truckers, technology, and the new workplace surveillance by Karen Levy:
> Long-haul truckers are the backbone of the American economy, transporting goods under grueling conditions and immense economic pressure. Truckers have long valued the day-to-day independence of their work, sharing a strong occupational identity rooted in a tradition of autonomy. Yet these workers increasingly find themselves under many watchful eyes. Data Driven examines how digital surveillance is upending life and work on the open road, and raises crucial questions about the role of data collection in broader systems of social control.
> Karen Levy takes readers inside a world few ever see, painting a bracing portrait of one of the last great American frontiers. Federal regulations now require truckers to buy and install digital monitors that capture data about their locations and behaviors. Intended to address the pervasive problem of trucker fatigue by regulating the number of hours driven each day, these devices support additional surveillance by trucking firms and other companies. Traveling from industry trade shows to law offices and truck-stop bars, Levy reveals how these invasive technologies are reconfiguring industry relationships and providing new tools for managerial and legal control—and how truckers are challenging and resisting them.
* https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691175300/da...
Interview on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast:
> Thanks to work from home, and other trends, workers are being electronically monitored by their bosses like never before. But some industries have had experience with this for awhile. Truck drivers, in particular, have been under legally-required electronic monitoring for several years now. Not only are their hours and miles electronically logged, increasingly they're subject to facial cameras and other types of body monitoring. On this episode, we speak with Karen Levy, a professor at Cornell and the author of "Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance" to discuss how surveillance works within the trucking industry, and what it means for everyone else.
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-truckers-already-...
* Also: http://archive.is/https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-o...
- The Odd Lots podcast recently did two episodes on US trucking that were interesting. The first with an actual trucker, "The Trucking Episode: Why the Industry Is Such a Mess":
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-trucking-episode-w...
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/the-trucking-episode-why-the-...
Interesting observations on tracking in that episode:
> Gord: (23:44) […] So they regulate the drivers, right? And there's going to be another book being published next month by an academic at Cornell named Karen Levy, which is called “Data Driven: Truckers, Technology and the New Workplace Surveillance.” And she has spent 10 years studying like the effects of all of the regulatory imposition on the driver through surveillance technology, driver-facing cameras, ELDs, all of this stuff that's meant to regulate us because of the public's fear of, you know, drivers driving tired over their hours, all this stuff, which is an effect of the fact that the market's been pummeled by deregulation. So there's this regulation question, but it's not looked at correctly, that they've deregulated the market, but they just moved the regulation from the operations of the companies and the rating and the business side of it, and they've moved all the regulation onto the operations and onto the driver, which is another reason people wash out.
> Because if you're somebody like me who's been in the business my entire life, my dad was a trucker, both my uncles were truckers, my grandpa was a trucker. I was helping mechanics fix trucks and driving around when I was a teenager after school. And I'm one of the sort of last of the big game hunters. I know what I'm doing. If somebody is a professional and knows what they're doing, they don't want to be told how to do their job by some human resources harridan, or a health and safety pencil neck person that's breathing down their neck. And that's a factor.
> Another thing, and this applies to more than just trucking, is like the psychology of people who work for a living. Most people that work for a living just want to do their jobs and be left alone. And we have this management mentality where like every single thing has to be done exactly as the computer models tell us and as safe as possible. And they're trying to impose theory on material reality and it drives the people actually doing the work insane. So, you know, you want to end driver churn and driver retention? One of the factors causing that is that they've overregulated the people doing the work rather than the people in charge of the markets in which the work is being done. Does that make any sense?
> Joe: (27:20) Yeah, and that's an incredible point, and I hadn't really thought about this before, this idea that it’s like, okay, the business of trucking, the business of pay, etc., [it’s] increasingly deregulated even as more burden gets shifted to the driver in the truck and the idea of monitoring. And so essentially sort of redistributing the imposition of where the regulation happens. […]
And just in the last week or so a second episode, "What Truckers Already Know About the Future of Electronic Worker Surveillance", with a researcher that just published a book on the industry:
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/what-truckers-already-know-ab...
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-truckers-already-...
> Long-haul truckers are the backbone of the American economy, transporting goods under grueling conditions and immense economic pressure. Truckers have long valued the day-to-day independence of their work, sharing a strong occupational identity rooted in a tradition of autonomy. Yet these workers increasingly find themselves under many watchful eyes. Data Driven examines how digital surveillance is upending life and work on the open road, and raises crucial questions about the role of data collection in broader systems of social control.
* https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691175300/da...
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