HEFFNER: I am Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Karen Levy.

She's author of the book Data-Driven: Truckers Technology, and The New Workplace Surveillance by Princeton University Press.

She's also a professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University, where she thinks about sociology, science, technology, media, and of course, data and big data.

Karen, a pleasure to finally host you today on The Open Mind.

LEVY: A pleasure.

I'm glad to be with you.

HEFFNER: I was relating to you a moment ago that one of my other favorite authors, also hailing from New Yorker, at least one teaching in New York, Virginia Eubanks wrote a book about automation and algorithms dictating outcomes in American life that really resonated as yours did so powerfully.

What I wanted to start with is just how did you decide to be, to launch with truckers that there's surveillance going on in a lot of places in American society right now, and a lot of it possibly illicit, or at least unknown by the people being surveilled.

How did you come to start with truckers?

LEVY: Yeah, it's a really good question.

So in a way, it was a little bit of a fluke.

I didn't know any truckers personally.

I don't have truckers in my family, but I was really interested in the questions that you mentioned, right?

The idea that so many of us are subject to more surveillance in our day-to-day work across all kinds of different industries and all kinds of different types of work and trucking is really about, as you know, we like to talk a lot about essential workers these days, but trucking is just about as essential as it gets.

Truckers are, you know, a huge group of people.

About 2 million people do long haul trucking in the United States, but we don't talk about them very much.

We often don't think about them, and if we do think about them, it's maybe even with a bit of a negative connotation.

Like we don't like passing them on the highway, or we don't want truck stops built in our towns but if you look around the things in the room you're in or the clothes you're wearing, there's a very high likelihood that probably all of it was on a truck being driven by a truck driver at one point or another.

So when I learned about kind of what trucking work was like and how it was transforming under digital surveillance, that was a story I became really interested in and really wanted to tell.

HEFFNER: And did it become clear too that the surveillance in trucking was more pronounced, more universal than and more traceable because the drivers know that they're being surveilled?

I gather in some cases, if not all, that there was a lot of data to work with.

LEVY: Yeah.

So truckers I think are, are like, and unlike other workers, right?

In some ways, I think what's happening in the trucking industry is a good example of what's happening to a lot of folks in a lot of different industries, right?

A lot, much more, granular digital surveillance of the activities people are engaged in.

And you see that in office work and medicine and law and finance and warehouse work and agriculture, like you see it in pretty much every industry you can think of.

So in some sense, truckers are nothing special, right?

They're just an example of that.

But one of the things that makes them interesting is exactly what you pointed out, right?

That if you ask truckers why they got into trucking, almost everyone I talk to, and I talk to hundreds of truckers, so many of them will say something akin to, I didn't want someone looking over my shoulder all the time, right?

A lot of them have tried out office work, or they've worked in a warehouse or a factory, and a lot of what attracts them to the work they do is the sense of autonomy, right?

The idea that you have some freedom to decide how you're going to get your work done.

And that is harder to come by than ever before, I think in, in low wage work, right?

Or in work that doesn't require college education.

So there are a really interesting group of people to study because they have that orientation towards their autonomy and freedom that, that not all groups of workers have.

HEFFNER: Now, I would imagine a trucker beginning today would have to consent to that surveillance upfront.

It's known, but at what stage in this digital infrastructure we live in was it wired into these trucks?

Was there a period when these truckers were just discovering that they in fact, were being surveilled or spied, or was it consensual from the start?

LEVY: Yeah, it's a good question.

So in the book, I talk about roughly a 25, 30 year history of how digital surveillance has gotten slowly but steadily integrated into trucking work.

So the big transformation that I write a about a lot in the book is the integration of a device called the ELD, which stands for electronic logging device.

So this is something that's mandatory in all trucks.

It has been since 2017, right?

So that is kind of an important date in kind of measuring how pervasive this kind of thing has been.

And the ELD is a device that's required by the federal government that tracks the hours that truckers work, so it knows when the truck is moving and when it's not.

And this is, it's a regulatory technology, so it's designed to make sure truckers aren't driving more than they're supposed to.

What the ELD has done though has kind of ushered in a bunch of other surveillance.

So when you have to put this device in your truck anyway, it becomes pretty cost effective for managers to also say, you know what?

Now that that we have this device that tracks stuff, we might as well track other stuff about what drivers are doing, like how much fuel they're using, if they're changing lanes without signaling, how fast are they going?

Sometimes cameras that watch the driver's face and try to detect if the driver's fatigued, or he's checking these mirrors often and at that kind of thing.

So I would say, you know, over the past 10 to 15, 20 years, there's really been a pretty significant change.

Truckers who've been in the business for a long time say it's just unrecognizable from what they got into a while ago.

But you're right that younger truckers, you know, a 20-year-old now who's just getting started, this is just the way it's been.

And there's no sign that that's going to change anytime soon.

HEFFNER: I gather that there's a mix of opposition to the new enforcement of these technologies and some feeling of lax about it, that it doesn't really change the idea of driving through America in quietude or with whatever loud Metallica music you want through your blood Mountain Dews or coffee to keep you alert.

The bottom line is the most vital thing for public safety, for the trucker safety and for everyone else on the highway and roads and for the security of whatever they're packaging or transporting is that they don't fall asleep in the wheel.

So I would imagine that that, uh, that there's some consensus about how the surveillance is net positive because of real incidents of drowsiness leading to fatalities.

LEVY: Yeah.

I'm so glad you raised this.

So I completely agree that, you know, we might say, okay, you know what, it's the public highway.

4,000 people a year die in truck related accidents.

As you mentioned, fatigue, trucker fatigue is a real problem.

It's been a documented problem for 75 years.

Nobody wants to die on the highway.

Truckers don't want to die on the highway.

I don't want to die on the highway when I'm next to a trucker.

Right?

We might all agree that there is a real public safety issue to be addressed here.

The problem though, is that if you look at the statistics about whether the surveillance actually helps with that safety problem, the statistics show at best that it's not helpful and at worse that it actually makes the problem worse.

So the year after electronic logging was mandated by the federal government, truck related fatalities hit a 30 year high.

And in the book, I talk a lot about why I think that happens.

And it has to do with kind of the removal of flexibility from truckers' lives, right?

So that they feel compelled to drive faster and to driving under conditions when they might otherwise have chosen to take a break or to rest or to pull over.

The issue in my mind is that truckers are definitely fatigued, but they're fatigued actually not because of the technology, but because of the way we pay them.

So truckers get paid by the mile they drive.

They have a saying, if the wheel ain't turning, you ain't earning, right?

So they're not paid when they're sitting in traffic.

They're not paid to load and unload their truck.

They're not paid when the weather is bad.

They're not paid when they're taking a break, which they're required to do.

Right?

There's lots of their workday where they make no money.

And so when you implement a system like that and you exempt truckers from fair labor laws, which is truckers are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act, which gives most people overtime pay truckers don't get that.

So when you do that, you create the conditions where people are going to be overworked just because of the pay structure, right, of the industry.

And so putting surveillance on top of that problem doesn't solve the problem, right?

The way to solve the problem, if what we care about are safe roads in my mind, is to just pay people for the work they do and remove the incentive for them to be so fatigued.

HEFFNER: So that seems like a, a clear outgrowth of your project.

And this was published originally in 2022.

Now we're here in 2024.

And you probably have hoped that your book was not just read by journalists or people in the academy, but some folks in regulatory bodies that are capable of enacting reform.

Has any of that occurred?

Because it's alarming to me to hear you say the, the technology that could be deployed to sense tired, fatigue, and you know that that's actually makes the problem worse.

It wasn't actually keeping an eye on the drivers and the roads.

So has there been any progress in the last two years stemming from your book and your own desire to see this work better?

LEVY: Yeah.

I mean, I can't take credit for what has happened, but there have been some stirrings of potential reform.

I will be honest with you that I don't have a great prediction of whether these things will come to pass, but there's been bipartisan legislation introduced that would remove the exemption that truckers have from the Fair Labor laws, so would pay them for the hours that they work.

That's gotten some support over the years.

The federal regulator it's called the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the F-M-C-S-A, has started making some moves to kind of increase the amount of infrastructure available to truckers.

So create more parking, for example, or bathrooms that they can use.

Those are also really an important part of making sure the truckers have safe conditions where they can stop, right?

If even if truckers want to stop safely, there's often not places for them to do that.

So there are some moves, right?

There's some moves in Congress, and I, again, don't take credit for that.

There's been a lot of people beating this drum, including, and especially truckers themselves, right?

Who've been advocating for these changes for a long time.

My fingers continue to be crossed, and I'm really grateful that the book has gotten the visibility that it has.

And I hope that we can see some real change, because as you said, right, you know, if we think there's really a public safety problem, and we really do care about essential workers in this country, the best way to show that in my mind is to actually ensure that we're solving the problems that they face and not just sort of papering over those problems with technology.

HEFFNER: And in spite of the fact that we're here on Zoom and, you know, we have our devices in hand or nearby, you made the very valuable point from the outset, truckers are as essential as ever.

You might watch those Minority Report movies forecasting what it would be like in 2024 or 2044.

Well, maybe it will be like that in 2044, but we have to be concerned with this industry and the humanity with which we think about policy for truckers.

But are there truckers, or at least the lobby of truckers that actually continue to want that exemption for reasons that you might expound on?

Are there some people who would like to keep it as is, I imagine?

Yes.

LEVY: Oh, certainly.

Right.

So the trucking, the trucking lobby, which is not truckers as workers, but you know, trucking companies, which are very, very powerful and very large and well organized, certainly would not like to see this exemption removed.

And to some extent, you know, consumer prices may well go up if the exemptions would be removed because we'd have to start paying probably more for people to do the work that they do.

But, you know, truckers in the US today make about $47,000 a year annually.

They made roughly double that in 1980.

And if you keep the dollars consistent, they made about $110,000 a year in 1980 and today's dollars, now they make about half of that.

That's exploitative amount of money for the amount of risk.

HEFFNER: It sure is.

It's also counterintuitive when you hear Republicans and increasingly Democrats, both political parties talking about the restoration of blue collar work and how you can be a plumber now and make $250,000 Right?

I mean, you would know this.

LEVY: I don't know how much a plumber makes.

HEFFNER: I think you can.

At least you can a plumbing empire and certainly make at least that.

But no, I mean, there has been a drumbeat of discourse around college is unessential.

Vital work that was missing an action during the earlier stages of the pandemic is a demonstration why we ought to be training people in skills.

And if they are doing schooling and are not prepared for a four year or two year scholastic experience, that picking up a trade is, is so important to the economy, for sure.

But now you're telling me that these truckers who do possess a skill to be able to do that for that, periods of longevity, it's a different kind of skill than plumbing.

But I'm just surprised to hear that the wage has gone down.

LEVY: Oh, yeah.

It's been down and it's been stagnant for roughly 15 years or so.

So it has not even with the so-called labor shortage and truckers will very quickly correct you that it's not really a labor shortage.

There are plenty of trucker, there are plenty of people who have commercial driver's licenses, but there's a wage shortage, right?

So you don't make it worth people's while to do a job that keeps you away from your family for days or weeks at a time.

A job that's incredibly hard on your body, a job that has the eighth highest rate of occupational fatalities in the United States, right?

Like doing it, doing trucking work is hard work.

Like, it's just about the hardest work you can imagine.

And so when you pay people dirt for doing work that we need them to do, and we insist on visibility, tracking their eye movements during that work.

It's not surprising that people don't get retained in those jobs.

So you mentioned training, that's a really important point, right?

The federal government has really pushed driver training, right?

And has subsidized a lot of schools to get people out on the road with commercial driver's licenses quickly.

What it has not helped support is retention, right?

So trucking is an industry where the rate of turnover is roughly 90% a year.

So people cycle in and out of that job continuously at roughly the rate that fast food workers do, right?

So we don't make it a job that people can stay in for very long because we don't pay people the wages or give people the quality of life that enables them to stay in those jobs.

And if we care about safety, the people you want behind the wheel of an 80,000 pound vehicle are the people who've been doing it for many years, right?

You don't want someone who's been to CDL School for six weeks.

So I think our incentives are just mismatched, and we have a very short term view of how to ensure that we have enough people to do this work.

The thing we need to do in my mind is make it high quality work so that, you know, it's as dignified and as safe as it can be.

Right?

And that requires making some tough choices, and maybe it requires actually raising the price of shipping in some context.

But in my mind, that's the right, the right bargain.

HEFFNER: Do you think that in 2044 there will still be truckers?

LEVY: It's a good question.

Right?

So I feel like, if you ask people, when will we no longer have human beings beyond the wheel or have human beings behind the wheel of a truck?

Everybody says, 10 years from now, 15 years from now.

And they've been saying that pretty much forever.

HEFFNER: It's like flying cars.

Like flying cars.

LEVY: Exactly.

It's flying cars.

Exactly.

In one chapter of the book, I spend a lot of time talking about autonomous vehicles and the connections between some of the rhetoric around autonomous vehicles and trucker safety and surveillance.

In my view, the current state of the art and autonomous vehicles does not suggest to me that in 10 years we will, or in 20 years, we'll no longer have human truckers behind the wheel.

The technology is just not there.

There are security issues.

There are obviously huge safety risks.

The public is deeply uncomfortable with the idea of autonomous cars, much less autonomous trucks.

I think there are some driving environments where you could imagine, you know, maybe like dedicated lanes that are set aside from the rest of the highway.

You have autonomous vehicles, or you have what are called platoons, right?

So like a human driver in the first vehicle, and then a series of autonomous vehicles that follow, that cuts down on wind drag.

And that can be really efficient.

So there are some environments, right, like some more predictable driving environments where I think it can work.

But like where I live in Ithaca, New York, where it's icy and the roads are curvy, right?

Or in a city where you have a lot of pedestrians and you know, things that the vehicles just are not yet that good at doing.

I just can't see a universe in which we get rid of human records anytime soon.

And I think that's a pretty shared view within the industry.

Like if you talk to trucking companies, I don't think any of them are planning for this in the short term.

HEFFNER: Yeah.

Until we're 3D printing our Big Macs and Slurpees and whatever.

Exactly.

Absolutely.

That, that seems to be what I think too.

But you might must have had some insight into the techniques of surveillance.

One of our favorite Open Mind guests in the last several years is Joy Buolamwini, who I met at the MIT Media Lab.

Long before her fame, and deservedly so, what did you learn about the surveillance in the trucking industry that had application to the way we should be thinking about the surveillance on our smartphones, on our other electronic devices as non-truckers.

Also you know Virginia Eubanks and her book documents those algorithms that are haunting us and that cause mass disruption to our lives.

So was there some takeaway there in applicability to how you and I ought to live our lives?

LEVY: Yeah, it's a really good question.

And in some sense, you know, surveillance at work is not a new phenomenon.

Like you can go all the way back to the advent of the industrial revolution, and you can find managers with stopwatches watching employees and trying to make them work faster.

Like that isn't new.

Sometimes I think we forget about that when we talk about workplace surveillance, right?

This isn't a novel phenomenon.

But there are things about it that I think are new and should give us some pause, right?

And some of it has to do with, I think the types of analysis that we do with this kind of data, right?

The ubiquity of the data collection, the fact that you can deploy it in new contexts, right?

Trucking was really insulated from a lot of the stuff for a long time because truckers were mobile and they were distributed geographically, right?

They weren't all in one factory.

So because of that, they just like, were able to escape this thing, right?

And that, of course, has changed because of phones and mobile computing and things like that.

So that's just like a fairly simple thing.

The types of analysis we do, I think are really fundamentally different too.

And, and one of the things that Joy has written so powerfully about is prediction, right?

So now we use a lot of these data to make predictions about, you know, which driver's going to be in a crash, or which employee is going to sell the most widgets, or whatever it is, right?

We do a lot of prediction.

And when we do that one of the things that Joy and Virginia have both documented is the degree to which those predictions are often inflected by bias based on the types of data we've collected in the past, or, you know, biases in the social world that sort of inflect those predictions.

And that's somewhat different in kind, right?

So those types of things are not unique to tracking.

They're not unique to the workplace.

They're characteristics of a world that we live in where, you know, data is so fundamental to the types of decisions that are made in education and criminal justice system and healthcare, et cetera, right?

So we see all those things happening in trucking, but they're part of this much broader set of phenomena.

HEFFNER: Karen, correct me if I'm wrong, but you hold a distinct honor, degree, that I think Joy and Virginia, as accomplished as they are lack, which is a law degree.

And I ask you about this.

I didn't see you affirm yes, but yes?

LEVY: I do have a law degree, yes.

HEFFNER: I want to make sure I'm getting the bio right.

Instrumental better days for a regulatory climate that is humane to people.

Instrumental is the law.

There have there been strides made.

Has there been progress made in keeping the law relevant?

So that Big Tech, Big Social will ruin our lives for the rest- LEVY: To put it lightly.

HEFFNER: American society as we see it, right?

I don't see any kind of the landmark protections for digital natives, which we all are now.

Maybe I'm missing it, but it does not seem that the law has kept a pace with your and Joy and Virginia's work.

LEVY: Yeah, it's, it's a good question.

I think maybe there's two dimensions to it.

So, you know, there have been some really important strides forward, I think, under the Biden Administration in the regulation, particularly around AI, right?

And what we're talking about is broader than AI.

But AI kind of stands in for some of the issues that we've been talking about.

So you know, some of that stuff doesn't have the force of law.

Some of it is agency action or has to do with kind of internal processes in the government, but there have been some moves forward to ensure that systems have more accountability built in, or that people are better able to audit what systems are doing things like that.

It's not, I think in my mind it doesn't do exactly what you're referring to, right?

I'm not sure it is an adequate check on Big Tech and its economic power.

But I've been glad to see some interest writing Congress and in the executive branch in, in some of that.

The thing though that really I think emerges from especially Virginia Eubanks's work, and I think my book too, is that we sometimes, regulating technology is a way to not regulate other problems.

Right?

So Virginia writes about this, I think really beautifully.

She says what we could do is ensure that people have the resources they need, that they have housing and food, and then we wouldn't have to build a fancy algorithm to allocate really scarce resources, right?

That we have a choice, that the resources are as scarce as they are.

And so we can pay a lot of attention to making an algorithm fair or as efficient as possible, but ultimately you're sort of moving the deck chairs around if you're not willing to make fundamental change.

HEFFNER: This much about antitrust as it about anti-algorithms, malicious algorithms, right?

LEVY: That's right.

I think the algorithms are a component of this broader social and economic system, but they're not the entirety of it.

And I think the same thing applies in trucking, right?

Like, you can think about having the best technical system to regulate what people are doing, and you can think about integrating workers' perspectives into what types of data are collected.

And all of those things are good and important, and I'm not against them, but I don't think that they're substitutes for the broader issue, which is, in my view, again, just paying people for the work that they do, right?

Like no technology is gonna accomplish that goal.

HEFFNER: And two minutes is not going to accomplish that goal.

There's a deeply personal story.

You can look it up on the Open Mind archive of Virginia's connection to the healthcare and insurance industry Yeah.

And how traumatizing that was, an inhumane treatment that she and loved ones received.

Yeah.

But this is my last two-minute question.

So take as long as you for as little as you want, but you make such an important point.

This is, this is about systemic unfairnesses in a cannibalistic capitalistic structure, and long as there's no anti-monopoly anti-trust protections, these algorithms will run the gamut and do whatever they want to do.

So Tim Wu, who I think is sensitive to these concerns, not just the algorithms, but the systemic inequalities, was advising the Biden administration or was part of a federal approach to this.

I don't think he's in office anymore, but that's the question.

How do you start to fix the big systemic issues that allow the American economy to run on fundamental unfairness?

LEVY: I was really heartened by one of the other people who was doing a lot of work with the Biden administration was Alondra Nelson Sure who is a sociologist who was helping to direct the Office of Science and Technology policy for the Biden administration has now moved out of that position.

But I was so heartened by her presence there, because I feel like one of the things that Dr. Nelson's work really clarifies and that her leadership exemplified there is exactly what you're getting at, right?

There's a lot that we can address technologically, but we have to address what people often call the sociotechnical components of these systems.

Right?

So how is it that the technology is built upon and layered with the law of the economy, culture, politics, right?

And addressing one component or one dimension of a complex problem like misinformation or like workplace surveillance or like inequality or like unemployment, right?

Pick your, pick your favorite difficult problem.

You're just never going to be able to get there with just better computers, right?

Or fair algorithms.

Right?

And those are essential.

And I'm really glad that we're seeing really an explosion of interest.

Like, my students are so motivated to work on these problems in a technical capacity, and I think it's great, right?

Like they should be part of the solution, but we also shouldn't lose sight of the fact that these are problems that are going to require sort of all hands on deck, right.

And lots of different approaches simultaneously.

HEFFNER: Right.

Right.

Well, to be continued, Karen, an extraordinary feat is your book.

LEVY: Thank you.

HEFFNER: Data-Driven: Truckers Technology and The New Workplace Surveillance " Thank you for your insight.

Karen Levy, check out her book.

Appreciate your time today.

LEVY: My pleasure.

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