Data Driven: Truckers and the New Workplace Surveillance
Karen Levy, Cornell University
Matrix is located on the 8th floor of Barrows Hall, on the UC Berkeley campus, near Telegraph and Bancroft Avenues, just up the hill from Sather Gate. There are entrances at both ends of the building, but only one of the elevators on the eastern side goes directly to the 8th floor. You can alternatively take the stairs to the 7th floor and walk up the stairs.
This talk examines how electronic monitoring systems in the U.S. trucking industry are used to compel truckers' compliance with legal and organizational rules. For decades, truckers have kept track of their work time using easily falsified log books, and performed their work without too much regard for legal worktime limits. But new regulations will require truckers' time to be monitored by digital systems, hard-wired into the trucks themselves, which remove much of the flexibility on which truckers have historically relied.
In her research, Karen Levy, Assistant Professor of Information Science at Cornell University and Associated Faculty at Cornell Law School, focuses on how digital monitoring reshapes truckers' social relations in two spheres. First, she examines how the systems reshape organizational information flows in trucking firms. Electronic monitoring systems accrue real-time aggregated data in remote dispatchers, allowing firms to construct alternative narratives to truckers' accounts of local and biophysical conditions. Data are then reembedded in drivers' social networks—fleets and even families—as firms attach economic incentives to them to create new performance pressures. These dynamics facilitate firms' control over truckers in new ways.
Levy then considers challenges created by human/machine hybridity in inspection interactions, in which law enforcement officers seek to verify truckers' time logs. Digital monitors destabilize traditional power dynamics by making offiers' technical troubles newly visible to truckers, undermining their authority. Truckers exploit officers' anxiety by misleadingly signaling the presence of monitors (thorugh a process of "decoy compliance") in hopes of avoiding inspection. These interactions demonstrate how human discretion and the performance of authority remain fundamental to enforcement regimes, even when they rely in part on digital technology.
Karen Levy is an Assistant Professor of Information Science at Cornell University and Associated Faculty at Cornell Law School. Her research focuses on social and ethical dimensions of emerging technologies, with particular concern for effects on marginalized groups. She has a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University and a J.D. from Indiana University Maurer School of Law.
