Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance

Supply chains depend on a variety of modes of transportation, from container ships and airplanes to trains and trucks, to move commodities through geographical space. The coordination of these logistical networks happens at multiple spatial scales from the global to the local, often calling on multimodality and often provided by third-party logistics companies. Most countries continue to depend heavily on road-based transport for domestic (as well as international) freight movements (making up about 70 to 80 percent of ton km), and this happens in forty- to forty-four-ton trucks. Trucks play an important role in the complex circulation of commodities, circulation that relies on the coordination of different actor groups that vary hugely in scale and also in the power they exert. Changing routes, rhythms, and expectations of freight mobilities emerged in the wake of discourses of just-in-time manufacturing and the logistical revolution (Cowen 2014). This has had deep and long-lasting repercussions for the experiences of freight workers, and particularly for truck drivers—colloquially called truckers.

There is a kind of mythology attached to truckers, created and sustained through film, television, and music. From Duel (1971) to Convoy (1978), there is a long-standing public fascination with the cultures of U.S. truckers, with many imaginaries being transferred into other countries too, assuming shared cultures of road freight work, often disregarding vastly different geographical, infrastructural, and regulatory contexts. Tel­evision shows such as Ice Road Truckers (2007–2017) have sought to elevate (gendered) notions of heroism and skill, yet we still see truckers—and particularly long-haul truckers—characterized as deviant. Take, for instance, Schitt’s Creek (2015–2020), a popular Canadian sitcom created by son–father duo Dan and Eugene Levy, appreciated for its liberal and reflexive commentary on wealth, life, and love. Yet across the five series, the show repeatedly portrayed truckers as people who stay in run-down motels, buy and use illegal drugs, and kidnap young women. When Alexis, a twenty-something woman, is abandoned by her male companion, she complains, “You left me here to be abducted by long-haul truckers … .”

At the same time, 2017’s Logan, a spin-off from X-Men focusing on the character Wolverine, set in the year 2029, at one point shows fully autonomous trucks barreling down a highway and ultimately crashing (Hopkins and Schwanen 2023). These different depictions of supply chain mobilities, of trucks, and of (missing) truckers, speak to a variety of themes that are taken up by Karen Levy in her new book Data Driven. Much of what is known about truckers comes from the United States. Levy’s book thus emerges in a busy landscape of texts that seek to give voice to U.S. truckers’ lives on the road. Sociologist Steve Viscelli’s (2016) The Big Rig documented his experiences as a lorry driver, as does Anne Balay’s (2018) Semi Queer, a powerful book that illuminates the experiences of “gay, trans, and Black” truckers, groups minoritized in this workforce. Thus, Data Driven extends a popular genre of—often autobiography—texts documenting work and life on the road for truckers. All of this work has sought, in its various ways, to humanize logistics, to show the lives and labors of workers on the front line of global supply chains. What Levy offers, though, is a much-needed critical intervention that engages with the truckers’ lived experiences, political economic structures of modern logistics, the (changing) materialities of the truck, and the creep of automation and worker surveillance.

The past decade has seen growing attention paid to the work conditions developing through supply chain capitalism. This work, from Cowen (2014), Watts (2019), and Alimahomed and Reese (2021) among others, has no doubt motivated some of the current attention paid to logistical workers and has provided initial conceptual tools to rethink and retheorize road haulage within the context of these increasingly pressurized logistical systems and globalized supply chains. What a focus on road haulage offers is renewed attention to the local conditions of lives in logistics, the coming together of political economic structures with embodied practice.

I first learned about Data Driven from a colleague who knew I had been working on vehicle automation and UK lorry driving work—“If it’s anything like Levy’s other work, it will be brilliant”—setting expectations high. Karen Levy is an Assistant Professor of Information Sciences at Cornell University. The empirical research informing Data Driven draws on Levy’s PhD and subsequent supplementary research, and traces the implementation of the electronic logging device (ELD) mandate for U.S. truckers. The ELD has parallels with the digital tachograph in the United Kingdom (Hopkins 2022), both replacing analog and paper versions, and being justified through similar discourses of road safety—often safety for everyone except the truckers themselves. Moreover, as Levy shows, policies that dictate driver hours and the technologies that monitor adherence do little to improve road safety figures. Truck driving is dangerous both in immediate, direct terms (through collisions) and also through mental and physical health terms, including hypertension, obesity, and repetitive strain injuries borne by truck drivers.

Levy’s training in sociology and law leads to informative and detailed commentaries on the legal, organizational, social, and ethical dimensions of the technologies that (seek to) govern working lives, but also that are deeply experienced by and in workers’ lives. This is also where her work on truckers departs from much of the extant scholarship, extending the scope to include the workers’ agency as well as structures that govern their working lives. Data Driven speaks to several novel and important themes that will be of interest to geographers across multiple subdisciplines including, but not limited to, labor geographies, transport geography, and digital geography. These themes engage with the sociomaterialities of trucks and trucking, layers of surveillance and forms of data, and the fleshy embodied nature of working lives on the move. Bridging these topics through the important case of logistics, Data Driven is a book that geographers will enjoy.

The book consists of seven chapters following a short introduction. The threads weave through Levy’s writing masterfully. In setting the context of U.S. trucking, we learn about the politics, economics, and culture of the job: “If the wheel ain’t turnin’, you ain’t earnin’” (Chapter 2). The incentives set in place by a pay-per-mile structure immediately set the U.S industry apart from that in the United Kingdom, yet there are many parallels, too. Levy provides sufficient information about the structures, socialities, and cultures of U.S. road haulage and trucking to engage the reader and provide the context for understanding the specifics of technological transformations in the sector. These dimensions play off one another throughout the book: Historical imaginaries of isolation and independence juxtapose with increasing surveillance; gendered, embodied expectations of mobile work; and rising automation of driving tasks. In this way, trucking provides a somewhat extreme empirical case through which to interrogate social, economic, and technological changes.

Levy uses he/him pronouns throughout, recognizing the male dominance of this occupation. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2020 about 6.6 percent of U.S. truckers were women. In the United Kingdom the percentage is lower still—at just 2 percent (Logistics UK 2023). Although there are other male-dominated occupations, many of these have increased rates of female participation in recent years. Yet in trucking the percentage has remained stubbornly low. Levy describes how “trucking is an identity: an enactment of masculinity, a form of economic provision, and an extension of sexuality” (p. 9). This might go some way to explain why many “women in trucking” policies and events have had limited effect, particularly without sector-wide improvements to truckers’ working conditions. Although the gendered mobilities and gendering of road freight work are not an explicit focus of Data Driven, Levy does signpost the reader to Balay’s (2018) excellent text Semi Queer, which presents oral histories of minoritized truckers in the United States. In this work, Balay showed how for some people, trucking can be a route out of rural hometowns, offering new (mobile) spaces to explore and express their identities. Yet there are dangers on the road, too, with expressions of masculinity contributing to discrimination, aggression, and abuse.

Another interesting feature of contemporary trucking in the United States is the ways that different forms of data are collected, transmitted, shared, and used. Levy paints a vivid picture and explains how data from the ELD (i.e., location, driver’s hours, infringements) coupled with other forms of data such as local weather forecasts are commonly used by routers and truck depots to monitor drivers’ mobilities, to question their autonomy, and to create new conditions of work. This further erodes “freedom of the road” narratives long associated with trucking lives (and perpetuated through films, television, and popular press). The (not so) slow emergence of communication, tracking, and surveillance technologies in cabs is happening on both sides of the Atlantic, albeit in different ways. Less dependence on tramping forms of truck driving work (where drivers sleep in their cabs and remain on the road for weeks or months at a time) creates different spatial dynamics between countries and regions, which then has implications for how tracking and surveillance are (ab)used. Thus, the distinctive spatialities of trucking work raise new questions about worker power and voice, employment conditions, management oversight, and technological interventions, but simultaneously contribute to the economic, social, and political production of logistical spaces.

Data Driven is a book about the U.S. trucking sector and truckers, but it is also about so much more. It is about the ways that technologies and particularly data-intensive technologies affect workers and working lives through changing regimes of (mobile) workplace surveillance and worker experience. As such, it is a book of great interest to geographers across a variety of subdisciplines from digital geographers to economic, labor, and transport geographers. It is well written, comprehensive, personable, and important. It will speak to many audiences, and I highly recommend this hugely enjoyable read (or listen—it is available as an audiobook, too). Karen Levy does a wonderful job of knitting together a complex story of working lives that recognizes how things have changed, and reflecting on how they might further morph into the future with greater creep of technological (and social and organizational) change.

At an affordable $33.00, Princeton University Press and Karen Levy should be commended for producing a high-quality and accessible book, one that people in the sector—and more specifically truckers—can read and enjoy. Levy does an excellent job of communicating her robust and detailed academic scholarship in this highly enjoyable read. Data Driven is a book that I am sure will take its place among the best scholarship on U.S. truckers, but also will be part of the push to better understand the pressures of logistical work around the globe.

Acknowledgments

This review was conducted with the support of a UKRI Economic and Social Research Council grant, Trucking Lives: ES/W009447/1, funded as part of the Transforming Working Lives research program (www.truckinglives.co.uk).