For this Overdrive Radio edition, a bit of a special preview of a special report dropping this coming Monday, July 10. It’s called “Trucking’s State of Surveillance” and follows Overdrive’s surveying of our owner-operator, small fleet and company driver readers about remote monitoring- and/or tracking-capable technologies used in the business. We asked readers assess the techs they use -- from smartphones and ELDs to truck and trailer telematics and various permutations of monitoring video cameras -- and rate what’s being given up in costs and/or being gained in benefits.

Reporting around those results yielded plenty in the way of how working owner-ops and other truckers view how techs are changing the trucking business and culture, as monitoring goes well beyond just fleets today and sits squarely in other business-to-business relationships with brokers and others.

But all of that reporting also followed attorney and academic Karen Levy’s book "Data Driven: Truckers, technology, and the new workplace surveillance," in which Levy tells the story of trucking during a time of transition, before and after federally mandated electronic logging devices came into play in late 2017. The book leans heavily on in-depth interviews with working drivers, and boatloads of other research besides, including leaning in part on Overdrive’s own chronicling of the ELD transition over the last decade and more.

Our own Long Haul Paul Marhoefer early on in 2023 suggested interviewing Karen Levy. That was well before we began work on the special series of features you’ll find Monday on the state of surveillance in the trucking business (the link to the anchor story will be live Monday July 10): https://www.overdriveonline.com/15541635

Full results of our State of Surveillance survey of Overdrive's owner-operator readers: https://www.overdriveonline.com/home/document/15541779/state-of-surveillance

That interview with Karen Levy eventually did happen, and is certainly integral to what’s a big report in seven parts. Marhoefer and Levy, in this episode, take us back to the initial inspiration for the book with FMCSA’s first feints toward an e-log mandate more than a decade ago. The talk touches on added stress around hours accounting, added pressure on drivers of all stripes from supply chain parties, and dovetails with Overdrive’s reporting from late last year on crash-statistics since the mandate, too: https://www.overdriveonline.com/csas-data-trail/article/15301876/crashes-injuries-and-fatalities-up-posteld-mandate

At a fundamental level, Levy noted, truckers know the problems they face -- detention and parking, how they’re entertwined with making the hours of service regulations as onerous as they can be for many -- and that they’re all fundamentally problems of economy, of finances, of just compensation for the time put in. All of the time put in.

For all the rancor that the ELD mandate engenders, and all the technological intrusiveness it’s in some ways enabled, ELDs can play a role in that just-compensation fix. But as Levy has it, they’re certainly no panacea, much less any kind of magic safety tool.