How Job Surveillance Is Transforming Trucking In America [Vox]
6 replies, posted
[video=youtube;G_UHknhNbAQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_UHknhNbAQ[/video]
"The issue here is that there's a technical solution being brought to bear on a problem that is not technical [...] trying to solve that with a technical solution feels incomplete."
Yet more signs of a technological dystopia.
i dunno, i think ELDs are fine in the context of working for someone, but it's obvious the implementation is poor. maybe they shouldn't completely automate the payment system. so you as an employee have some way of explaining "here I turned off my vehicle to take a second break because of bad conditions." like, i agree that workers need as many rights to protect themselves against fatigue in an industry like trucking, but truckers also need to be held accountable for their actions. unfortunately, the current ELD process from what i can tell basically has a computer hold you accountable, not a human being, and that needs some reform.
[QUOTE=Gamerman12;52908623]i dunno, i think ELDs are fine in the context of working for someone, but it's obvious the implementation is poor. maybe they shouldn't completely automate the payment system. so you as an employee have some way of explaining "here I turned off my vehicle to take a second break because of bad conditions." like, i agree that workers need as many rights to protect themselves against fatigue in an industry like trucking, but truckers also need to be held accountable for their actions. unfortunately, the current ELD process from what i can tell basically has a computer hold you accountable, not a human being, and that needs some reform.[/QUOTE]
I don't think holding truckers accountable for their actions is in question here all sides agree upon that.
But they're in a unique position where their home is their place of work. And "smart" ELDs are poorly implemented that don't take into context the various scenarios or health of the trucker into consideration and just blindly log/calculate GPS/miles driven/time.
I get the impression these ELDs are sort of the incomplete "bandaid" solution. Sure they have the capability to reduce fatigue-related incidents, but the accountability and responsibility for that should be on the trucker and not the trucker's ELD.
As Levy was saying in the video, it's a technical solution for a non-technical problem, but I think you can take that a step further and use this as an example why rigid one-size-fits-all solutions like these ELDs are not the correct solution. I say rigid because one-size-fits-all solutions are not inherently bad, but when you treat an entire group of people as numbers with explicit cutoffs (i.e. it's "rigid" and not flexible), it just doesn't work.
It sounds like their issue is the inflexibility of the hours, not the fact that they're electronically tracked.
If they weren't being 100% honest on their time cards, and that was effective, then it was always a broken system. It seems rather odd to protest the electronics instead of admitting that the rigid hours were always a bad idea and that instead of fixing the issue years ago, they waited until it became impossible to cheat on the times to say anything.
They track my dad's phone for work, he works in elevator maintenance, and he just leaves his phone in the elevator shaft and gets lunch, most of the time it literally takes him about 30 seconds to reset the breakers, and they pay him for it. He has to stay an hour on site or whatever.
I've been watching too much Black Mirror and now I just have a phobia of being at work and having my boss check on whatever I was doing through my "grain" eugh
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