says Viscelli. Less popular are driv-
er-facing videos, and most recently,
computer programs that use videos
to watch drivers’ eyelids to see if they
are micro-sleeping or fatigued. That
said, Viscelli says, “Experienced
drivers already take monitoring in
their stride, and it will become ubiq-
uitous once safety benefits are clear
and documented.”
While questions continue to be
raised about the rights and wrongs
of employee monitoring, it appears
likely they will be swept aside by em-
ployers with increasing technological
ability to gather more information,
leaving employees with little choice
but to accept, sometimes reluctantly,
that workplace monitoring is all part
of the deal.

 

Further Reading

People data: How far is too far?, Deloitte Insights 2018 Global Human Capital Trends, https://www2.deloitte.com/ insights/us/en/focus/human-capital- trends/2018/people-data-analytics-risks- opportunities.html

Anteby, M., and Chan, C.K.

A Self-Fulfilling Cycle of Coercive Surveillance: Workers’ Invisibility Practices and Managerial Justification,

Organization Science, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1175

Viscelli, S.

The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream, University of California Press, 2016 https://www.steveviscelli.com/book

Sarah Underwood is a technology writer based in west London, U. K.

© 2019 ACM 0001-0782/19/4 $15.00

Truck drivers are among the most accepting subjects of monitoring, and often see surveillance as care, rather than coercion. Steve Viscelli, senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, and a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at University of Pennsylvania, chronicles decades of technology approaches to monitoring in the trucking industry, noting early disk recording systems that could be used after the fact to observe basic information such as driving time and how fast assignments were completed. They could not be used for direct monitoring, making it impossible to decipher when a truck would turn up at a location and plan the driver’s next journey. In the late 1980s, satellite solutions emerged that could monitor trucks in real time and allow future work to be scheduled.

With many drivers joining the trucking industry as a means of gaining independence, getting away from the boss in the office, and being paid for the amount of work they do, Viscelli expected satellite solutions to have a profound effect on drivers’ desire for autonomy. However, he says: “I was wrong. Most truckers didn’t mind. For conscientious workers, monitoring backed up what they were doing and could show if they had a problem.” Other technologies packed into solutions provided instructions, perhaps what drivers had to pick up next, enhancing the earnings of drivers that are paid by the mile.

By the late 1990s, these systems, also known as Qualcomms (as they were based on Qualcomm chips), dominated big fleets. However, they could be ‘gamed’ to underreport driving hours in electronic logs required by the U.S. Department of Transportation, a situation that was not tenable as fatigued drivers caused more accidents.

Viscelli describes GPS as the ‘new frontier’ of monitoring, as it tracks trucks when they are moving and when they are at a location, helping both employers and employees reduce downtime. Forward-facing video is also finding favor with drivers as it helps to reconstruct accidents and can show plainly that a car, rather than a truck, was at fault, which is most frequently the case,

Truck drivers
are among the most
accepting subjects
of monitoring, and
often see surveillance
as care, rather
than coercion.

Milestones

Newest NAE Members Include Computer Scientists

Among the 86 new members and 18 foreign members recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) are five computer scientists.

Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer.

Individuals in the newly elected class will be formally inducted during a ceremony at the NAE’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 6, 2019.

The computer scientists newly elected to the National Academy of Engineering (and the reason for their election) are:

Joseph Y. Halpern, Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering, computer science department, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, for methods of reasoning about knowledge, belief, and uncertainty and their applications to distributed computing and multiagent systems.

Monica S. Lam, professor, computer science department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, for contributions to the design of advanced compiler and analysis systems for high-performance computers.

Robert T. Morris, professor, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, for contributions to programmable network routers, wireless mesh networks, and networked computer systems.

Margo I. Seltzer, Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, for engineering contributions to databases, file systems, and operating systems.

Claire J. Tomlin, Charles A. Desoer Chair and professor, electrical engineering and computer sciences, University of California, Berkeley, for contributions to design tools for safety-focused control of cyberphysical systems.