A few years ago, Jon Knope was standing in a rainy parking lot littered with smashed soda bottles in Cartersville, Ga., learning the finer details of how to park a Class 8 combination tractor-trailer. He was in his early 20s, somewhat rootless, and needed a job that would beat hustling on ride share apps in his mother’s station wagon.
He liked driving fine, so he went through trucking school. He could make a lot more money, largely because he was allowed to work much more than Uber or Lyft would let him. In the next few years, he would spend more than 900 nights on the road, drive at least 350,000 miles, and, while he was technically alone in his truck cab watching every sunrise and sunset fly by, he was never really by himself. While many associate trucking with freedom, he was, like every trucker, hemmed in by low wages, long hours and an unbelievable level of automation and surveillance.
Today, long-haul truckers are some of the most closely monitored workers in the world. Cameras and sensors dot their trucks, watching the road, the brakes and even the driver’s eye movements. Once, when his truck’s cabin heater broke, Mr. Knope was forced to sleep in freezing temperatures for several days while traveling across northern Ohio and New York because an automated system made sure his engine was turned off at night. The company told him there was no way to override the system.
Just imagine finishing 10 hours at a desk job, only to return to your apartment to find the heat didn’t work. That’d be quite frustrating. Then imagine your apartment was your office and most nights dinner was a microwaveable burrito or a bag of fast food. And then imagine your desk job required you regularly press a little pedal, you couldn’t stand up, you had essentially no face-to-face contact with co-workers, and if a bathroom didn’t easily present itself you were forced to use a plastic jug — all while a computer or a person at a desk hundreds of miles away monitors your every move.