Abstract
The time binds behind trucking’s career fatigue.
Jeff has been pushing his truck hard tonight running pallets of Pillsbury products between two warehouses on each side of the state of Indiana. He is feeling pressed for time, not only because he is on a deadline, but also because his time is being recorded by a digital logbook, which uses GPS technology to track his movements and report them back to his employer. It can be checked at any point by the Department of Transportation for violations. Despite his best efforts today, Jeff has run out of hours. He has driven more than the 11 hours allotted by the federal Hours of Service (HOS) rules, which regulate truck drivers’ time. Sitting in the passenger seat next to him, I am startled by a voice coming from the truck’s speakers, which says, “Jeffrey James Smith, you have no remaining Hours of Service drive time. You have violated the Hours of Service.” The message repeats every ten minutes for the next hour as Jeff looks to stop for the night. Just after midnight, he finds a place to park. He hops in the back of the cab (his living room), throws on some PJs, and returns to the driver’s seat (his office) to do some planning for tomorrow’s shift. “I know if I don’t do this right now, I won’t be able to sleep tonight,” he tells me. By the time he finishes, he has worked a 17-hour day. Ironically, he has concealed several of the non-driving work hours from today’s logbook by recording them as “sleeping” so as not to break the HOS rules. Truck drivers are paid by the mile but regulated by the hour, so they routinely hide non-driving work from their logs in order to stay profitable and look legal.
Truck drivers have high rates of on-the-job fatality and notoriously poor health outcomes. These are certainly behind the near-100% driver turnover rate in the industry’s large fleets.
Jeff is one of many truck drivers I met as part of a study on the changing nature of work in America. Over three years, I talked to dozens of drivers and rode alongside some of them for weeks at a time in order to observe their lifestyle. Truck drivers have high rates of on-the-job fatality and notoriously poor health outcomes, including high rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and sleep disorder. These risks are well known to be behind the near-100% driver turnover rate in the industry’s large fleets. But this doesn’t explain why some drivers stay in the industry for more than a decade—some well into their fifties. How do drivers make meaning of such a risky profession? What does it take to thrive as a truck driver?
Many drivers feel caught in what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls a “time bind”. In her influential book of the same name, she describes a typical time bind as competing demands on a person’s attention and energy, such as work and children, which create time scarcity. Finding it difficult to carve out more time for one or the other, people often just live more hurriedly.
Drivers’ time binds are a bit different. Work keeps them at a distance from home and, though they are often rushed, there is a lot of boredom and waiting in the job. Their time binds have more to do with competing demands within the job itself—namely, the need to deliver on a deadline and maintain a legal logbook. When these don’t line up, which is often the case, they experience time not as scarce but as too desynchronized. Their world is defined by clashing rhythms.
The simplest strategy for success in this environment is what drivers like to call “running hard”. Running hard means many things: driving fast and far, sleeping and showering irregularly, skipping meals, taking shorter breaks, or taking an unprofitable load today in order to get a better load tomorrow. It is a code of rugged perseverance that honors the driver who revels in the challenge of delivering freight even though trucking time binds can be draining and alienating. As one rookie driver told me, “I constantly feel like I’m on someone else’s time. It’s unsettling. […] It’s like, I know I’m in my skin, but I don’t feel like I’m in my skin. I’m like a human robot. I have to move at someone else’s pace.” By the same token, learning how to run hard through a chaotic shift and come out safe, legal, profitable, and on time is precisely why driving can feel meaningful. As one veteran driver said, “A part of me wants to say that I really like the—if it doesn’t seem odd—the challenge of it. Because, to me, I take a lotta pride in the fact that I haven’t been late with a load. Not ever. And to be able to sorta do what it takes to, on a day-to-day basis, pick up a load and get it where it needs to be and get it there on time. Takin’ into consideration all the issues…the drive and the fatigue, the traffic—and still on a daily basis do a good job. I take a great deal of pride in that.” For many veteran drivers I met, trucking time binds are certainly stressful and destructive, but they can also offer something as meaningful as pride.
Sam Butler, Flickr Creative Commons
Time binds are just as much about problems of making meaning as they are about not having enough time. One of the major reasons why truck drivers find time binds problematic is the way they pit ideals of short-term success against ideals of long-term vitality and sustainability. In the short-term, the punishing rhythm of driving, with its unpredictable and erratic swings between bored waiting and intense work, can be like a taskmaster that never lets up. Many drivers simply won’t tolerate this environment, so they leave. For those who persevere, this same punishing rhythm can actually become a foundation for a sense of professionalism. “I kind of like the [HOS] rules, to be honest with you,” noted one driver, “It rewards those of us who are good at planning—who know how to work smarter, not just harder.” Drivers said similar things about the other time pressures of driving, such as traffic, parking scarcity, and the notoriously erratic sleep pattern that is required of the job. It’s not as if they like these things, but there is a feeling of excellence that can come from learning how to run hard and make money despite these challenges. This is especially the case when so many of their rookie colleagues fall by the wayside.
The simplest strategy for success is what drivers like to call “running hard” today in order to get a better load tomorrow.
The very time binds that thriving drivers use to build a sense of professionalism, however, can come back to haunt them in the long term, which presents a tricky moral dilemma. One driver I met described an exhilarating feeling of speed and rebellion when he first started. “It makes you feel alive. You’re just waking up in the morning and it’s—it seems like a release. You’re doing 100 miles an hour through California in the desert when you’re supposed to be doing 55. Just being a rebel. It makes you feel good.” But after sixteen years of running hard, that exhilaration has worn off in large part because of a driving-related repetitive stress injury to his shoulders. “Right now I could probably… walk into a doctor’s office and him tell me I could go draw disability because of my shoulders. It’s just bone on bone. I ain’t got that much longer because of that. I’ve done all I can do.” Some of the most successful and passionate veteran drivers I met also complained of bad knees, back problems, weight gain, diabetes, or sleep apnea, which made it difficult for them to see a viable long-term future. As meaningful as running hard can be, over time it catches up in the form of chronic illness or, worse, a serious accident. Experienced drivers begin to see these risks more clearly. Their lives may be cut short precisely by learning how to run hard, but by that time they have already committed to the lifestyle and it becomes difficult to see better options. “This is way better for me than what I used to do making thirty-five thou’ working 80 hours,” noted one driver who used to be a manager of a fast food restaurant. “Where else can I make this much with a high school diploma? I never went to college.”
An electronic onboard recorder tracks truckers’ time on the road and alerts them when they’re at or over their allotted daily drive time.
KOMU News/Anna Burkhart, Flickr Creative Commons
For truck drivers, whether to stay in the industry becomes frustratingly unclear.
Drivers’ notoriously high turnover, risky behavior, and poor health are the result of a cultural Catch-22: making meaning of trucking time binds by running hard can be satisfying in the short term, but it simultaneously commits them to a destructive and unsustainable long-term path. Maintaining a stable career as a professional driver can create new instabilities that are often difficult to see until it is already too late. The right course of action, whether to stay in the industry or not, becomes frustratingly unclear.
In the end, truck drivers taught me that time can be such a problem in our busy and overworked society not just when there isn’t enough of it, but also when it becomes fraught with cultural contradictions and moral dilemmas. Even if competing demands do not exhaust the limited number of hours in a day, they can still ask us to commit attention and energy to courses of action and conceptions of a good life that feel mutually exclusive. To commit to one seems to mean giving up the other. In the face of such dilemmas, time becomes heavy with meaning and it can feel like it’s pressing in.