Professor predicts grim future for drivers

Viscelli says automation could steal nearly 300,000 of the top-paying trucking jobs

Steve Viscelli, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “The Big Rig, Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream,” sees a dark future for drivers in an age of autonomous trucks.

While technology developers talk of trucks driving themselves as drivers do other jobs in the cab or simply lounge, Viscelli believes the hours-of-service regulations will change to accommodate the technology. Things will change for the driver as well.

“These trucks will never stop moving, and the drivers are going to be up every few hours doing the local driving and the loading and then back again,” he said in a recent interview at a university conference room in Philadelphia. “We should be thinking about these as sweatshops on wheels.”

Steve Viscelli used the phrase “Sweatshop on Wheels” deliberately. That’s the name of an influential 2000 book subtitled “Winners and Losers in Deregulation” by another professor, Michael Belzer of Wayne State University.

Drivers have been the losers, of course, something Viscelli fully understands and made clear in his book. After its 2016 publication, he was invited to do a study for the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley, to look into the automation of trucks and the impact it will have on drivers.

The study, released in September, is called “Driverless? Autonomous Trucks and the Future of the American Trucker.” In it, Viscelli asserts the industry stands to lose up to 294,000 of the best-paying truck-driving jobs to automation.

Viscelli stresses we won’t see this begin to happen for another 10, 15 or even 20 years but it’s important to plan for change now.

“If you have a truck that can drive itself for 200 miles, what jobs are most at risk? Obviously, there are jobs where you have more driving and fewer driver-performed tasks,” he said in the interview.

“What segments look like this? What segments favor automation of the driving task itself? Who drives a lot of uninterrupted highway miles and who serves large customers on regular basis?” Viscelli asked.

For the most part, those jobs are in the truckload sector.

“On one hand, for-hire truckload jobs are very tough jobs that have very high turnover, and the largest companies in this segment rely on a very inexperienced labor force,” Viscelli wrote. “Within this workforce, however, (are) a significant number of long-term employees and contractors who are very experienced and earn good incomes. Some of these workers might be particularly hard hit by automation because they live in rural areas, where other well-paid jobs are difficult to find.”

Proponents of truck automation say there will be plenty of driving jobs in an autonomous future. Truckload jobs will simply be replaced by local-hauling jobs.

“The bad, albeit unsurprising, news is that these are among the worst trucking jobs around,” the report says. Local drivers average between $28,783 and $35,000 a year, while truckload drivers average between $46,641 and $53,690 a year.

Viscelli wrote that many new local jobs in an age of automated trucks might involve ports along the interstate highways where automated trucks drop and hook trailers. Local drivers working these inland ports could be much like drivers who serve traditional coastal ports, where hours are long, wages low and lots of waiting time goes totally uncompensated.

“When port drivers are contractors rather than employees, they can work the equivalent of two full-time jobs and earn less than minimum wage,” Viscelli wrote in the report. “Automation could thus replace some of the best trucking jobs with more of the worst.

“Splitting trucking into local human driving and autonomous highway driving is likely to foster the ‘digitization’ of freight matching, with the potential for intense downward pressure on driver earnings.”

In our interview, Viscelli referred to it as the “Uberization” of freight.

“That’s basically putting loads on a digital platform where you can cut out the brokers, potentially cut out control of large companies, and have independent contractors coming in and out,” he said. “The concern is going to be vicious competition driving down the wages of drivers. With digital apps, they could be waiting to cut each other’s throat on rates.”

Intervention is needed to prevent that from happening.

“Without policy intervention, automation will likely eliminate high- and mid-wage trucking jobs, while creating low-quality driving jobs,” Viscelli said in the executive summary of his report.

What kind of policy intervention does he have in mind?

Viscelli’s report lists these general recommendations:

• Develop an industrywide approach to worker advancement and stability.
• Ensure strong labor standards and worker protections.
• Promote innovation that achieves social, economic, and environmental goals.

Each of these goals is followed by a number of recommendations.

In our interview, Viscelli was more explicit.

“We need to fix existing problems in order to prepare for the future,” he said.

One of those problems is various kinds of government support for training new drivers, most of whom quit in a matter of months.

“We have to stop subsidizing new workers getting pulled into this system. We’ve got to make sure that companies are paying for, rather than externalizing, that cost onto the public, which is what we’ve allowed them to do now for decades,” he said.

“We need to think fundamentally about a minimum wage for CDL work, with qualifications,” Viscelli said, adding that other kinds of regulation may be necessary.

“I know that’s going to be unpopular with (people) who disagree with that kind of regulation, but we’re looking at hypercompetition that’s going to be destructive,” he concluded.

Viscelli may have said it most succinctly in one particular item among the recommendations outlined.

“Ensure drivers are able to earn a living wage.” LL