The electronic logging device mandate’s many impacts inside the trucking business and culture, and with respect to broader highway safety, are no stranger to the pages of Overdrive, “litigated” as it were in numerous forms. With four-plus years now under the mandate, it’s not hard to find an owner-operator who feels the ELD mandate has hurt safety and productivity in trucking, but what if it's also hurting rates?
Overdrive’s “State of Surveillance” survey respondents rated ELDs’ cost-benefit ratio at 0.77, with ELD users rating the costs significantly higher than the benefits derived. Among all survey respondents, just a fourth felt ELD benefits exceeded costs, and among independents and small fleets with authority, that number was even lower, at 18%.
The ELD mandate's impacts formed the jumping-off point for Cornell University prof Karen Levy's "Data Driven" examination of what she called the "new workplace surveillance," but it's not just employer-employee relationships that are feeling impacts.
Asked to assess some of the bigger potential costs, further, ELD-related privacy drawbacks and pressure-cooker hours drawback were among the most commonly named in Overdrive's State of Surveillance survey.
As ELD use has become a mainstay for a significant portion of independents and small fleets, as a general rule the last holdouts on the shift to e-logs prior the mandate, ubiquitous location tracking has been part of the result, with new wrinkles for business-to-business relationships with brokerages and/or other customers.
Broadly among ELD users responding to Overdrive's
“It’s my belief that if they didn’t know where we were, they wouldn’t be able to control the rates,” she said. “If everybody turned off their location services on their phone,” and stopped posting their available trucks on the boards, independent carriers would retain greater leverage, she said. Brokers on the load boards wouldn’t know if there are more trucks than loads at any given location.
