The tyranny of clock time? Debating fatigue in the US truck driving industry

Abstract

Social theorists frequently claim that clock time—a cold, mechanical, and intensifying culture of time reckoning—has the tendency to dominate “process time”—a warm, humane, and leisurely culture of time-reckoning. This article interrogates this “tyranny of clock time” narrative through an in-depth examination of the fatigue debate in the US truck driving industry. I find that trucking regulators use clock time to encourage rest and recovery. Drivers, meanwhile, are committed to process time in ways that encourage intensification and overwork. Process time culture involves its own forms of time discipline that are related to power, exploitation, and overwork in surprising ways. Yet even though the normative ends of the two time orientations are reversed in this case, I still find that clock time is tyrannical in a certain limited sense. Clock time disrupts the rhythms of the labor process leading to work scenarios that drivers find fatiguing. In their efforts to use clock time to regulate fatigue, then, trucking regulators have actually created new kinds of fatigue. The tyranny of clock time narrative is thus challenged and supported in ways that refine our understanding of both clock time and process time.

Keywords

Clock time process time work fatigue truck driving deregulation

The distinction between clock time—a highly quantitative conception of time focused on abstract and decontextualized measurement—and process time—a more qualitative conception of time focused on the concrete rhythms of social activities, bodies, and the natural environment—has been foundational to the social analysis of time. Scholars have drawn this distinction in myriad ways and have long found it useful for understanding differences in ways of “doing” time. One of the most enduring claims arising from this distinction is that clock time is tyrannical toward process time. Clock time is cold, mechanical, and empty. It alienates us from the natural environment, encourages the hyper-rationalization of social life, and intensifies labor. Process time, by contrast, is warm, organic, and alive. It is a more humane temporal culture that encourages rest, recovery, and playful spontaneity. Scholars frequently argue that, when they are pitted against each other, clock time tends to “triumph” over process time. This “tyranny of clock time” narrative is pervasive in social theory and lies at the heart of many of the most compelling critiques of modernity (Giddens, 1995; Lukacs, 1971; Marx, 1955; Postone, 1996; Thompson, 1967).

In this paper, I interrogate the tyranny of clock time narrative by grounding it in a concrete empirical case—the US truck driving industry—a context in which the proper management of time is a matter of life and death, and clock time, in the form of drivers’ work schedules, is seen as both cause of and solution to the industry’s notorious health and safety problems. I focus on a period of heightened debate about work time and driver fatigue, which occurred between 2010 and 2013. Through an in-depth examination of this debate, I document how two cultures of time have developed within the truck driving industry: a clock time culture practiced by regulators, and a process time culture favored by drivers and other industry insiders. I show that, contrary to theoretical assumptions, it is regulators’ clock time culture that is allied to norms of rest, recovery, and a more humane relationship to bodily fatigue, while drivers’ process time culture encourages intensification and overwork, thus confounding the typical formulation of these concepts. In yet another complication, however, I ultimately find that regulator’s clock time culture is indeed tyrannical in a certain limited sense. It tends to disrupt drivers’ ability to fully commit to process time, resulting in work scenarios that drivers find fatiguing. The resulting picture, then, both contradicts and supports the tyranny of clock time narrative in complex ways.

Temporal cultures

Temporal cultures are grounded in what Glennie and Thrift (2009) call communities of temporal practice—groups that share similar ideas, skills, and technologies related to temporal reckoning. Social theorists typically divide temporal cultures into two ideal types, which for the sake of simplicity I call “clock time” and “process time.” This framework has ancient roots, such as the distinction between Chronos and Kairos in the Greek rhetorical tradition (Kinneavy, 2002), and has been reformulated by contemporary scholars in dozens of ways (e.g., Adam, 1990: 30). Postone, for example, uses the words “abstract” and “concrete.” Abstract time refers to “uniform, continuous, homogenous, ‘empty’ time” and is thus marked by “equal, constant, nonqualitative units” (Postone, 1996: 202). Concrete time, by contrast, refers to “various sorts of time that are functions of events: they are referred to, and understood through, natural cycles and the periodicities of human life as well as particular tasks and processes” (Postone, 1996: 201). Whatever the specific terms, scholars draw this distinction in order to describe two ideal typical ways of “doing” time. Whereas the more abstract clock time perspective assumes action is best planned ahead of time, the more concrete and embodied process time perspective assumes “things take the amount of time they need to take” (Davies, 1994: 279).

The tyranny of clock time

Much of the thinking about temporal cultures has been developed in research on work and organizational life under capitalism (Whipp et al., 2002). In this context, clock time is typically discussed as an instantiation of the power that the owning class wields over labor, while process time is described as the more organic way of doing time that is lost or displaced under capitalist class relations (e.g., Nowotny, 1994: 84; Postone, 1996: 215; Simpson, 1995: 22–23). The most well-known version of this argument is Thompson’s (1967) account of the conquering of “task-oriented” time by “wage time” during the emergence of the factory system in England. Similarly influential have been accounts of the 19th century efficiency movement and the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor (Braverman, 1974). Scientific Management, as Taylor’s philosophy was called, is (in)famous for rethinking the labor process through time-and-motion study (Taylor, 1911, 1939). This technique was roundly critiqued by social scientists for its capacity to intensify and deskill work by disciplining workers to conform to increasingly granular clock-based schedules (Braverman, 1974).

Perhaps because of the influence of these early accounts, scholars have been less attentive to uses of clock time that deviate from this picture (Glennie and Thrift, 2009). One need look no further than the 19th century efficiency movement, in fact, to find such examples. In terms of scientific management, time scholars have paid little attention to Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, for example, the leading students of and eventual rivals to Taylor (Price, 1989, 2003). They were the first well-known champions of what they called “fatigue study,” though earlier formulations can be found in Europe (Rabinbach, 1990). Their main legacy to the workplace is the institutionalization of what we now call a “break.” Among other techniques, Gilbreth and Gilbreth developed a system for determining precisely timed rest periods. Through experimentation they determined “the length and nature of the interval or rest period required for the worker to recover his original condition of working power” (Gilbreth and Gilbreth, 1919: 12). They aimed “to distribute the necessary fatigue properly, and to provide the best possible means for speedy and complete recovery” (Gilbreth and Gilbreth, 1919: 14). Much of this was to be accomplished by directly involving the worker in research so that “the suggestions and criticisms that come from him” can “go into a permanent record” that will “result in a revolutionizing of the method [of work]” (Gilbreth, 1915: 7). Indeed, the Gilbreths railed against Taylor’s practice of engaging in “secret time study” without workers’ consent, and aimed to include workers in the designing of the labor process (Nadworny, 1957). Much like Taylor, then, the Gilbreths relied heavily on clock time in their research, but they did not share with Taylor the goal of intensifying and accelerating labor through coercion.

The conquering of process time

While clock time culture has been the subject of a concerted effort to show its social variability, and thus its historical association with the power of the owning class, process time culture has seen much less deconstructive work. It is commonly represented rather unproblematically as the warm, organic, and pre-modern way of timing work (Davies, 1994; Hargreaves, 1990; Sennett, 2009). It is rarely connected to concepts like power, domination, and discipline, and is more often associated with craftsmanship and care work—domains in which the rhythms of work tasks, rather than an external time giver, are meant to provide the pacing and duration of labor. Within process time cultures, workers are typically given more individual control over planning and execution and are thus, it is assumed, invited into a more leisurely, spontaneous, and playful style of labor.

Process time is also typically represented as powerless in the face of clock time’s oppressive abstractness (Debord, 1995; Giddens, 1995; Hohn, 1984; Postone, 1996). This is the case in Thompson’s (1967) account wherein wage time displaces and degrades workers’ natural task-orientation to time because clock-based schedules intentionally decontextualize the labor process. They lay a generic “beat” over the unique and variable rhythms of an actual work shift carried out by a specific person. As Adam (1990: 112) notes, under this tyranny of clock time “there is no longer a way to take account of specific conditions and particular needs,” thus giving rise to “the need for external normative and legislative protection which has to impose socially meaningful boundaries on these endlessly uniform strings of time units.” When clock time conquers process time, it becomes necessary to bring more humane temporal boundaries “back in” as artificial protections and norms, such as a 30-minute lunch break. Boundaries on clock time’s inherently intensifying capacity, then, often take the form of yet another set of clock time structures, thus creating a feedback loop of increasing rigidity and quantification that further pushes process time culture to the side.

Similar to research on clock time cultures, a handful of empirical accounts are in tension with this picture. One of the primary contexts for process time today is the so called “flexible organization,” particularly the workplaces of knowledge workers, independent contractors, and other white-collar professionals (Ancona and Waller, 2007; Barley and Kunda, 2004; Bell and Tuckman, 2002; Lee and Liebenau, 2002). In these communities of temporal practice, workers expend energy according to the fluctuating rhythms of project cycles, diverse client demands, or worker’s energy and attention levels. Rigid planning and timetabling can be counterproductive because the way work gets done most effectively can change from moment to moment (Benabou, 1999). Workers focus on synchronization, spontaneity, and flexibility because these principles allow them more autonomy to adapt to changing demands. These accounts suggest that, far from being displaced in modernity, process time is thriving in contemporary workplaces.

These accounts also reveal that process time can produce its own kind of discipline, which can encourage overwork and exhaustion. It can thus easily function as a mechanism of power and domination (Lee and Liebenau, 2002). For example, when driven knowledge professionals are given the opportunity to craft the labor process to their own rhythms, they can become so absorbed in work that they push themselves too hard (Fine, 1996; Quinn, 2005; Zaloom, 2006). Among domestic workers, the piling up of tasks set by an employer, with no consideration of a formal schedule, can create an overwhelming workload (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001). Process time can thus facilitate a kind of “self-sweating” among workers that, while problematic for employees, can be financially beneficial to employers. In these cases, a clock-based schedule might actually prevent overwork and exploitation by providing rigid boundaries (Blair-Loy, 2009). In short, process time appears to be related to power, exploitation, overwork, and exhaustion in ways that are still poorly understood.

Perhaps ironically, in its quest to reveal the socially constructed nature of clock time, social theory has treated process time as though it were given and natural. As a result, our images of both process time and clock time have become too fixed. In the next sections, I return to these concepts with the help of a concrete empirical case that allows us to see interactions between the two cultures within a workplace that challenges many (though not all) of our theoretical expectations.

Analyzing the fatigue debate

The US truck driving industry is a complex patchwork of actors composed of three major groups—motor carrier firms, drivers, and regulators—as well as a host of organizations that align themselves with one or more of these players. Drivers, for example, are generally divided into “company” drivers, who work full time for a motor carrier firm, and owner-operators, who are self-employed and contract their labor to firms. Since the mid-1990s, a third kind of driver has come to predominance in the industry—leased contractors (Viscelli, 2016). As I explain more in a later section, these drivers look like traditional owner-operators but are organized in subtly different ways that are key to understanding the fatigue debate.

For most of their recent history, truck drivers have been backed by powerful unions. Throughout the deregulation of the industry in the 1980s, however, the influence of these groups has been strategically undermined by manufacturers and large trucking firms (Belzer, 2000). This has shattered drivers’ control over wages and the labor process. Without strong union representation, the profitability and quality of driving work has sharply declined in recent decades and has forced drivers to intensify their labor (Viscelli, 2016), leading to increased fatigue and alarming health and safety outcomes (Belman and Monaco, 2001).

At the same time as the industry has been deregulated at the market level, it has become more regulated for drivers because of the emerging fatigue problem. Regulations for drivers are created by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), which sets drivers’ work schedules through the Hours of Service regulations (HOS). As a political entity, the FMCSA is allied more with the insurance industry and public safety advocacy groups, rather than trucking firms or drivers. In addition to being squeezed by market deregulation, then, drivers are also being squeezed by an increasingly hostile public advocating for more rigid work time regulations through the FMCSA.

Changes to the HOS have lagged behind wider economic changes in the industry. After they were first established in the mid 1930s, the rules remained mainly unchanged for over 60 years (Cassidy, 2013). Between 2003 and 2013, however, a raft of rules was introduced to restructure how drivers work and sleep. One of the most important developments, which I focus on in this paper, has been two changes in 2010 and 2011 that were hotly debated during six “listening sessions” hosted by the FMCSA.

The sessions involved six members of the FMCSA sitting at a long desk in front of a revolving audience of drivers, carrier owners, and other stakeholders. Drivers could also listen over Closed Broadcast, watch a live webcast of the proceedings, email questions to the panel, and engage in live question-and-answer by telephone. Two of the sessions were conducted near large truck stops to allow for easier access. The sessions were video recorded live and posted, unedited, to the FMCSA’s website, totaling over 40 hours of dialogue. They were later taken down from the website. I watched and took detailed notes on all six video recordings and analyzed verbatim transcripts of the proceedings (available at http://www.regulations.gov).

Official participation rates could not be found, but one estimate, reported during the Louisville listening session, cited over 300 in-person participants and another 7000 via email, phone, and webcast. Demographic information was not made systematically available for each participant. However, those who did volunteer this information when speaking were predominantly older and more experienced drivers. Many introduced themselves by stating how many “accident-free miles” they had driven in their careers, and mainly described themselves as either company drivers or leased contractors. Nearly all discussed driving long-haul “Truck Load” freight, which is the most common type in the industry (Viscelli, 2016: 6). In my analysis, then, I assume that the listening sessions capture a particularly experienced, safety-conscious subset of long-haul drivers. I therefore focus less on drivers’ opinions of regulation as a representation of all drivers and more on how drivers describe the temporalities of trucking to regulators, who typically have little familiarity with the rigors of the job.

Aside from drivers, a number of executives and owners of motor carrier firms spoke. In my analysis, I pay special attention to the motivations behind their positions on regulation. Though executives’ opinions of regulation often overlapped with drivers, I assumed their motivations could be quite different given their radically different class position.

The listening sessions provided only limited access to federal regulators’ conceptions of time because they spoke very little during the sessions. Therefore, I analyzed two additional sources of data: the official federal documents published by the FMCSA about the HOS regulations (e.g., FMCSA, 2003) and the commissioned laboratory experiments on driver fatigue upon which the FMCSA relies heavily to make decisions (e.g., Eskandarian et al., 2007). Though they are far from perfect, these documents provided a supplementary view to the listening sessions of how regulators think about time.

My analysis of the fatigue debate is also informed by participant observation and in-depth interviews conducted for a separate study (Snyder, 2016). Between 2010 and 2012, I spent approximately 300 hours riding with four leased contractors who work with a mid-sized motor carrier firm. I also conducted in-depth interviews with 20 long-haul drivers—independent, leased, and “company” drivers. Though these data are not presented here, the research greatly aided my ability to make sense of the listening sessions.

Clock time culture and the hours of service regulations

The mentality with which the FMCSA approaches fatigue is deeply influenced by industrial clock time culture, especially the strain of scientific management discussed above as fatigue study. Throughout their publications, the FMCSA stresses a “science-based approach” to understanding driver fatigue, striving to obtain “a clear scientific understanding of fatigue causal factors, including time of day, amount and timing of sleep, time awake, and time on task” (FMCSA, 2003: 22458). The focus is thus on how many hours drivers allocate to different activities, most importantly driving and sleeping. Time is seen as a 24-hour container in which one places activities that can be measured with precise units of duration.

Especially since the early 2000s, the FMCSA has backed studies—some involving elaborate multi-day simulator experiments—that determine the exact duration of “on-task alertness” after which a driver’s performance begins to degrade (Eskandarian et al., 2007). In the eyes of the FMCSA, the findings of these experiments are clear: “Performance begins to degrade after the 8th hour [of driving] and increases geometrically during the 10th and 11th hours” (FMCSA, 2003: 22471).

Recognizing that drivers rarely spend an entire shift driving—they often stop to deliver or load freight, refuel, and perform other nondriving work tasks—other studies have attempted to determine the optimal duration of a shift. Again, the findings here are very clear. “After 14 hours from the start of the work period, it is time to stop driving, as the risk of fatigue-affected incidents is increasing rapidly” (FMCSA, 2003: 22473).

Finally, understanding that “human beings are subject to a circadian, biological clock of about 24 hours, which controls natural wake/sleep cycles,” the FMCSA has pioneered studies on sleep and circadian rhythms in extreme workplaces. These studies are unequivocal that “humans require about eight hours of restorative sleep daily” (FMCSA, 2003: 22460).

Guided by the experimental data, the FMCSA designed four main rules, known as the “14-hour rule,” “11-hour rule,” “10-hour restart,” and “sleeper berth provision.” (Another rule, called the “34-hour restart,” was not discussed at the listening sessions; therefore, I do not consider it in my analysis.)

The 14-hour rule, also known colloquially as the “14-hour clock,” stipulates that drivers can work a maximum of 14 continuous hours before they must go off-duty. This rule was put in place in 2003. It has created the functional equivalent of a punch-in, punch-out system, like one would see in any shift-work setting. Drivers “punch in” when they start their vehicle and must shut down their vehicle, or “punch out,” after 14 consecutive hours. The 14-hour clock is a continuous countdown timer. It continues to count down the minutes even when the truck is stopped, even if unforeseen events, such as traffic jams, bad weather, mechanical failure, or other unavoidable delays occur.

Within the time window created by the 14-hour rule, drivers may drive a maximum of 11 hours (known as the “11-hour rule” or “11-hour clock”) at which point they must take a minimum 10-hour break (called the “restart”). After completing this break, drivers regain a “fresh clock”—meaning they may work another 14-hour shift and drive another 11 hours. Unlike the 14-hour clock, the 11-hour clock is a context-dependent timer. It counts down the minutes when the truck is moving and stops when the truck is stopped. This rule reflects the numerous fatigue studies showing that alertness declines considerably after the 11th hour of driving. As I discuss more below, drivers think of the 11-hour rule as their “money-making time,” because they are typically paid by the load and therefore only remunerated for the time spent moving freight.

The “sleeper berth provision” regulates how much and when a driver may sleep. Within each work cycle, drivers must include one period of continuous, uninterrupted sleep that lasts at least 8 hours—usually taken in the “sleeper berth,” the rear section of the truck equipped with a bed. Drivers may take these 8 hours whenever they wish, but they must take them consecutively. This reflects chronobiological research showing that restorative sleep can only be achieved by an uninterrupted 8 hours (Vercelloti, 1982).

Taken together, the rules assume a driver’s day will consist of 14 hours on duty and 10 hours off duty—a structure that is meant to mirror the circadian rhythm of the human body, which is roughly 24 hours (Vercelloti, 1982). On-duty time can consist of a maximum of 11 hours of paid driving and 3 hours of nondriving (and thus typically nonpaid) work. Off-duty time should consist of a minimum 8 continuous hours of sleep plus 2 more hours to relax, take care of personal matters, and get ready for the next shift.

An obvious limitation in the design of the HOS, which has dogged regulators for decades, is enforcement. How can they ensure that drivers will log their time honestly without direct supervision from inside the cab? It has long been an open secret in the industry that many drivers forge their logbook data in order to hide how many hours they have actually driven (Levy, 2015). This allows them to make more money by driving more than the legal limit while still “looking legal” if they get stopped by law enforcement.

A new technology called the Electronic On Board Recorder (EOBR), also known as “e-logs,” is changing this. E-logs use a GPS signal to track drivers’ movements in real time and record some of their logbook information automatically. Many of the largest motor carrier firms have already converted their fleets to e-logs, and the FMCSA has now proposed to make the technology mandatory in all firms (FMCSA, 2014). In addition to the new rules, then, many drivers now have very few ways to fake their logbook data.

In sum, the FMCSA has remained committed to a conception of the labor process as reducible to clock time by emphasizing the allocation of minutes and hours to different tasks within the “container” of a shift. They do acknowledge one process-time related element—the circadian rhythm—however, even this is reduced to a standardized clock measurement, that is, “roughly 24 hours.” Similar to the tradition of fatigue study embraced by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, the FMCSA certainly uses clock time as a disciplinary tool, but not in the name of intensification. Clock time is meant to prevent overwork.

Process time culture among truck drivers

A glaring issue that goes unaddressed by the FMCSA, and is not discussed in the HOS rules, is that truck drivers are incentivized, both economically and culturally, to overwork. This is partly related to the industry’s pay-per-mile system. Though some are paid hourly, the vast majority are paid either at a set rate per mile driven, or as a percentage of the final freight bill. This incentive structure encourages them to take as little time as possible to move freight. As a result, any restriction on a driver’s movement, such as a required break, is a threat to his or her profitability. Not just sleep and breaks, but even time spent working that does not involve driving, such as doing paperwork or waiting for a trailer to be loaded, is “wasted time” because it is functionally unpaid. There is an incentive, then, to see not just rest but even nondriving work as not “real” work (Viscelli, 2016: 91).

To meet this economic incentive to overwork, many drivers create work-games (Burawoy, 1979) out of the process of delivering freight. The work-game of long-haul driving involves maximizing miles out of each load by developing “a routine that tailors every waking moment toward achieving the highest productivity, analyzing every task, however small, to determine when nondriving tasks can be done without diminishing the number of paid miles driven” (Viscelli, 2016: 86–87). This routine is not based on a set schedule of hours, however, but on constantly tweaking one’s micro-movements, especially decisions to sleep or stay awake, in order to create pockets of uninterrupted driving time that are maximally profitable. It is therefore a “routine” with a great deal of variation from day to day or even load to load. As drivers move among different spaces—truck stops, loading docks, roadways, rest areas, etc.—they must juggle the rhythms of thousands of small processes—traffic patterns, freight availability, parking availability, weather considerations, their body’s sleep needs, their logbook status, etc.—and create synchronizations among these rhythms in such a way that will, in the end, result in more driving activity than nondriving activity (Snyder, 2012).

For drivers using paper logbooks, this “miles game” (Viscelli, 2016: 58) often involves hiding work time by manipulating their logbooks to look legal. And though it would seem that e-logs have made this impossible, observational studies have shown that drivers routinely log their time as “in the sleeper” without actually sleeping, instead using that time to do nondriving work, which allows them to preserve their revenue producing hours when encountering an unexpected delay (Levy, 2015; Snyder, 2016). Even on e-logs, drivers can find ways to hide nondriving hours in order to work to their own rhythms, and thus actually do more unpaid work. Put differently, because of the pay-per-mile system, it makes more sense for truck drivers to mark time by the unique rhythms of each load of freight than by a standardized schedule of hours.

Debt peonage and the culture of independence

Within the context of this obsessive miles game, an occupational culture has arisen that champions independence and ruggedness, what Derickson (2013) calls a culture of “manly wakefulness” (see also Levy, 2016). This is related to drivers’ ability to, unlike other blue-collar workers, make their own decisions without a heavy-handed manager overseeing their every move (Blake, 1974). Many truck drivers prefer not to be called “trucker,” which can be seen as a derogatory term, but “professional driver” (Snyder, 2012).

This culture of rugged professionalism needs to be understood in light of new forms of independent contracting that have come to prominence in the industry. As Viscelli (2016) has documented, beginning in the mid-1990s, carriers sought to create a new kind of driver that would be cheaper and more productive for firms. The lease-purchase agreement, in which a driver becomes an independent contractor but leases their truck from a carrier, was their answer. Leased contractors look like traditional owner-operators in that they are responsible for fuel, repairs, taxes, and the other risks of an independent trucking business. They are, legally speaking, small business owners. However, because they lease their truck from a carrier (or shell corporation), paying it off from their earnings, and are typically barred from hauling freight for any other carrier, they are actually tied to a single firm through what Viscelli (2016: 125) calls “debt peonage.” The firm to which they contract their labor also typically controls the negotiation of loads and dispatch, thus determining much of the real business of hauling freight. Lease contractors are now the preferred labor for the largest carriers because they are cheap, flexible, and productive (Viscelli, 2016: 238, n.16). From the drivers’ perspective, however, these arrangements are actually riskier and often less profitable because of the driver’s indebtedness to a single company that, in fact, controls much of their business. Being both indebted and responsible for the truck’s running costs, leased contractors must intensify their labor even more so than a company driver or traditional owner-operator just to make ends meet (Snyder, 2016; Viscelli, 2016).

Large carriers, who benefit most from these arrangements, draw on the mystique of rugged independence to convince drivers to become contractors. Drivers are encouraged to see lease contracting as a way to become an “entrepreneur” who has more control over the labor process (Snyder, 2016). This mystique is perpetuated by trucking media, trucking schools, and carrier-friendly organizations like the American Trucking Association (Viscelli, 2016: 113–114). In this way, powerful trucking firms have managed to create more political alignment between drivers and carriers over deregulation—a far cry from the antagonistic days of the highly unionized industry of the past (Viscelli, 2016: 12–13). Drivers’ see their willingness to work in erratic temporal patterns to maximize the miles game, even if that means sacrificing sleep, as part of their remit as “independent” entrepreneurs. Carriers see it as the key to greater efficiency with lower labor costs.

In sum, especially following deregulation, trucking culture has developed attitudes about time that are similar to what one might see among salaried professionals, small business owners, or independent contractors, rather than the factory, mining, or construction workers with whom they are often associated. Like workers who mark time by project cycles, truck drivers mark time by the rhythms of each load of freight. Becoming excellent at milking as much profitability out of each mile is what makes drivers feel like they are professionals (Snyder, 2012). However, it can also encourage a kind of absorption in the rhythms of work tasks and an obsession with maximizing profits that may in fact cause them to push themselves too hard (Belzer, 2000; Snyder, 2016; Viscelli, 2016). In this way, process time among truck drivers is allied not to a languid work culture but to a culture of overwork. Process time disciplines, such as spontaneity and flexibility, are internalized by drivers as they get caught up in the miles game in an attempt to stay afloat financially, often under conditions of debt peonage.

The problem of inflexibility

Given their captured status as debt peons and the culture of rugged professionalism that has grown up around it, drivers’ main complaint in the listening sessions was that the HOS prevent them from working to their own rhythms, and thus maximizing the miles game. Reflecting the greater degree of political alignment between drivers and carriers, this complaint was shared by carrier executives, many of whom spoke of themselves as former drivers or as allies. Both drivers and firm owners argued that the HOS, though they are designed to prevent fatigue, produce new work scenarios that drivers find fatiguing. I will describe two of the most commonly discussed scenarios.

Forced stopping

The HOS create fatigue for many drivers when they are repeatedly forced to stop at the wrong time. Drivers experience the 14-hour clock, which cannot be stopped, and the 11-hour clock, which marks a driver’s productive time, as pitted against each other. Especially when one is delayed by traffic, weather, or problems at a shipper, the 14-hour clock can begin to cut in to one’s productive time (the 11 hours allotted to make money by driving), thus creating a fatiguing feeling of urgency.

One driver and owner of a small fleet in Kentucky said, “I appreciate the [10-hour] rest period … but sometimes factories are open eight to five. Sometimes you haul to grocery stores and warehouses are [only] open at night.” Rest is not a welcome respite when it falls at the wrong time in the rhythms of delivering freight. In these common situations, this driver reports, he may drive 3 hours to deliver freight during the middle of the night but not be able to pick up his next load until the next evening. As a result, he wastes the remaining 8 hours of his shift waiting to pick up his next load. While waiting, his shift has come to an end, even though he has only driven 3 hours that day. “I have to wait an extra 10 hours to reset [e.g. take the required 10-hour rest break that will renew his driving clock] when I’ve used only maybe a couple of hours [of the 11-hour clock] … on a night time delivery.” This time spent waiting can be stressful, reports this driver, because he feels like he is losing productive time. Even though he has technically worked a 14-hour shift, only 3 of these hours are remunerated. “I’m waiting [for my new duty period to start] and I’m getting tired waiting. […] Waiting can make you more tired than working.” As another driver put it, “I get paid by the mile. My sit time kills me. It kills my paycheck.”

Forced driving

A more concerning complaint was that the rules force drivers to work when they want to rest. Drivers discussed many reasons to stop driving including tiredness, traffic, weather, and the availability of safe parking. Because the 14-hour clock cannot be stopped when one encounters these problems, drivers said they feel pushed to keep driving until their 11-hour clock has been fully spent, even if it would be safer and more efficient to stop. A former driver and current vice president of a mid-sized Illinois trucking firm said,

I’ve been driving down the highway in the truck—and I know my drivers do the same thing—they have hours on the 11-hour to reach their destination. They’re currently within their 14 hours to reach a destination, but they get fatigued. They have a choice to keep driving fatigued or stop and take a two or three-hour nap and get up. But then, if they do that two or three-hour nap, they’re out of their 14 hours.

Aligning himself with drivers, this executive reports that sleepiness can arise at unexpected times and that a simple “cat nap” would be sufficient. However, because the 14-hour clock cannot be stopped, a few hours of unplanned sleep can work against a driver’s productivity. As he sleeps, the time window in which he can make money shrinks.

Other sources of fatigue, such as rush-hour traffic, are more predictable. Inflexibility is also a problem in these situations. “When we come into a large city,” notes one driver, “we [often] hit it at the height of rush hour. We can avoid it by taking time off and getting much needed rest and continuing on afterwards.” Unfortunately, this driver reports, the 14-hour clock encourages drivers to push through rush-hour traffic in order to log as many miles as possible. “You know when the hours—the peak hours of congestion in the major cities are going to happen,” notes another driver. It would be much better, he advises, “if you can stop your clock for that one or two hours while all this traffic goes away and then you can leisurely drive in, do your loads, and get outta Dodge.”

Truck driving, much like other professional and contract work, is process time-oriented because drivers are attuned to the unique temporality of each load of freight. This is evident in the fact that drivers talk about time in terms of the process of delivering freight, even though they are mandated to also keep a clock time schedule. They are less concerned with issues of routinization, standardization, allocation, and planning, though they must engage with these aspects of time to some extent because of their logbooks and client deadlines. They are more concerned with issues of timing, spontaneity, and synchronization. Allowing more flexibility in the HOS rules would give them greater control over the placement and quality (rather than duration) of activity, thus enabling them to better synchronize the flow of pick-ups and drop-offs with the flow of the myriad other contingent processes they encounter on the road. As process-time oriented workers, drivers do not want “more time” but more fluidity of movement.

Clashing temporal cultures

Having heard drivers discuss their experiences, the FMCSA proposed more changes in 2010 and solicited another round of responses in 2011 at a listening session near Washington, DC. These exchanges reveal how the industry’s clashing temporal cultures can cloud debate over fatigue.

In its new proposal, the FMCSA aimed to directly respond to drivers’ complaints about inflexibility, particularly that the 14-hour rule prevents them from stopping when their bodies need it most. “FMCSA wants to give drivers flexibility in scheduling breaks, recognizing that they are not always able to find a place to stop at a particular point in their schedule” (FMCSA, 2010: 82180). The administration did not follow drivers’ suggestions, however. They designed an additional rule that requires drivers to take a half-hour break within the first 7 hours of being on duty.

Upon reaching the 7th hour since coming on duty, the driver would need to take a break of at least a half hour before resuming driving. The driver could remain on duty without a break after the 7th hour, but could not drive again without taking a break. […] This approach should give drivers considerable latitude in scheduling breaks. (FMCSA, 2010: 82180)

The FMCSA’s proposal leaves in place the rigid 14-hour rule and places inside this window the requirement to take a half-hour break on or before the 7th hour of driving. Because drivers may take this break any time before reaching the 7th hour, the agency sees some degree of flexibility. Rather than acknowledge process time temporal qualities outright, then, the FMCSA chose to create more granular clock time boundaries (a 30-minute break occurring between the 1st and 7th hour of driving), which they hope more closely models the conditions of real driving. In a kind of feedback loop, initial problems with the HOS stemming from process time critiques (i.e., inflexibility) have been addressed through an increasingly granular set of clock time based rules, which have only further pushed process time to the side.

In the listening session, this proposal prompted a great deal of confusion about why regulators see a system of mandatory breaks, as well as the notion of “planned flexibility,” as a good response to the problem of inflexibility. The Vice President of Safety for a large motor carrier firm spoke to the main concern.

Mandating when a driver must take his or her rest break does not allow them to pay attention to how they are feeling and take a break when it’s most helpful to them. The proposed rule fails to recognize that a driver’s day cannot be planned with the precision that the rule requires.

This comment from a carrier executive aligns with drivers’ comments. Like the drivers who spoke, he is not opposed to the idea of encouraging rest breaks, but to the notion that these breaks must be scheduled in advance in order to be beneficial. He continues,

We all want our drivers to take a break. But mandating that, and saying you have to take a half-an-hour off—you know, is seven hours the right time? You can get tired at three hours. You can get tired at two hours.

Reflecting drivers’ sentiments, this executive sees adding another rigid deadline into the already rigid 14-hour rule as wrongheaded because it focuses a driver’s attention on not “breaking the rules” rather than whether or not he is tired. It is important to point out, however, that this executive’s critique of regulation may come from a quite different motivation than drivers’. Though he pitches his critique in the language of health and safety, which will resonate with regulators, he may also be in favor of driver flexibility because of the adaptable and miles-obsessed worker it allows his firm to create.

For drivers, the problem of inflexibility was discussed just as much in terms of identity and dignity as it was in terms of safety or profitability. Many found the rules disrespectful to their sense professionalism. One veteran owner-operator, with over five million miles of accident-free driving in his career, noted,

I don’t think any time you mandate us to … take a rest period, you’re doing good. I know my body. I know how I drive […] I think we’re grown adults and we’ve drove long enough to know … when we can pull over and take a short break.

This experienced driver voices the independent ethos of the professional. That the FMCSA would attempt to regulate a driver’s body rhythms with the degree of precision being proposed is infantilizing to him. He shares much the same negative opinion of the proposed rules as carrier executives, then, but upon a different basis. Echoing this sentiment, another driver complained,

We have so many people [who] want to squash that thumb down … [like] big brother or daddy wanting to squash that thumb down on his son in order to make him act straight. […] If you take the pressure off, and let us, the professionals, do what’s right and do what’s safe, we’re going to do it.

These comments suggest that drivers see the HOS as a cultural system that clashes with their identities. As it stands, the rigidity of the rules mark drivers not as professionals but, as one participant put it, “just some dumb trucker.” Through this sense of cultural devaluation, drivers ultimately align themselves politically with carrier executives, even though executives’ motivations are likely quite different—namely, to maintain their dominant position over a pliable labor force. Resistance to clock time regulation and celebration of flexibility form common ground upon which drivers’ and carriers strike an unlikely alliance that ultimately reproduces the power structures subordinating drivers.

Conclusion

Just as other scholars have documented in examinations of temporal culture at work (e.g., Darier, 1998; Davies, 1994), I also find that clock time and process time do not sit easily with each other. Clock time challenges drivers’ ability to fully engage with the unique rhythms of their bodies and environment and thus makes it more difficult for them to manage fatigue how they would like. It is tempting to conclude that this tension has arisen because clock time has “triumphed” over process time. However, the problem of clock time in this case is not only more complicated, but is also in some respects the opposite of what we have come to expect from the “tyranny of clock time” narrative.

Some aspects of the critique of clock time among industry insiders have nothing to do with temporality per se. The HOS rules have a certain tyrannical (or at the very least irritating) quality, in part, because they sit uncomfortably with the economic reality for most drivers—movement equals money. Especially since deregulation, these conditions are less and less sustainable because drivers are routinely placed under conditions of debt peonage that threaten their financial solvency (let alone profitability), no matter how hard they work. Thus any regulations that make drivers stop will be seen as undesirable, whether they are guided by a culture of clock time or otherwise. Drivers’ attitudes toward clock time, then, are often about a general decline in economic opportunity (and what they see as regulators’ patronizing attitude) rather than about clock time itself. This suggests that we should be careful not to immediately conflate criticisms of clock time disciplinary practices with a critique of clock time itself, a particularly common observation in macro historical accounts (e.g., Nowotny, 1994; Snyder, 2013; Thompson, 1967). Late 19th century factory workers smashed factory clocks during protests, for example, but was this a criticism of clock time or simply resentment about being disciplined in any way (Stein, 1995)?

Clock time culture is more than just a symbol of unwanted disciplinary power, however. The HOS also create a temporality that these drivers say is intrinsically fatiguing, which I would characterize as a kind of micromanaged chaos. The HOS focus on the planning, routinization and standardization of workers’ energy in time using the clock hour. This metric, however, is remarkably disconnected from the actual process of delivering freight, thus generating more desynchronization and chaos than order. Clock time simply cannot accurately model the dynamics of fatigue because the abstract language it uses to describe fatigue—hours, minutes, shifts, breaks—presumes a context-less space. The HOS rules create more temporal complexity in a system that is already complex and prone to becoming desynchronized.

This picture fits closely to the tyranny of clock time narrative in the sense that there does seem to be an intrinsic difference between clock time and process time, which results in tension. The tension stems from fundamentally different orientations to social space. Clock time culture treats social space as uniform, while process time culture treats each social space as unique. When confronted with the problem of modeling movements—of bodies, objects, and events—clock time culture assumes a priori uniform social spaces in order to generate cues for action that will also be uniform. In this sense, clock time is, as Postone (1996) rightly calls it, abstract because of its “arm’s length” and de-contextualizing orientation to space. Process time culture, by contrast, focuses on adjusting in-the-moment the cues for action to fit the unique rhythms of the space at hand. It has a more “concrete” orientation to space (Postone, 1996). This core observation has been made in many theories of social time and appears to me to be correct.

As discussed above, however, the abstract/concrete distinction is routinely attached to another set of assumptions that do not logically follow: that clock time and process time are intrinsically oriented to “cold” and “warm” normative ends respectively, and that clock time is inherently more powerful than process time (e.g., Debord, 1995; Thompson, 1967). In the trucking industry, frustrations with clock time are not related to the FMCSA’s drive to intensify labor. Their intention is just the opposite—to use clock time to create opportunities for rest. The irony of the implementation of scientific fatigue study is that, for all its intention to reduce fatigue, it has generated new work scenarios that drivers negotiate by working more intensely, thus creating fatigue.

Why, then, do drivers work so intensely if the HOS are meant to ensure that rest will be taken? Contrary to typical assumptions, drivers have intensified their labor not because of clock time, but because of the disciplinary capacity of process time. Process time intensifies labor by allowing drivers to more effectively play the “miles game” (Viscelli, 2016). They cultivate the disciplines of flexibility and spontaneity in order to milk profitability from each beat in the rhythm of delivering freight. This kind of overwork is common in other professions, such as IT and finance, where liberation from rigid schedules and an immersion in project cycles and task flows is linked to a culture of overwork (Blair-Loy, 2004; Dubinskas, 1988; Sharone, 2004). But this has to be understood within the larger context of drivers’ captured status as “debt peons” in a deregulated market (Viscelli, 2016). As motor carrier firms have pushed for more thoroughly process time disciplined workers in order to create a cheap and productive labor force, using arrangements like lease contracting, drivers have also embraced process time disciplines as they have taken up the mantle of the “independent” professional (Snyder, 2016). As one driver said to the FMCSA panel, “I don’t think any time you mandate us to … take a rest period, you’re doing good. I know my body. I know how I drive.” This valorization of the authority of the professionalized body to dictate temporality actually facilitates domination in the trucking industry (Snyder, 2012). Process time discipline helps to reproduce a larger industry arrangement that places drivers in a subordinate class position at the same time that it downplays that power imbalance through dignified cultural categories like “professional,” “independent,” and “entrepreneur.”

In sum, this paper aligns with and contradicts different aspects of the tyranny of clock time narrative. It aligns with the frequently discussed claim that clock time and process time are fundamentally different in terms of an abstract/concrete dynamic. Tensions will inevitably occur when they are pitted against each other in the same space of action. I find little evidence, however, for the claim that clock time is more powerful than process time, is more disciplinary and dominating, or is inherently linked to “cold” normative ends. Truck drivers’ process time culture is not “conquered” by clock time. In fact, something closer to the opposite is true. Drivers circumvent what may be safer clock time temporal boundaries because they have been disciplined by a process time culture that is supported by an industry profiting from drivers’ willingness to be flexible. Being trapped between the government’s clock time and the industry’s process time, drivers have little choice but to work themselves harder—pushing through tiredness in order to exhaust their 11-hour clock, for example, or subverting seemingly inescapable enforcement technologies in order to continue to work to their own rhythms. The tyranny of clock time narrative reveals some keen insights about cultural variation in the temporal world, then, but its normative claims about that world are less convincing.

On a practical level, these observations lead me to conclude that the FMCSA’s efforts to crack the fatigue problem by tweaking work schedules and creating a more clock time disciplined driver are unlikely to succeed so long as the industry remains deregulated and de-unionized. Under these conditions, commanding drivers to temper their fatigue by working in routinized shifts overlooks the fact that many are working under conditions of debt peonage in which their very livelihoods require a commitment to flexibility and spontaneity. Quite simply, it is possible to drive safely under the HOS, but if drivers want to be financially solvent it is in their interest to be process time disciplined. In terms of temporality, the fatigue problem hinges on interventions that would make it not just possible but profitable to be clock time disciplined.

Unfortunately, intervening on this level is mostly out of the purview of an external regulatory body like the FMCSA. Firm owners, moreover, are unlikely to want to dismantle the cheap, pliable, and productive labor force they have worked so hard to create over the last few decades. In all likelihood, change will have to start with a reinvigorated labor movement that has enough power to strike deals with government and industry, and organize drivers collectively, in order to make safe working hours a financially realistic goal and a part of trucking’s professional identity. In addition to fighting against pernicious employment arrangements that place drivers under conditions of debt peonage (Viscelli, 2016), such a movement could help the industry think outside the narrow clock time logic of the HOS when discussing fatigue (Snyder, 2016). It could, for example, begin to rethink the industry’s pay-per-mile incentive structure so that drivers see reducing their work hours as a viable option. It could advocate for better data systems that allow for easier sharing of drivers’ logbook information between different parts of the logistics system, thereby making it easier to synchronize drivers’ movements with those of shippers and receivers. It could call for better enforcement of penalties against shippers and receivers who create unnecessary delays. It could advocate for graded sets of rules, the flexibility of which depends on driver’s seniority and safety record. And it could address the culture of overwork in the trucking community by questioning the supposedly “independent” disciplinary norms of process time, such as being willing to work whenever one is asked. Process time discipline might be what makes drivers seem like professionals, but it is also what makes them ripe for exploitation by an industry that profits from their willingness to sweat their own labor.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received financial support for this research from the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (#581760).

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