It's not in-human if you can't trust your drivers to do their job honestly. It won't be used everywhere but if you constantly wonder why some drivers seem to deliver far less than others and then it magically disappears once you install monitoring, it "proves its worth".
It doesn't sound nice but when margins are paper-thin, it is not surprising.
If margins are paper thin, they should cut costs elsewhere, not human lives. I know a trucker who's stated that if they didn't lie on their timesheets or use amphetamines, there's no way they'd get the driving required done, they'd get canned, and another person would either falsify or use uppers to keep going. This kind of thinking could then be used for anything - office building workers, for instance, why is 0.5% of time mail not being sorted? It's entirely dehumanizing and takes creative process and ingenuity (what little there is in autonomous jobs) down the drain.
These companies will say it's illegal to lie in time sheets and they'll fire you if the catch you but then they don't try to catch anything too hard and set up what you have to do so that there is no way to do it without lying on time sheets. That kind of behavior is very common for lower level workers so the company gets to eat the cake of illegal practices while protecting themselves by saying it's against policy. See all the Amazon warehouse bathroom issues.
Many companies are movie to digital timesheets where the truck figures out if you are driving or not. You pretty much just need to say 'on/off/sleeper'. Those are harder to lie on.
The correct action the companies should be doing is reviewing their routes and what is a realistic way to do them. That route from 1970 no longer is the same time frame. The driving rules have changed and so has the road layout.
> It's not in-human if you can't trust your drivers to do their job honestly.
Well, as drivers get paid per mile I’m not sure how they can be “dishonest” and still take home a decent paycheck.
The company I run for will install driver facing cameras for the top (bottom?) 200 drivers, the ones who set off the robotruck unsafe driving algorithm too many times to see what they’re doing wrong. The alternative would be to just fire them so this policy is marginally better I suppose.
It is pretty hard to get the truck to report you AFAICT — only managed to set it off once and that was when a car purposely brake checked me pretty hard, if the truck didn’t have collision avoidance I’d have slammed into the back of them because by the time I realized what they were doing it was already too late. This other time I was about to take everyone out due to another driver unsafely merging and the truck was like “ho hum, nothing to see here, carry on”.