Every camera company is a bad company.

Difference in office jobs with security cameras is, you're not prevented from sipping coffee, or snacking at your desk. Some of these trucking companies are very restrictive about any behavior beyond two hands on the wheel, eyes forward.

 

I personally have driven with in cab, but it wasn't to the level of what others report they experience.

 

I imagine that they will become mandatory on a federal level in every motor vehicle in the future.
Even a deer hit ot pothole damage will be assigned blame.

 

You want a camera for in case, OK
I have 3 of them for ny protection. If an accident happens you will be cleared as a company by that footage. They are my cameras, I have controll,not you. You won't bother me for stupid stuff and I won't bore you with my middle finger at the lense all day. If something happens, you will get the footage but you won't be policing me all day every day. Dont like it, Don't hire me!

But just because you hire bozos that break the law, company rules and are basically loosers to put in your trucks Do Not Go Thinking that a good driver with ethics and a sense of freedom will accept you ########!


The guy at the end of town raped a girl so you want to surveillance me for the rest of my life because we have similarities in our jobs?

You people that promote this crap are whats wrong with this world.

 

And the worst part of it is that someone will play the race card. See it too often in this day and age.

 

"This is how we do things, if you don't like it, buy your own truck, yaddayaddayadda..."

"How come we can't get anyone but losers and idiots to work for us? Where are all the good drivers?"

 

Retired,semi retired or dead!

 

On another note ...post the companies that DONT have cameras....this may help drivers wanting to hire on with them

 

I work on a job now that does have a lot of cameras. Almost everything I do is recorded. The cameras are rarely used to spy on me for "gotcha" violations. The footage is basically taken and immediately archived in case an incident comes of it and it needs to be pulled up for examination. It is NOT sent to the internet, or to a third-party company for immediate nitpicking. I DO NOT have electronic mechanisms automatically scouring the videos for possible violations to get me in trouble and then tattling on me.

It's actually possible for other employees to watch any one employee, if they have spare time. One employee likes to do this—and then they give you a call if they see something being done wrongly. Most of us think the guy is an azzhole, and he threatens employee morale. People will quit because of him, and that causes serious problems with staffing, where we don't have enough people already. The job can get quite hard, and when you are doing the best you can in managing problem people, you don't need your work disrupted even more with a phone call complaining that you are still not doing good enough. It's a given that most of us want to do a good job, and if something isn't being done right, there's typically a reason for this; it's not just assumed that the worker is lazy or negligent. For example, if 5 things need to be done at once as per policy, but no human can do these 5 things all at once, a couple things just don't get done. That's reality, and if a person gets nagged or disciplined over it, they'll just quit—and they do. A third-party sitting in the camera room typically cannot see the big picture, or the impossibility (or impracticality) of their expectations. It all looks just so easy to them.

When I drove a truck, what was surprising to me was the sheer numbers of violations that I got that had zero-chance of resulting in an accident. In fact, in the last company I worked for, my point total got near the allowed limit, and I didn't have a single near-near miss in all of them. That's to say that not only did I not get in a near-miss even once, but I didn't even get near to having a near miss. Many of the "violations" were matters of practical trucking—like picking up a bit of speed going downhill so the engine wouldn't lug going up the next hill, or not coming to a full stop for a stop sign placed on an uphill grade where my trailer was loaded enough to grind the clutch if I started again from a complete stop. It often was safer to do a violation than to e.g. slowly struggle to pick up speed again while remaining in an intersection where unseen cars can begin to appear.

Laws are not perfect. In fact, laws do not produce. Anything. All laws do is tell people what not to do. They don't tell people how to get a job done in all circumstances. People who make laws rarely have to produce anything. They make laws based on the criteria that they don't want things to go wrong, not based on the criteria that something needs to go right in order for society to actually be worth protecting from these wrongs. Thus, this is the situation trucking is in now. And will remain, probably with things getting even worse. For a couple years now, I've broken no laws in a truck because I simply haven't driven one.

And while I did do mistakes, everyone makes mistakes. Putting a camera on a human will not convert them into a robot that does not make mistakes. It may even increase the numbers of mistakes they make, as it causes them to worry. Also, (other) employer cameras almost never provide evidence of an employee in a factory or other place committing a crime. Those cameras typically log technical violations that can at most get a person fired—not sent to court to have their lives ruined.
Finally, I do congratulate those truckers who are near-perfect, for not needing to worry too much about camera footage. There are people out there that are so good at any job that all this fuss about cameras may seem strange to them. The problem is that our society does not need 10,000 perfect people who were born with amazing natural talents in trucking. 10,000 truckers will not move our economy. We need, like, 3.5 million truckers. This means a whole lot of people are going to be utilizing skillsets not natural to them, and adapting to work that is not optimum for their capabilities. The trucking companies can either deal with this reality, or just not move freight.

 

I realize that not every driver, probably very few, is in the position that they can tell an employer, "if you do not like the way I do my job, find someone else to do it" and they find themselves in the position that the black slaves were years ago. So! Do not come around this old man and talk about "freedom". Every day of my life, I have witnessed the "open road" become a "plantation". The minute a driver is hired, a ball and chain is put on his ankle. A "desk jockey" who can't even hardly drive their car to and from work,is watching how you drive a truck.

On the other hand, look at what kind of drivers are out there today. I sat at a truck stop the other morning and it was like a "circus". Drivers that could not even come in the truck stop the right way. They even cross over and run east on the west bound lanes to get in the truck stop the wrong way. One driver even turned into the 4-wheelers area and no way to turn around in there and he tried to back out but couldn't, so he decided to jump the curbing that was dividing the cars from the trucks, I thought for sure he was going to get hung up on the curb but he made it. So, I guess the trucking companies are like parents of young children that need watching all the time.