Book; How the World Ran Out of Everything https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2024/09/book-review-into-the-maelstrom-wellisz
Until its dramatic collapse, most people barely knew that something called the global supply chain existed, much less understood how much their daily lives depended on it. Then, suddenly, toilet paper and frozen chicken disappeared from supermarket shelves, and COVID-19 patients were left dying in hospitals for lack of medical equipment. How could it have happened? Enter Peter S. Goodman, veteran economics reporter for the New York Times, who chronicled the unfolding disaster at close quarters, from the factories of Shenzhen, China, to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and the truck stops and rail yards of Middle America. His reporting forms the heart of this new book, How the World Ran Out of Everything.
Article; Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/129/3/1269/7745219
Over the past fifteen years, long-haul truckers have emerged as significant subjects of scholarly inquiry, including those described in Shane Hamilton’s award-winning Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy (2008), which charted, among other things, the ways in which “bandit” drivers, the “last American cowboys” of the highway, undermined their own autonomy by supporting deregulation during the Carter and Reagan administrations and ultimately paved the way for the rise of the low-wage, contingent-labor economy. Recent trucking memoirs have also surfaced as review-worthy windows into the collapse of blue-collar dignity in the United States, including waning independence and the erosion of teamsters’ unions, declining wages and increased debt, and deteriorating public perceptions despite the critical role long-haul truckers play in providing the goods the rest of us want and need. In Data Driven, Karen Levy picks up the threads of the deteriorating conditions under which American “asphalt cowboys” continue to labor as underpaid, overworked, and surveilled subjects of electronic logging devices.