Three sections in Part 390 point away from the driver rather than at them, and a reader who has spent eleven chapters being told what they must do has earned them. § 390.35 is the first and the broadest. No motor carrier, its agents, officers, representatives or employees shall make or cause to make a fraudulent or intentionally false STATEMENT on any application, certificate, report or record required by this subchapter; a fraudulent or intentionally false ENTRY on any such document required to be used, completed or retained; or a REPRODUCTION, for fraudulent purposes, of any of them. Read the reach of that. Every document this book has taught — the application and the qualification file of Chapter 6, the record of duty status and its supporting documents in Chapter 8, the inspection report of Chapter 11 — is a record required by this subchapter, and the prohibition covers the carrier and its people as squarely as it covers the driver who signs.

§ 390.6 addresses the pressure that produces those falsifications. A motor carrier, shipper, receiver or transportation intermediary — including their agents, officers or representatives — may not COERCE a driver of a commercial motor vehicle to operate that vehicle in violation of the safety regulations the section enumerates, which include the parts this book is built from; and a carrier may not coerce a driver into violating a further set of commercial regulations. Notice how far the first list reaches beyond the employer: a shipper who will not let you leave, or a receiver who makes the appointment conditional, is inside the same prohibition as the carrier that dispatched you. And the section does not stop at the prohibition. § 390.6(b) gives the driver a complaint process: a written complaint under § 386.12(c) describing the action claimed to constitute coercion and identifying the regulation the driver was coerced to violate, with any supporting evidence that will help the Division Administrator judge its merits.

§ 390.36 is the narrowest of the three and the most commonly misused word in it. Harassment here does not mean unpleasantness. It is defined as an action by a motor carrier toward a driver it employs — including an independent contractor while in the course of operating a commercial motor vehicle on the carrier’s behalf — INVOLVING THE USE OF INFORMATION AVAILABLE THROUGH AN ELECTRONIC LOGGING DEVICE, or through other technology used in combination with and not separable from one, that the carrier knew or should have known would result in the driver violating § 392.3 or Part 395. So it is tied precisely to the machinery of Chapters 7, 8 and 10: the device that records your hours being used to push you past them, or past § 392.3’s ill-or-fatigued prohibition. § 390.36(b)(2) is careful to preserve the ordinary use of the same technology — nothing in the prohibition prevents a carrier from using technology allowed under the subchapter to monitor a driver’s productivity, provided the monitoring does not result in harassment. And § 390.36(c) gives its own written complaint route, under § 386.12(b).

Read together, the three describe a system that expects pressure to exist and puts limits on it rather than pretending it away. The record must be true, the pressure to make it untrue is itself prohibited, and the device that watches you may not be turned into the instrument that breaks you.