Labor violations force truckers into life of servitude

[kscarbel2]

PBS NewsHour  /  June 17, 2017

An investigative report released Friday by USA Today, exposes a truck driving industry rife with labor violations, forcing truckers into working conditions akin to indentured servitude. Brett Murphy, the article’s author, joins Hari Sreenivasan from Naples, Florida to discuss his findings.

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[fxfymn]

I read the article. Very disturbing and it shows that some folks have absolutely no moral compass.

[BillyT]

I haven't seen the article, but It sounds like the old " employee called a contractor" ploy!

[BillyT]

Anyone old enough to remember Midwestern Distribution out of Ft Scott Kansas? Or North Americans new products div? Both examples of the "lease purchase" rip off where the same tractor gets sold over and over and few "contractors" ever end up owning their tractor!

[BillyT]

I talked to a driver many years ago who had a "lease purchase" agreement with Midwestern Distribution, a division of massive Leaseway Corp. He was within something like 1000.00 of paying off his truck, a Freightliner Cabover, and he parked it at their terminal!  He took a couple days off and they did an " in frame" on his engine, and he now owed an extra 1500. Or so it was the late 70s! The company goal was to make sure the "contractor" never paid off the truck! The way they did this was insidious!, there was a clause that if you  missed a payment the truck was repossessed! When you leased on they ran your a.. off insuring that you were happy and thought they were the greatest company in the world! They forced you to have your truck maintained at their facilities where you were overcharged and you began to get farther and farther in debt they gradually reduced your miles until you couldn't pay your household expenses and you had to choose between feeding your family or making the truck payment! You weren't allowed to trip lease or seek freight other than theirs! Without freight you couldn't get an advance for fuel, some guys got stuck out on the road and just abandoned the truck which was repossessed,and resold to another hapless individual! They charged a new contractor 5000.down on his truck cash! You see how the profits add up?  Every truck expense was advanced to the contractor and "padded" to more than they would pay elsewhere! They even assigned the truck lessee a co driver that he had to pay out of his percentage! He had to accept the co driver who was a "rookie" just out of driving school, on "his" truck!  A good friend of mine knew a guy that was with Midwestern, and his co driver tore the mirror off his truck(imagine what they charged him to repair that)! He left the guy at a t.s.! The guy I mentioned earlier whose engine they rebuilt was a real hard nosed experienced driver from S.Jersey and he actually managed to pay off his truck! One of the few! 

[BillyT]

The main business at Midwestern Distribution was selling trucks, not hauling freight, the profits from the freight were just icing on the cake! North American New Products had the same business model, but they hauled lightweight products like blanket wrap furniture and appliances like washers and dryers. They sold mostly single axle tractors Astros and Freightliner cabovers!  They were sued for millions of dollars by the federal government for their misleading brochures, which made driving for them look like a vacation! I had one of their promotional brochures where they showed drivers skiing at Vail and visiting the Grand canyon etc! What a krock of s..t!

[kscarbel2]

Truckers who carry your favorite goods to market are being cheated to save you money

The Los Angeles Times  /  June 3, 2017

Juan Lara was headed back to the Port of Los Angeles two weeks ago from his daily pickup in the Mojave Desert when his truck erupted with engine trouble. He managed to bring the truck and its 50,000-pound load of borax limping into the port.

There the 63-year-old driver says he faced a bill for $10,500 in repairs for a truck he doesn’t even own. That will take a big chunk out of his pretax pay of about $2,500 a week, which is reduced by more than half by his expenses for fuel, insurance and the truck lease itself. Subtract federal, payroll and state taxes, and Lara may be working for less than $18 an hour, with no benefits.

Lara is classified at his trucking company, California Cartage Express, as an “independent contractor,” not an employee, even though he says he drives exclusively for the company and operates under the control of its dispatchers.

The vast majority of the roughly 12,000 regular truck drivers at the Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach are classified by their bosses as independent contractors. But as federal and state judges and labor regulators have consistently ruled, they’re employees in all but name. They just don’t get the benefits — access to employer-owned equipment, workers compensation and unemployment insurance, employer contributions to Social Security and minimum wage protection.

They don’t get retirement or healthcare coverage, or reimbursement for their work expenses. Typically, they work on 90-day renewable contracts, which means they can effectively be fired at will, with no recourse to the protection against arbitrary treatment enjoyed by employees.

The misclassification of workers as independent contractors is a national scandal. But the port may be the single most concentrated example of this race to the bottom in the American workplace. Port trucking “really is a case study in the bigger economic trends we have seen since the 1980s,” says Jessica Durrum, head of the clean & safe ports campaign for LAANE, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. “This is not about one or two bad apples.”

There’s no mystery why shipping firms at the port prefer the independent contractor model: It saves them about 30% compared to the cost of operating with employee drivers. That’s the estimate of Fred Potter, director of the port division of the Teamsters, which represents about 500 drivers at the port and is trying to expand its representation.

The Teamsters’ goal is to get the drivers as much as 30% more in pay over the average $28,000 that the union says the “independent contractors” can pull down after expenses, but resistance by the firms has been ferocious. As long as the misclassification continues, Potter says, “the employers who break the law have an advantage.”

The drivers haul not only industrial cargoes, but merchandise for leading retail chains, including Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s and Wal-Mart as well as merchandise bearing some of the world’s most familiar brand names. Those chains and brands are the customers that shipping companies try to please by undercutting each other’s rates, and they have the power to require the shippers to comply with the law.

We reached out to the four big retailers; Target said it expects all its vendors “to comply with our vendor standards and all applicable laws and regulations around labor, wages, overtime and more,” including “the appropriate classification of their workers.” Home Depot said, “we're investigating the issue and we're exploring ways to ensure drivers are aware of available channels to raise concerns with us.” Lowe’s said it had “no information to share” and Wal-Mart didn’t respond. We also reached out to California Cartage, Lara’s company, but they didn’t respond.

Shipping companies claim that truckers prefer to be independent contractors. “The market is telling us that independent contracting is where the talent pool is,” says a spokesperson for XPO Logistics, a big port shipping firm. “For them it’s about pay and flexibility, and that’s important for us, too.”

“Of drivers offered the opportunity to be employees or independent contractors,” says Weston LaBar, executive director of the Harbor Trucking Assn., “more than 90% choose to be independent contractors.” But that choice is really a sham because opportunities to be employees are limited; the few employee-only companies at the port face “a significant economic disadvantage,” says an industry insider who asked to remain unidentified because he serves in port management.

Legal rulings have almost uniformly found that the truckers meet all the markers of employees and almost none of independent business operators; LaBar concedes that “99% of the cases” have been ruled in favor of the drivers.

As a National Labor Relations Board judge found in 2015 in a case involving Green Fleet Systems, the company dictated each driver’s shifts, set payments unilaterally, effectively prevented them from working for other companies and required the drivers to park the trucks on company property between shifts — and charged them up to $15 a week for the parking.

“In every real sense, they were neither independent nor businesses,” ruled the judge, Jeffrey D. Wedekind. “Rather, they were dependent drivers.”

As the rulings pile up, so do the liabilities. The port firm Shippers Transport Express settled a federal court suit over the misclassification of more than 500 truck drivers for $11 million in 2015, while agreeing to convert the drivers to employee status. Of about 900 complaints filed with the California labor commissioner since 2011, rulings have been issued in more than 375 — every one finding that the drivers are employees and ordering back pay totaling nearly $40 million, according to Julie Gutman Dickinson, a Los Angeles-based lawyer for the Teamsters. About 350 cases have been settled or sent to arbitration, and 150 are pending.

In May, U.S. Judge William D. Keller of Los Angeles ordered Pacer Cartage, a unit of XPO, to pay five drivers a total of $958,657 in unlawfully deducted wages, lease payments, expenses and interest. XPO is appealing the order.

During the trial Keller warned Pacer that case law had moved inexorably toward the conclusion that the drivers had been improperly classified as independent contractors.“That isn’t a storm cloud for you,” he said. “That is an absolute tornado coming at you at about a hundred miles an hour. And you better scatter.”

The industry attributes its string of losses to “politically tilted” judges and regulators and the influence of “plaintiffs’ attorneys and organized labor,” as Greg M. Feary, the head of a law firm that represents the shippers, wrote in response to a recent USA Today investigation into lease abuses at the Port of Los Angeles.

The classification of drivers as independent contractors dates back to federal deregulation of the trucking industry in 1980. Companies that mostly employed Teamster members on fixed wages were soon supplanted by nonunion companies that sold their trucks to their drivers and paid them by the load. Established Teamster companies, including California Cartage, shifted to the new model. A vigorous trade in used trucks developed among drivers.

But the economics for drivers took a drastic turn for the worse in 2008, when the port instituted an initiative to get old, polluting diesel trucks scrapped and replaced with fuel-efficient, lower-emission — and much more expensive — new models. The goal was to quell local residents’ complaints about filthy air, paving the way for a port expansion to relieve congestion.

As a federal appeals court later observed, port officials believed that the conversion to clean trucks would be “prohibitively expensive” for independent drivers. The city of Los Angeles issued a mandate that all trucking firms at the port, which had better access to the capital needed to convert the fleet, would have to change back to the employee-only model. The shipping firms successfully sued to overturn the mandate in federal court.

“Every day I come to work knowing I’ll have to cover $60 for the lease that day, plus fuel and insurance,” says Daniel Seko, 39, a driver for Intermodal Bridge Transport who gets paid by the load. In a good week, Seko says, he might earn $900 before expenses. “If it’s not a good week, $500.”

There are signs that the industry is moving toward an employee-only model, but at a snail’s pace.

One reason may be that the companies are hoping that the advent of the Trump administration heralds a more indulgent approach at the NLRB.

A few weeks ago, XPO asked an NLRB judge to suspend two cases in which the Teamsters accuse the firm of illegally misclassifying drivers, to “see whether the new administration remains interested” in the cases. The judge rejected the motion and scheduled a hearing for July 24 in Los Angeles.

[Underdog]

My take away from this article is, if you're an independent contractor and you are not making what you deserve, what is stopping you from changing jobs? Every trucker knows port haulage is a rat race. Also in the article it seems these independent contractors were doing better until they were forced to purchase newer trucks in 2008. Now they are trapped in lease-purchase agreements that they can't afford. So the government that caused the problem by interrupting free markets is now supposed to bail them out, creating another segment that can't function without subsidies. And the rest of us get to pay for it.

[kscarbel2]

Bernie Sanders Wants Crackdown on Trucking Companies That Don't Pay Living Wage

Heavy Duty Trucking (HDT)  /  November 13, 2017

Sen.Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wants the U.S. government to only provide federal contracts to trucking companies that pay workers a living wage and benefits, he stated in a letter President Trump last week.

In the letter, he cites a controversial USA Today report that described the plight of certain independent-contractor drivers working at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach who worked to pay off truck leases and took home little pay. Sanders urged President Trump to sign an executive order that would deny government contracts and subcontracts for trucking companies that misclassify workers as independent contractors, force workers to lease the trucks they drive, and engage in abusive labor practices.

Sanders also suggested that the Labor Department audit its current contracts and subcontracts awarded to port trucking companies to ensure they are in compliance with the wage and labor requirements of the McNamara – O’Hara Service Contract Act.

“This should not be happening in the United States of America,” Sanders states in the letter. “Truck drivers are the backbone of the American economy. They deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, not like modern-day indentured servants.”

Democrats on Capitol Hill have given extra attention to alleged labor and wage abuses at America’s ports since the USA Today expose ran earlier this year. In late October, Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-CA) and Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) introduced two bills aimed at addressing labor and environmental issues at the ports.

However, port trucking companies and stakeholders have maintained that the cases outlined in the USA Today story were too extreme and not representative of industry practices.

They’ve also characterized it as part of an attempt to unionize labor at the ports by the Teamsters Union. The union has organized several driver strikes at ports over the past few years to protest what it says is a misclassification of drivers as independent contractors in order to forego paying proper wages and benefits.

[csptnjod]

Ok first yes for the most part it was a scam however if you approached it right you could make out some what. After reading through several of these remarks I find several incorrect statements first they didn't charge 5000.00 down you gave them 1.00 they set up a corporation and started driving second they didn't pay percentage they paid by the mile household users so you got screwed there never did figure out how household movers guide came up with those milages anyway milage pay was .10 lead driver and .8 second driver however each drive got paid for every mile driving the truck ran no matter who was driving but as I said they used household miners guide is you list approximately 12% or more on actual milage they did do all the Maintainance and the rule was you had to have repairs done by them on a few occasions though I did have it fixed on the road like when my ac quit that pissed them if but o-well. I expect that only maybe 10 to 15% of the trucks actually got paid off. As I said if you approached it right you could do well in my case I ran a husband and wife team and we were just in it for a pay check and we did well we never figured to end up with the truck. You had to load and unload your truck or pay the jumper out if your own pocket that sucked. I could go on and on but I just touched on a couple points here that I saw were inaccurate. I irked for them for about a year and a half before moving on.

[HeavyGunner]

15 hours ago, csptnjod said:

Ok first yes for the most part it was a scam however if you approached it right you could make out some what. After reading through several of these remarks I find several incorrect statements first they didn't charge 5000.00 down you gave them 1.00 they set up a corporation and started driving second they didn't pay percentage they paid by the mile household users so you got screwed there never did figure out how household movers guide came up with those milages anyway milage pay was .10 lead driver and .8 second driver however each drive got paid for every mile driving the truck ran no matter who was driving but as I said they used household miners guide is you list approximately 12% or more on actual milage they did do all the Maintainance and the rule was you had to have repairs done by them on a few occasions though I did have it fixed on the road like when my ac quit that pissed them if but o-well. I expect that only maybe 10 to 15% of the trucks actually got paid off. As I said if you approached it right you could do well in my case I ran a husband and wife team and we were just in it for a pay check and we did well we never figured to end up with the truck. You had to load and unload your truck or pay the jumper out if your own pocket that sucked. I could go on and on but I just touched on a couple points here that I saw were inaccurate. I irked for them for about a year and a half before moving on.

So you were there for the transaction with the gentleman Billyt was referring to? Sounds like you got hosed to me. Paying truck lease payments, fuel, repairs, insurance for something you don’t own. Why In the world would you take on all that risk for something you don’t own? Seems like that’s akin to paying taxes, homeowners insurance and footing the bill on all repairs on a rental to me. 

Edited August 4, 2019 by HeavyGunner
Damn autocorrect

[glitchwrks]

1099 "contractor" is the norm for many jobs nowadays. A former employer got his pants sued off over 1099 workers in NY state, since NY has a very strict definition on what's a contractor and what's an employee. Amazon is a major offender, considering everyone 1099. They won't build a warehouse in a state that won't allow their classification of employees as contractors. Sometimes 1099 is a good deal for the worker, often it's not. I know for me, I went in thinking I was getting a W-2 job and at the end of the year I owed the IRS a fair bit of money -- since I didn't realize the distinction (and the company made no effort to let me know I wasn't W-2) I had no real deductions.

I'd heard that California in particular is cracking down on it, after realizing how much they were losing in payroll taxes.

[Bullheaded]

That's why the highways are full of immigrants now. They can use and abuse them to no end.

I've been vocational and on/off road all my life but I did by a highway tractor once and hit the road a couple years. That wasn't for me. I never saw so much disrespect and bullshit from both the shippers and the receivers.  And when you add to that brokering for a company with a horrible dispatcher, it wasn't long before i sold that truck, and went back to construction/forestry.

[Dave 47]

Dave 47

,i..PAID off TRACTOR #8628

in October, 1983 it was A 1978

Freight liner With a 1981

Cummings, 300 &

9 speed,transmission 355 Rear ends *We were still in a Recession 

in 1980 Lived in San Diego CA..

Had got  My Class, 1 license

in 1977 *Company ,i.. worked for

Lost All of our Pumping,,

contracts* &No LOCAL TRUCK,

Driver, Jobs* Pre-Internate Days*

No Cell phones*

Midwestern DISTRIBUTION

WOULD LET ME Own my own

TRUCK $1.00  TO Start a

Corporation, in KANSAS*

0.72¢ A MILE ,LOADED,, or

EMPTY* FOR a young, DRIVER

WHO had- NOTHING!!

THIS was a good, Opportunity

They, Ran me HARD ,ALL over the

USA.& ,i..PAID-OFF$$

THAT*"DOLLAR" TRUCK*

in ,2..YEARS**

*NEED TO THANK*

"ALL" of the, TRUCK, stop

"LAWYERS" who said*

MIDWESTERN* they are, NEVER "

going to Let you PAY$$ OFF

your, "DOLLAR" "TRUCK"

THEIR, "ADVICE" MADE ME

Hang in there ,When my,

DIESEL FUEL, GELED UP

--20°F. Des Moines Iowa *

FREEZING, RAIN* 1/4" ICE

ALL over OHIO** BLIZZARDS,

Brainerd  & Cloquet ,Minnesota*

PAPER, MILLS*EVERY,TIME

the GOING, got  ROUGH*

THE " ADVICE " from the

MONDAY, MORNING "

QUARTER BACK'S " made me,

LAUGH & KEEP on TRUCKING*

OWNER OPERATOR, 34,YEARS*

RETIRED, 2014* & IT" ALL "

STARTED, WITH a "DOLLAR"

TRUCK, that the, TRUCK STOP,

"LAWYERS" said ,i.. Would,,

NEVER, PAY OFF*

OWN OUR HOME, FREE & 

CLEAR ALSO ,PRETTY GOOD,

RETURN, for a $ DOLLAR...

 

 

[Old Fuddy]

Billy T... Do you know who Midwestern Distribution is today? 

[Old Fuddy]

On 6/21/2017 at 3:30 PM, BillyT said:

The main business at Midwestern Distribution was selling trucks, not hauling freight, the profits from the freight were just icing on the cake! North American New Products had the same business model, but they hauled lightweight products like blanket wrap furniture and appliances like washers and dryers. They sold mostly single axle tractors Astros and Freightliner cabovers!  They were sued for millions of dollars by the federal government for their misleading brochures, which made driving for them look like a vacation! I had one of their promotional brochures where they showed drivers skiing at Vail and visiting the Grand canyon etc! What a krock of s..t!

Billy, Your comments are dead on. But missing one little morsel of salacious info...

What happened after the closure of MidWestern? Where did all the brass go and resurface under their new dot# and state filings???

They are still in business today and doing much of the same things. I'll give you a hint.... Joplin isnt far from Fort Scott.

[S. L. Nicholson]

I gave Midwestern Distribution a try in September 1982. When I went through their orientation at Ft. Scott Kansas it didn't seem to add up and I voiced my opinion. I was immediately descended upon by their people and some Bootlickers in the room. I worked for them for four months. I worked with four different Operators. Basically they were hillbillies with little or no critical thinking skills. I left and never looked back.