Employees or IC's??

Owner operator is IC, but lease purchase at most megas is shifting costs onto the driver. They truly are employees, and it serves megas right to lose these cases.

 

What hurts is when you do have true independents, the own their own truck, purchase their own plate and IFTA and pay all their costs, fuel tolls and maintenance from their settlements, decide what load they want, etc. yet the state might still decide these are employees...

Our contractors pull intermodal cans from the NY/NJ seaport so their scope of work is limited to a choice of 4 or 5 marine terminals and restricted to working when these locations are open...

We have over 50 owner operators and like most of the port drivers don't want to drive for anyone else, they like their own truck and live in our communities, purchase fuel and their license plates and IFTA in the local community, pay tolls to the local highway authorities, etc.

Last year they pulled over 30,000 cans off the pier. Without them we would possibly go out of business which will cost another 50 actual employees their jobs...all because the Teamsters want to organize the port drivers but they can't organize owner operators...

And the champion of 'Miss-classification' in NJ, a state senator who used to be supported by the NJ Motor Truck Assn. until he turned against the industry...

Now the SOB wants to run for Governor; doesn't he realize he needs more than the teamsters?
r...

 

It is the same old crap that applies to California, so nothing new.

 

Except the judges haven't ruled over here. Cali is a lost cause.

 

I'm against Kali as much as anyone, but they aren't wrong here.

Swift controlled every aspect of their work schedules – from where and how the plaintiffs delivered freight to which routes the truckers had to use. Swift also controlled the equipment the truckers used, including the maintenance and condition of the trucks

what part of that is not an employee? Or even close to being independent? I'm glad they are losing these cases, the lease stuff is a scam that only benefits the companies.

 

Easy for me to avoid this nonsense. My operation is LLC with S Corp tax structure. One time cost of $150 to set it all up. The truck is a part of the corporate entity. I am just a little 'ol employee driver of my own 1 truck operation. Kinda hard to say that my business corporation is an employee of the carrier it is with. A business entity cannot be an employee since it is not a person. And I have any employee stuff all covered by being a salaried employee of my own company. And since under 50 employees, avoid much of the government required nonsense that falls on larger employers. Simple and with a better tax advantage than being a sole proprietor.

The carrier may indeed control the operation details of the truck. That's ok, it is property of my business and a contract between my business and theirs. I lease the equipment to them and they use it as they need to. They may control my activities as it pertains to operating the truck. That's ok. I am an employee of my business. My business provides the driver (me) to the carrier to operate my business truck, and my business pays a salary to the driver (me) to do the work. No conflicts anywhere. And I have given authority to the driver (me) to haul the loads that are chosen by the driver (me) so no forced dispatch either. And only the driver salary is subject to both Income and SSI taxation. The money the business makes beyond that is a distribution to me (the owner) and only subject to income tax alone. And my driver salary is based on the prevailing annual mean wage of heavy truck drivers in my area as per the Dept of Labor. So even any conflicts with IRS are fully covered. Let any state pull all the stuff they want.... they have nothing to say about it and none of their employee classification crap applies.

 

It's clear that operation, just like mine is IC. Where it gets dicey is these newbies, who finish training at mega bottom feeder, inc, and get told "we don't have a company truck for for you yet. You'll have to wait a while, and hopefully we'll have something. We do have, however, a lease purchase truck you can get into today, and be your own boss." That, my friend is misclassification, fraud, and whatever pejorative you can throw at it!

 

That can be a problem. This is why there needs to be some guidance available to those newbies that are in this situtation. They could set up the same thing I have going on, at very little out of pocket cost. Their business lease/purchases the truck from the carrier, who usually operates that part of their business as a separate entity from the carrier hauling operation, the carrier hauling operation then leases the truck from the business, all the while, the newbie driver is an employee of their own business. It is not as complicated as it sounds to implement. The carriers are not going to provide such nuggets of information. I would think it would be advantageous of the carriers to provide such information, maybe even demand such structures be set up, to stay out of all these IC vs Employee entanglements that greedy government agencies like to pull.