This Is The Legal Mess Now Facing the Trucking Industry

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:15)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:16)

Tracy, when you think about the gig economy or gig economy workers, what first comes to mind for you?

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

Uber, Lyft, has to be.

Joe Weisenthal (0:26)

Right. That's it, I mean, I think for everyone, I think that's the answer.

Tracy Alloway (0:30)

Freelance journalism, maybe?

Joe Weisenthal (0:31)

Freelance journalism, that might be the next one, but it is a good point that what we call the gig economy, that everyone has this idea of these sort of marginally attached workers, people think of it as a new thing, it's actually been forever. So obviously something like freelance journalism has been around forever, long before anyone had heard of Uber or Lyft.

Tracy Alloway (0:50)

Absolutely, I think gig economy workers just kind of gave it a new label that made it sound a lot more modern than it maybe was. But one of the classic examples, I suppose, of a gig worker has to be a trucker, an owner operator in the trucking industry.

Joe Weisenthal (1:05)

Right, and we've obviously talked about trucking several times on several past episodes. But when you think about an individual who is also their own boss, who may go from one company to another, who does not have some permanent full-time arrangement, yeah, obviously it looks like trucking, I think, is the number one in terms of the sheer number of people, or number one or number two, maybe Amazon warehouse workers up there. But the most common job, I think, of the US are one of them.

And yeah, I think by any sort of definition of what we would call a gig worker, I think many truck drivers would obviously qualify.

Tracy Alloway (1:44)

Right, and in recent years, we have seen efforts to improve working conditions for gig workers, but it kind of gets into this gray area where, yes, a lot of gig workers are exploited. A lot of them are working under suboptimal labor conditions, earning less pay than they would if they were actual employees, certainly less benefits.

But there's also a certain type of gig economy worker that maybe values some independence and likes working as an independent contractor.

Joe Weisenthal (2:16)

Right, so this really gets at the question, and people look at arrangements like with Uber, and there are people who view this as exploitative or unfair to the worker, or the workers are being deprived benefits that perhaps an employee should get. And then there are also people who say, you know what, I like the flexibility of being an Uber driver. I like the arrangement of not having a company being my full-time employer.

And I think all of these things clearly apply to truck drivers as well. And knowing the right legal frameworks to think about these things is pretty complicated.

Tracy Alloway (2:47)

Yeah, and I mentioned this idea of a gray area and trucking. I mean, it's already a gray area, and it's sort of like just stepped into another gray area because it's been caught up in some of the legal issues around gig economy workers, specifically in California, but there's also legal issues elsewhere in the US as well.

Joe Weisenthal (3:07)

All right, well, let's dive more into this question about how some of these sort of legal thinking regarding gig economy workers or gigs in general are intersecting with the trucking industry.

We have a friend of the podcast, Rachel Premack, the editorial director at Freightwaves and the author of the great Modes newsletter joining us. She's written a lot about these issues. So, Rachel, thank you for coming on the show.

Rachel Premack (3:30)

Thanks for having me.

Joe Weisenthal (3:31)

Absolutely. So why don't you sort of, I mean, first of all, isn't it kind of right that we talk about gig workers, but in terms of basically the employment arrangements of truck drivers, what do they look like and do they basically fit in with what people generally have in their mind of what a gig worker is?

Rachel Premack (3:47)

Yeah, so right now there are about 2 million employed long haul truck drivers in the US. About 300,000 to 400,000 of those are owner operators, and the rest are employees of either small trucking fleets of maybe 10 to 100 or a few hundreds of other truck drivers, or they are employees of fleets of so-called mega fleets that would have thousands or even tens of thousands of truck driver employees.

But the owner operator community in trucking is pretty substantial and it does really set, you could say, the culture for the larger trucking industry as well. A lot of drivers might start out as employees and have the goal of being owner operators. But generally, owner operators are a pretty big part of trucking and they definitely would count as the so-called gig economy, even though it's not really, we don't really think of them the same way we think of Uber, Lyft or DoorDash.