Commentary: Is Your Lease-Purchase Program a Problem?
Deborah Lockridge
" >Deborah Lockridge
" width="185" height="242">“Forced into debt. Worked past exhaustion. Left with nothing.”
That's the subhead of a USA Today report, “Rigged,” which earlier this summer highlighted abuses of leased owner-operator drivers at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
The newspaper found that some drivers were working long hours and taking home very little – in some cases none – of their paychecks after their lease payments and other expenses were deducted.
The report claimed that in some cases drivers were being forced to work as much as 20 hours in a day, far past the maximum allowed by law, with drivers alleging that their supervisors threatened to take their jobs or assign lower-paying routes as punishment if they did not.
The Harbor Trucking Association told HDT that the cases in the USA Today report were cherry-picked for their extremeness or were not completely explained.
“It focuses on a very small subset of the industry, and what we forget to point out is the 90-plus percent of drivers who prefer to be independent contractors and have made that business model work,” said HTA Executive Director Weston LaBar in an e-mail.
And that's long been my complaint about “misclassification” crusades by the Teamsters (especially at the ports), by state agencies, and by the U.S. Department of Labor. In an effort to address abuses like those described in the USA Today report (and to collect employment taxes government agencies think they're missing out on), these efforts throw the baby out with the bathwater, making it much harder for carriers and drivers to maintain legitimate contractor relationships.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of horror stories out there about owner-operator lease-purchase programs, and not just at the ports. Over the years, I've heard complaints about these programs at carriers both large and small. If you offer a ...Read the rest of this story
