Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/655281
TRUCKING TOPICS 16 // COMPANY DRIVER // APRIL 2016 As I've written before, California's labor laws require meal and rest breaks for shift workers – a half-hour meal break every five hours and at least a 10-minute rest break for every four hours worked. In 2014, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided the California laws applied to truck operators. Numerous states have some version of such laws. However, trucking companies have long assumed that the 1994 Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act's federal pre-emption clause for state rules affecting intrastate motor carriers, combined with federal rules for interstate carriers post- deregulation, in essence exempted carriers from complying with them. The 2014 Ninth Circuit ruling, however spawned lawsuits seeking class action status against fleets domiciled in California or employing drivers living there. The penalty for not complying with the Golden State's rules (such as an hour's pay for every meal break not provided) has made for an attractive carrot for lawyers looking for big settlements. Again as I wrote previously, there's evidence that some employers, in order to avoid such lawsuits, have adopted a defensive posture, requiring all drivers to shut down for 30 minutes every five hours to comply with the meal break rule, complicating drivers' hours of service. Joe Rajkovacz of the Western States Trucking Association has warned that the ruling could lead to a confusing state-to- state patchwork of de facto hours of service regulations. His thoughts on the "safe position" for employers large and small faced with new applicability of California's wage and hours laws? "Migrate toward paying a minimum [hourly] wage with some incentive on top of it," he says, such as percentage of the load or mileage pay. Given California's size, if the opposition to the FAA reauthorization and/or similar future measures continues to be successful, you may well see many employers based in that state or employing drivers there migrate to such a system — if they don't just force drivers to take the extra breaks, as Rajkovacz has written, under threat "of termination." I wonder, however, whether a patchwork of state-to-state rules on wages and hours in this area is ultimately what's best, and I think of owner-operator Joe Ammons, among others, who not so long ago took that pay-for- all-time-worked ideal for employee drivers further by advocating for repeal of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act's exemption of interstate transportation workers from federal overtime pay requirements. The Owner- Operator Independent Drivers Association counts itself in support of such an action, in addition to stated efforts to promote hourly compensation for employee drivers generally. If the FLSA exemption was removed via legislative action (or administratively) at the highest levels of government, the end result might well be new value placed on time for all drivers, and potentially, over time, a new model for pay. Ammons believes reversal of the FLSA exemption of transportation workers ought to happen given the mandate for ELDs means hours monitoring will be a wide reality. He re-opened his years-old petition to the Secretary of the DOT and Congress to do away with the exemption in the run-up to FMCSA's publication of the ELD final rule. You can find it in the link embedded in his Twitter post from September (See next page).