There’s a new trucking-focused trade group in Washington and it is interested in one issue: independent contractor status.
The group is called Truckers Integral to our Economy (TIE) and its executive director is Scott Brenner, who is also an executive director at Crossroads Strategies, a Washington-area lobbying firm. Brenner told FreightWaves he worked in Congress for about 10 years on the Ways and Means and Transportation committees and also spent time at the Department of Transportation before joining Crossroads.
While the question of independent contractor status has played out heavily on the state level, with California’s AB5 the biggest battleground, Brenner said TIE would not focus on state issues. Rather, the entire concern at TIE is the Department of Labor’s proposed definition of independent contractor status to be used by the Wage and Hour Division when it has an employee versus employer dispute brought before it.
The current rule on the books for the Wage and Hour Division is a Trump administration creation that was formally introduced in the waning days of that administration. It is viewed as more favorable to the idea of a worker being classified as an independent contractor.
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