In the midst of numerous battles regarding independent contractor status, a federal district court has sided with a driver who claimed in a lawsuit against Schneider National that he was effectively an employee rather than an independent owner-operator.
The suit was filed in July 2020 by Eric Brant, who drove for Schneider between December 2018 and August 2019. The decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit comes down almost completely on the side of Brant, whose allegations are the core of the criticism that has been leveled for years over the status of owner-operators under lease to a carrier.
A lower court in May 2021 had ruled in favor of the trucking company “by giving decisive effect to the terms of Schneider’s contract,” according to the appeals court decision. Such an approach by the lower court “in many areas of law … would be sound. … But not under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).”
Independent contractor status under the FLSA is one area of the battle as the National Labor Relations Board considers whether to move away from what is known as the Super Shuttle precedent and substitute the Federal Express standard that was in place a few years earlier. That move would be more favorable to defining workers as employees rather than independent contractors.
The definition of independent contractor status also is in limbo at the Department of Labor, where the Wage and Hour Division, after having been rebuffed once in an effort to withdraw a Trump...
Several accounts -- run by users in Vietnam and boasting tens of thousands of followers -- later shifted to focus solely on Australian national politics, linking to websites full of AI-generated a...