Supreme Court rejects California Trucking Association’s appeal
Supreme Court rejects California Trucking Association’s appeal
California’s trucking sector braces as AB5 set to go into effect
John Kingston Follow on TwitterThursday, June 30, 2022
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AB5 is now set to go into effect in the California trucking sector, as the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday denied review of the appeal that represented the California Trucking Association’s last-ditch effort to keep the independent contractor law away from its operations.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which had earlier nullified the injunction that kept AB5 out of California trucking, must dissolve the stay that had allowed the injunction to remain in place while CTA made its push toward the Supreme Court.
With the Supreme Court handing down its denial without comment Thursday morning, dissolving that injunction is expected to happen quickly.
When it does, the independent owner model for trucking in the state of California will be entering a new world with little precedence.
At the heart of AB5 is the ABC test, and further, the B prong of ABC. That B test defines an independent contractor as a worker who is engaged in “work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business.”
A trucking company hiring an independent owner operator to move freight would presumably fail that test in any litigation.
FreightWaves will continue to cover this story over the course of the day.
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John Kingston
John has an almost 40-year career covering commodities, most of the time at S&P Global Platts. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment, one for steering coverage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the other for the launch of a public affairs television show, Platts Energy Week.
