The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s listening session on brokered freight transactions this past Wednesday, Oct. 28, shone light from multiple viewpoints on regulation that today exists and that some feel is being circumvented by brokers to owner-operators’, shippers’ and the public’s detriment. Others — brokers, principally, though a variety of others, too — voice the view that the reg has outlived its usefulness and applicability in today’s freight market.
In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, track back through the entire session, with quite a lot of commentary from the broker side of the equation in the first portion, but with truckers further weighing in, in roughly equivalent numbers, as the session wore on.
At issue specifically: three petitions, two to beef up the regulation requiring disclosure of all freight charges, among other records, on both sides of a brokered transaction, another to remove the reg entirely. 49 Code of Federal Regulations 371.3(c) is the part of the broker regulations at principal issue – it enshrines that all parties to a brokered transaction have a right to review the record. Find more reporting on the subject via the variety of stories at this link, and the origin story of this most recent attention to the issue after this year’s Mayday protests in the depths of the freight downturn you can hear in this recent-past podcast talk with Ezlogz’ C.J. Karman (whose commentary you can also hear in the listening session) and owner-operator Mike Landis. Here’s the session, edited just slightly to remove technical interruptions and some redundancy of comment:
