AB Trucking small fleet owner Bill Aboudi, who runs eight trucks in and out of the Port of Oakland and also occasionally contracts with owner-operators who serve the Port of Oakland (often working under non-exclusive arrangements with multiple carriers as independent contractors, he says), shared the above image to his LinkedIn profile recently. It’s one of several flyers he’s seen that he believes are coming from various owner-operators around the Port of Oakland and elsewhere in the state frustrated with what they’re being told in consultation with companies they contract with for freight — in his operation, that’s containers by and large.
“Every time we’ve had a protest at the port,” he says, “it’s a grassroots efforts where the owner-operators get pissed off.” He has no reason to suspect anything otherwise is going on here. The flyer above, printed from someone’s Outlook email account by the looks of it, references an email whose domain (Truckers-Unite.org) doesn’t go to a functioning website. My messages to the account early in the week went somewhere (they didn’t bounce back as undeliverable), but they were not answered. Another of the flyers claims to be a message from “The Truckers Group.” Sourcing on both, though, remains vague.
The antipathy expressed toward California bill AB 5 — which codified a quite difficult standard for the independent contractor relationships owner-ops have held with partner carriers to date — however, is familar to Bill Aboudi.
“I’m speaking against it even though I have employee drivers,” he says, in his eight trucks. The port trucking business in Oakland and elsewhere is “really unpredictable. On some days, we’re running nice and smooth – all of a sudden a ship is late, a ship is early, and it all has to happen now. That’s where owner-operators come in” and opportunity is maximized for them. Aboudi keeps what he calls a “cheat sheet with people who qualify with you.” Now those relationships with owner-operators (all of whom also work with other carriers as well, some with their authority and some without), given Aboudi owns trucks and is principally in the business of trucking, are open to legal challenge under AB 5.
For him, what that means is “I have to take less work” from the ship lines. He posits a 10-load job up for bid. “With only 8 trucks, I can’t bid on that job” without the flex capacity port owner-ops offer.
AB 5, ultimately, “will hurt everybody” similarly over time, he believes.
