• ATLP’s Fall Forum is scheduled to be an in-person event this year in Washington D.C.  The forum is to be held in November – details will be forthcoming.  After our successful Kansas City meeting, we are excited to get together again!
• The Federal Maritime Commission establishes a website to report its progress implementing the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022.
• The Presidential Emergency Board recommends wage increases to resolve contract talks between major railroads and labor.  Read the entire report here or the Reuters summary here.
• DOT issues a proposed rule to strengthen consumer protections for ticket refunds.
• Chairman Oberman appoints Janie Sheng as Director of the STB’s Office of Public Assistance, Governmental Affairs and Compliance.  Ms. Sheng has been Acting Director since August 2021. 
• Harvest Season is Coming and the STB wants to know if the Class I carriers are ready.
• California to ban the sale of new gasoline powered automobiles by 2035.  Washington State intends to do so as well.

ATLP’s Annual Meeting is 79 days away.  The agenda is packed full of transportation topics in sync with this week’s transportation news.  In this Highlights post we review this week’s news and preview related annual meeting sessions.

Maritime

The Senate sent its version of the Ocean Shipping Reform Act to the House of Representatives this past Monday.  The House had already passed its version of the act and now the chambers must reconcile the differences between the bills. 

This article will address the ongoing areas in which administrative leadership is moving substantive enforcement changes in core areas of labor law focusing on how Board procedures facilitate such changes. We will discuss shifts in the prosecution of cases by the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board in injunction cases and collaborative enforcement with other federal agencies as well as a number of substantive areas.

The significance of involvement of the NLRB in a classification analysis of independent contractor status is both complex and subtle.  In traditional civil labor law, states and courts as well as the United States Department of Labor have evolved tests that focus, within different degrees of emphasis on status. These range from a multi-factor test that evaluates the degree to which a worker operates as a self-sufficient business complying with state laws that regulate the work. This has been an approach common in the trucking and intermodal world, buttressed by state licensing and insurance requirements, particular for owner operators in the brokerage industry.

This week’s Highlights shines a light on a few transportation news pieces that caught our attention, click through to the ATLP website for links to these items: