Ogletree Deakins sign. Ogletree Deakins sign. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

Attorneys at the management-side firm Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart will lead a federal legal challenge to California's new worker classification law on behalf of the state's trucking industry.

In an amended complaint filed Tuesday, the California Trucking Association and two independent truckers asked the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of California to block enforcement of Assembly Bill 5. The law, set to take effect Jan. 1, will make it more difficult for companies to label workers as employees.

The complaint asks the court to carve out an exemption from the new rules for trucking companies and truckers; it does not ask for the entire law to be struck down.

"AB 5 has implications that go beyond employment classification in California," Ogletree Deakins partner Robert Roginson, an attorney for the trucking association, said in a prepared statement.

"With more than 350,000 independent owner-operators registered in the United States, the new test imposes an impermissible burden on interstate commerce under the U.S. Constitution's commerce clause and infringes upon decades-old congressional intent to prevent states from regulating the rates, routes and services of the trucking industry," said Roginson, the firm's managing shareholder in Los Angeles.

The lawsuit is one of the first legal challenges to the law, which codifies much of the California Supreme Court's 2018 ruling in Dynamex Operations West v. Superior Court. Lyft, Uber, DoorDash and Instacart announced last month that they will pursue a 2020 ballot initiative to carve out an exemption to the law for app-based drivers.

Truckers were some of the most clamorous opponents of AB 5 this summer, circling the Capitol in their rigs and blaring their horns. Independent truckers who own their own rigs say the new law will cost them flexibility and the money they've invested in their trucks. Shipping companies argued that having to hire drivers, train them and provide trucks will push up costs.

AB 5′s author, Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, said in August that many independent-contractor truckers work for one company and don't set their pay rates. "Those are employees," she said.

The lawsuit by the California Trucking Association argues that California's new law is barred under the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution as well as federal statutes that give the federal government authority over commercial motor vehicle operating rules.

"The Dynamex decision and now AB 5 put plaintiffs in an impossible bind," Ogletree Deakins partner Alexander Chemers wrote in the complaint. "CTA's motor-carrier members must either completely revamp their traditional business model, and change the prices, routes, and services that they offer their customers, or risk criminal and civil liability" under state law.

The complaint filed Tuesday is an amended version of a lawsuit the trucking association filed last year challenging the worker classification test created by Dynamex. The substantially similar amended complaint now addresses language in AB 5.

 

Read more:

Sacramento Firm Drafts Ballot Initiative Challenging Landmark Labor Law

Gig Companies Set Lobbying Records Amid Fight Against Landmark Labor Bill

Gavin Newsom Is Delivering for Plaintiffs Lawyers, Labor Advocates

Newsom Signs Landmark Gig Labor Bill, as Court Cases Loom

As California Passes Landmark Worker Rights Bill, a Familiar Foe Takes Aim at Uber