Carrier loses fight against Biden independent contractor rule in New Mexico court

Though a case filed by Colt & Joe Trucking against the Department of Labor’s independent contractor (IC) rule dates back to April, the federal court decision against the carrier reads like a preliminary scorecard on a possible reworking of the rule under a Trump administration.

Colt & Joe, a New Mexico-based carrier, filed suit in April seeking summary judgement to have the Biden administration IC rule set aside. But in a decision handed down Thursday, the court declined to do that. (The decision being released on Thursday was ironic: It came a year to the day after the DOL released its IC rule, which at the time was seen by some trucking industry legal observers as less anti-IC than they had feared.)

Colt & Joe lost on all its requests. The U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico ruled that the carrier did not have standing to challenge the law in federal court, and that even if it did, its arguments “either fail or have been improperly briefed and therefore waived.”

Where the future can be seen in the decision is the prospect that the incoming Trump administration, which saw its own IC rule torpedoed in favor of the Biden rule, may try to reimplement an IC rule along the lines of what it introduced just weeks before the end of the first Trump administration.

The Trump IC rule was withdrawn soon after Joe Biden took office. It also hadn’t been implemented until the final weeks of the Trump administration. 

But a court ruled that the withdrawal was improper, and the Trump rule was reinstated. That was followed by the standard rulemaking process, which eventually…

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