The Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) isn’t heard about all that much, unless you live in a town with a big shipping port. Now they are making the news a little more often, though, because they finally see something happening that, they feel, they have to take action against.

They want to stop part of the clean truck plans that Los Angeles and Long Beach ports are implementing. They see them as hurting competition and causing a lot of problems for companies, that have been working together just fine, for a long period of time. The Port of Los Angeles does not want to back off from the changes that it is planning, and it expects to switch over to all-employee drivers.

In other words, there cannot be any owner-operators, and these people make up a large part of the current shipping and trucking industry. The Port plans to go ahead no matter what the FMC tries to do, but if the Commission is successful, that part of the plan might have to be placed on hold. To do that, the FMC would have to show that the plan harms competition.