Until 1980, port truckers were generally employees. A shipping company would contract with a trucking fleet to move goods from a port terminal to a warehouse. That fleet would then dispatch an employee. But the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, combined with containerization, upended this system, effectively converting most port drivers into freelancers.

These truckers were no longer eligible for unemployment insurance or workers’ compensation. Nor could they organize with the Teamsters or either of the two dockworkers’ unions: the International Longshoremen’s Association on the East Coast and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union on the West Coast. (A small fraction of port truckers remained hourly employees, called company drivers.)

Port truckers were forced to become small-business people: owner-operators who bought their own trucks and took on all the expenses and risk. Those with poor credit were even more vulnerable, signing leases on trucks. As a 2017 investigation by USA Today found, some of these lessees barely broke even; one man made just 67 cents after a week of work. Trucking was foreclosure on wheels or modern sharecropping.