As more and more states legalize marijuana use for recreational and medicinal purposes, employers face a significant conundrum. Employers have to decide how to treat positive marijuana tests within their business. For those employers in safety-sensitive fields, ensuring that employees can pass drug tests is necessary for continued operations and limiting liability.
Hours of service requirements are a big deal for trucking companies. The penalties for violations can be significant – up to $16,000 per violation. Violations will also impact a trucking company’s safety score, impacting their insurance premiums. At the same time, compliance with hours of service requirements involves significant office work and record-keeping, which also cost money.
Action over cases have become increasingly common over the past two decades. These cases involve employees collecting worker’s compensation from their employer, and then suing a third party that caused their injuries through negligence who had a contractual indemnity clause with the employer that covers the lawsuit. The prevalence of these suits have led insurance companies to take action by issuing new endorsements aimed at protecting themselves.
Pollution coverage in commercial automobile coverage can be a tricky subject. The standard commercial automobile policy excludes coverage for pollution events unless the pollution stems from a substance necessary to the operation of the vehicle; this means substances like gasoline or brake fluid. There are three ways companies get around this exclusion – through the MCS-90, through transportation pollution liability coverage through a stand-alone policy or as part of a contractor’s pollution liability policy, or through the CA-9948 endorsement.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration uses Compliance Safety and Accountability scores to assess the safety of trucking companies and target the most at-risk companies for additional interventions. CSA scores are composed of seven BASICs (Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category) which attempt to use data available to the FMCSA to pinpoint trucking companies with inadequate safety procedures. While most BASIC information is available to the public, the FMCSA does not make the crash indicator BASIC available to the public. However, the information is available to the trucking company itself and enforcement personnel.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration uses Compliance Safety and Accountability scores to assess the safety of trucking companies and target the most at-risk companies for additional interventions. The CSA scores are composed of seven BASICs (Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category) which attempt to use data available to the FMCSA to pinpoint trucking companies with inadequate safety procedures.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was created in 2000 to reduce the number of crashes involving large trucks and tractor trailers. The FMCSA tackles this approach in a number of different ways. Some of those ways involve issuing regulations and enforcing those regulations with civil penalties. But the FMCSA also a mandate to issue educational trainings to carriers and truck drives aimed at improving road safety.
The Fair Labor Standards Act sets national standards for wage and hour issues related to employees. The law empowers the Department of Labor to set eligibility standards for overtime pay as well as a series of exemptions for it. Employees who qualify for overtime under the law receive time-and-a-half pay for hours worked more than forty hours a week. Time-and-a-half pay is a 50% increase to the employee’s “regular rate of pay.”
Trucking regulators at the U.S. Department of Transportation have searched for better ways to enforce to hours of service requirements for quite some time. When electronic logging devices first became widespread, many people at the National Transportation Safety Board viewed them as great ways to reduce accidents and save lives through improved enforcement of existing regulations. Now, a new study was released that throws that logic into question.
Pollution liability can be a major problem for trucking companies. Typical business automobile liability insurance policies exclude coverage for losses caused by the release of pollutants. These policies define pollutants broadly as any irritant or contaminant, including smoke, vapor, soot, fumes, acids, alkalis, chemicals and waste. At some point, most trucking companies will transport something that qualifies as a pollutant just given the broadness of the definition. Therefore, the pollution exclusion in the traditional policy can create a major gap between a company’s risk exposures and their insurance coverage.
