Company says the driver is to blame
Flores said he was 10 months from the end of his lease contract when he was fired.
“Can you imagine sacrificing four years?” Flores said of the long days away from his wife and two sons, often for pay that dropped below minimum wage. “For all that sacrifice, I thought the truck would be mine.”
As part of a year-long investigation into port trucking, the USA TODAY Network interviewed Flores and reported his story. He said that he regularly worked up to 20 hours a day and that he used a fake logbook to avoid detection by federal regulators.
“Of course they (his employers) know,” he was quoted as saying in the original story. “But the company doesn’t care.”
Robert Milane, a spokesman and lawyer for Morgan Southern’s parent company, Roadrunner Transportation, confirmed that Flores’ public criticism, coupled with the fact that he refused to use electronic logbooks, forced the company to act.
“The fact that he stated that in his interview, we had no choice to terminate his lease,” Milane said. “He brought this on himself.”
Milane also denied Flores drove more than federal law permits. He said Morgan Southern’s electronic time logs prevent any driver from doing so.
“What he says wasn’t true,” Milane said. “I know he wasn’t running over hours.”
But Flores said he would simply switch over to paper logbooks when he knew he would be working past federal limits.
Another Morgan Southern driver, Jose Juan Rodriguez, told reporters in December that when he was still leasing his truck he, too, often drove well past the legal limit. “Many times,” he said, “we complain to the supervisor but we’re told that if we aren’t willing to work, ‘there is the door.’ ”
Since July 2015, Morgan Southern has been cited 15 times for hours violations in California, according to Department of Transportation records.
Using California’s open-records law, reporters obtained a port authority database that records the exact time a truck enters or exits the gate at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.
A USA TODAY Network analysis of the data shows that Flores’ truck was in operation for at least 14 hours without the required 10hour break at least nine times