Trucker tells his story — and is fired for it

Driver loses his job, his rig and $60,000 in lease payments

Brett Murphy USA TODAY Network

Rene Flores said he regularly broke the law as a port trucker in Southern California, hauling shipping containers up to 20 hours straight between Long Beach and Phoenix.

He kept a fake logbook tucked beneath his seat so regulators wouldn’t know he was violating federal fatigue laws for commercial truckers.

He said his company paid him so little — and charged so much for his leased truck — that he no choice.

Flores said his managers at Morgan Southern knew about his hours, but for years the trucking company looked the other way.

Then, the 36-year-old father of two talked publicly about his illegal hours and explained how his company paid him as little as 67 cents for a week of work in a USA TODAY Network story. On June 17, the day after the story was published, Morgan Southern fired him.

Flores couldn’t afford to pay off the $30,000 balance on his leased truck, so the company took that too. Flores lost $60,000 in payments he had made since 2013.

What happened to Flores is just the latest episode in a decade-long struggle that has seen hundreds of port truckers in California turned into modernday indentured servants.

As the USA TODAY Network reported last month, many of these drivers say they were forced by their bosses to sign lease-to-own truck contracts, which put them in debt to their own employers. The trucks are so expensive — up to several thousand dollars a month for payments and maintenance — that some drivers say they have no choice but to work 15 to 20 hours a day.

Drivers who refused to work or filed complaints say they faced retaliation by their employers, who could fire them or assign them lower-paying routes until they actually owed money to their company on payday.

In case after case, drivers who quit or got fired lost their trucks and everything they had paid toward owning them.