Company Cheats Workers Out Of Millions With Legal Loophole

(~300 words, 2nd Person)

When someone does us wrong, professionally or financially, we turn to the court system for help.

Imagine you do this and win. The company that did you harm has to pay up. Then they vanish, and comeback – only now they’re off the hook.

This frustrating situation is something many truckers around the country face, and the sad part is it’s 100% legal.

Former employees of a Chicago-based trucking company found this out the hard way after the company they worked for, Alex Logistics, dissolved while owing them money. The workers spent months trying to get paid but their former employer was gone – in name only.

As the workers sat shortchanged, the same team with the same business model and the same clients had reformed under a different name, completely avoiding all previous backpay obligations. This is not a new practice in trucking – companies have long opted to simply dissolve and reform as “new” entities rather than paying what they owe.

Take the case of Fargo Trucking in California from 2015. A judge ordered them to pay $8.7 million to drivers they’d cheated out of a fair wage. It was the largest judgment of its kind at the time, but that didn’t mean Fargo Trucking would pay.

The company simply went out of business – they dropped their clients and stripped their company of its assets. Then, with a new name and new Department of Transportation number, they came back in business, free of financial burdens.

Express FTC hauls the same goods in the same trucks for the same clients as Fargo Trucking did – but because they’re technically a different company by the letter of the law, they are under no obligation to pay drivers. The corporate entity itself is guilty, not the people who carried out the actions.

While corporate personhood plays an important role in protecting a person’s assets as they pursue professional success, in our current system, it also enables big companies to game the system against their workers.