Updated as March 2024 to reflect subsequent developments, including investigatory activity at FMCSA around this issue as well as developments as they pertain to petitions to the agency for change in brokered-transaction-records disclosure.
Access results/analysis of Overdrive's early 2024 brokered-freight transparency/rates-data survey via this link. Access all of the more recent reporting around the transparency issue via this link.
When this story was updated in 2020, market difficulties for owner-operators with the COVID-19 stall in April and May, to say the least, were no secret. Blood boiled over the fast fall in brokered-freight rates at that time from a variety of quarters. The current, 2024 freight environment has come after a similar fall, yet one that took much of the past two years to develop.
Plenty of the questions owner-operators and small fleets were asking during the worst of the early-COVID freight situation remain. Back then, Diane Marchand of Williston, Florida, wrote to me April 29, wanting to know who the principal culprit in falling rates was: Have rates really been dropped by the shipper? she asked. Are the brokers just “price-gouging the truckers?” Or are the lowest bidders among the truckers themselves to blame?
After the early-COVID plummeting of rates, things changed markedly for spot rates, of course, and one answer to Marchand’s questions is easily all of the above. But there’s another aspect to the questions -- the power to determine whether you’re being treated right by a broker on a load-to-load basis is held by ... guess who?
That’s you, assuming you haven’t signed away that right by agreeing to a contract in which you waive it. (Read those contracts.)
