C.H. Robinson, fresh off a shocking legal defeat in the Supreme Court opening up the entire broker industry to legal liability for negligent carrier selection, has changed its security protocols and locked out owner-operators as of Thursday morning.
Ernesto Charbonier, a produce-hauling one-truck owner-op based in Arizona found himself locked out of C.H. Robinson's Navisphere load board after just having completed a load for the mega-broker on Tuesday night.
"I spoke with [C.H. Robinson] on the phone, to a very nice lady, and she just said 'we’re trimming our carrier base and you were deemed on the not safe list' for their new standards," he said.
The broker referred him to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to raise his safety score before they can work with him "and a lot of other carriers again," Charbonier added.
That came as something of a surprise to the owner-op who said he's hauled more than 200 loads for the broker over the last three or so years.
"It's hard to believe I’m not safe," he said. "I've never been put out-of-service once for any type of violation -- that should tell you what kind of carrier I am."
Charbonier's current MCS-150 filing with FMCSA shows three driver inspections with zero OOS violations.
He said he had some minor hours-of-service violations -- for example, one inspector in Nebraska dinging him for not carrying a spare paper log book in case his ELD went down -- but nothing major.
He spoke to another owner-operator with a worse Inspection Selection System score that wasn't locked out of the load board.
Still, you can't keep a good hauler down. Charbonier posted about his troubles on X and quickly found plenty of other brokers that took his side.
"I've spoken with a couple brokerages now, and I'm very happy and very humbled" by the response to his post. "I talked to three different brokerages, gave them my MC number, and they ran me through their vetting and said 'you can haul for me today.'"
C.H. Robinson famously loaded a double-brokering chameleon carrier thousands of times, with a staff member at the brokerage allegedly instructing the carrier on how to evade safety enforcement and screenings.
But C.H. Robinson has also long been a lifeline for new carriers, accepting haulers with new MC numbers.
Charbonier said he thinks C.H. Robinson's recalibration represents something of a shift in the industry following the Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II decision.
"A lot of the freight media have been talking up how the big freight brokerages are going to end up with more freight than the smaller ones, and that a lot of the smaller are going to go out of business with big brokers landing a greater share of the industry," he said, but C.H. Robinson circling the wagons "tells me that's not going to be the case."
[Related: Owner-ops respond to broker group's freakout over SCOTUS decision]
"It's produce season, a lot of brokers are interested" in his capacity to haul produce. "They're ready to load my truck tomorrow."
In the end, Charbonier said he thinks it's the mega-broker that loses out, and they're actually hamstrung by the massive volume of freight they move. Instead, smaller, more nimble brokers who know their customers and lanes and can properly vet and get to know carriers stand to gain if the big firms are arbitrarily dumping capacity.
"C.H. Robinson is the one that loses my capacity," he said. "They’re not going to have as much capacity compared to the smaller players"
He said some of the smaller brokers can smell blood in the water, too, saying a broker had told him C.H. Robinson is "in shambles after the lawsuit," and missing out on good capacity now simply to protect themselves from legal action.
C.H. Robinson previously responded to the Supreme Court ruling and its involvement with Super Ego, the infamous chameleon carrier network exposed by 60 Minutes, by saying the media had misunderstood its role as a broker, and that it's already one of the safest networks in trucking.
"This is a win for the smaller brokerages," he said, and maybe a win for him, too, as he rides the rising rates tides and branches out with other brokers.
"If this would have happened in the last three years, I would have been grasping at straws," he said. "But now the market has shifted and I’ll survive."
