
Two members of the Truck Leasing Task Force who previously defended the lease-purchase model for the opportunity it provides have had a change of heart.
Tamara Brock, a task force member representing independent owner-operators, said the stories from truck drivers who have been victimized by predatory lease-purchases caused her to think differently.
“When I first started on the committee, I was gung ho about keeping these arrangements,” Brock said. “But over these past months that we’ve been meeting … I’ve just changed my mind completely.”
Brock said she spoke with truck drivers at the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Ky., and watched videos of drivers who spoke about getting caught up in lease-purchase arrangements with a motor carrier.
“It totally changed my perspective,” Brock said. “I watched a video from a driver who was in the first month of a lease-purchase. After one month, she was already $900 in the negative. She made way more money as a company driver … The whole concept is set up to fail.”
Steve Rush, chairman of the task force, also previously believed the model could be salvaged. But like Brock, he gained information from the task force that led him to a different opinion.
“The lease-purchase model needs to go away,” Rush said. “The evil, and I mean that, evil, far outweighs the minuscule good that comes out of it.”
The comments from Brock and Rush came at the Truck Leasing Task Force’s meeting on Thursday, June 13.
The task force, which was established by Congress with the goal of ending predatory lease-purchase agreements in the trucking industry, started in 2023. Since that time, numerous stories of truck drivers getting into bad deals with motor carriers have been relayed. In these predatory lease-purchase agreements, a carrier leases a truck to a driver but still largely holds control over the operation, including the driver’s ability to pay off the loan. It is common for drivers to report owing money to the carrier at the end of a pay period.
Paul Cullen Jr., a task force member and attorney for the Cullen Law Firm, has contended for several meetings that arrangements where the carrier holds the loan over the driver should come to an end.
“I keep on the table, ‘Why we should try to save this model?’ I think it’s an important question for us to analyze,” Cullen said at the January meeting. “Why should it be saved? I think we should keep that on the table for our potential recommendation at the end.”
Comments from Brock, Rush and others make it appear that a large portion of the task force has reached that same conclusion.
However, Cullen said he wanted to reiterate that the task force is aimed at protecting truck drivers who owe a debt to the motor carrier and have no true ownership of the truck or their business. The task force, however, is not attempting to change the longstanding model of an owner-operator who decides to lease his or her truck back to a carrier.
“True owner-operators are able to make decisions for their business that determine whether they’re successful or not,” Cullen said.
Steve Viscelli, a task force member who is an economic sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, said he’s seen predatory lease-purchase arrangements where the failure rate is 90 or 95%.
Ryan Kelly, of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said failure rates that high don’t happen by mistake.
“If a model fails 90% of the time, it’s designed to fail,” Kelly said. “It’s not an accident. That failure rate is unheard of.”
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau plans to provide a full presentation to the task force on July 18.
The Truck Leasing Task Force plans to submit its final report of recommendations to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration on Nov. 16. LL
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