The Federal Maritime Commission this week upheld a 2023 ruling that ocean carriers could not lawfully require that motor carriers use specific intermodal chassis providers to move containers.
The American Trucking Associations’ (ATA) Intermodal Motor Carriers Conference (IMCC) in August 2020 filed a complaint against the Ocean Carrier Equipment Management Association (OCEMA), Consolidated Chassis Management and the world’s largest ocean carriers alleging they violated the Shipping Act by requiring carriers to use specific default chassis providers and denying motor carriers the right to select the chassis provider for merchant haulage movements.
Last year, an FMC administrative law judge ruled in favor of the IMCC, noting that ocean shippers’ “practice of designating an exclusive chassis provider for merchant haulage and using merchant haulage volume to obtain discounted carrier haulage rates where motor carriers have no choice of chassis providers violates” the Shipping Act, and ordered shippers to cease and desist the practices.
OCEMA and others named in the complaint appealed the 2023 ruling, arguing that the FMC “lacks jurisdiction because the challenged restrictions relate to their contracts with chassis providers and involve overland transportation between the ports and inland facilities.”
The full FMC said the administrative law judge’s ruling was supported “by the record and sound reasoning,” adding the FMC “plainly has jurisdiction over allegations that ocean common carriers’ practices and rules governing chassis provisioning violate” the Shipping Act.
“The FMC has now confirmed that the actions of these ocean carriers are a clear violation of federal law and must stop,” says IMCC Executive Director Jonathan Eisen. “IMCC and ATA have been fighting this conduct by foreign-owned ocean carriers for more than a decade, so this ruling has been a long time coming.”
