Your Honor, That’s a Meme

Happy Monday. Plaintiffs suing TQL and C.H. Robinson for racketeering are using our memes as evidence.

Plus:

• Contract Rates Keep Climbing Past Spot

• FMCSA Is Pulling 1,000 CDLs a Month

• Truckers Are Letting Rain Do the Truck Wash

💡 QUESTION OF THE DAY:

One driver estimates his $200,000 in annual gross revenue leaves just $______ after taxes and expenses.

🍳 WHAT’S COOKIN’ IN FREIGHT

📈 Contract Rates Keep Climbing Past Spot. Contract rates have climbed every month since April, per U.S. Bank and DAT data, and by August had opened a 22-cent lead over spot: $2.39 a mile versus $2.17, a reversal from June, when spot still ran 8 cents ahead. Fuel doesn't close the gap; it holds steady: all-in spot fell 3.4% to $2.87 a mile while all-in contract rose to $3.09, the same 22-cent spread as linehaul alone, as surcharges jumped 13% in a month to $0.70 a mile, now roughly a quarter of every spot rate. ATA's Bob Costello says the apparent recovery is "nearly all due to excess capacity leaving the market," not real demand growth.

🚨 FMCSA Is Pulling 1,000 CDLs a Month. FMCSA Chief Derek Barrs addressed a crowd of truckers at the annual TenFour D.C. event on the National Mall, saying the agency is now pulling "around 1,000 or so a month" non-domiciled CDLs "issued improperly." He called fraud in the industry "rampant," pointing to the new "Joint Task Force Crossroads of America," a DOT-DHS partnership with federal prosecutors and nine state attorneys general already shutting down sham CDL schools and flagging carriers that hire unlicensed drivers. When one attendee yelled "And brokers, too!", Barrs didn't push back. He said FMCSA lacks criminal authority but is leaning on law enforcement partnerships to go after bad actors across the chain.

🌧️ Truckers Are Letting Rain Do the Truck Wash. National diesel prices are hitting records, up nearly $3 a gallon from a year ago, and truckers are cutting everyday expenses to protect their margins, The Wall Street Journal reports. Drivers described cooking in their cabs, bringing food from home, and sleeping at loading docks to avoid overnight parking fees. Some let rain replace $100 truck washes. Amandeep Singh paid a $707.67 repair bill through Zelle to avoid a 3.5% credit-card fee, and estimates his $200,000 in annual gross revenue leaves just $45,000 after taxes and expenses. Others are parking their trucks altogether. "My paycheck is the same, but the fuel goes up," driver Gerjon Premtaj said.

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Strong Solo Sergey Goes to Court

A TQL employee liked a FreightCaviar meme. Believe it or not, the plaintiffs put that thumbs-up in a federal racketeering complaint.

They didn’t like an email directing someone to ignore safety violations or a message arranging a fraudulent shipment.

They put a thumbs-up on a joke about how the pyramids were built.

Paragraph 175 of the September 23 lawsuit against C.H. Robinson and Total Quality Logistics alleges that TQL employees are “among the most frequent social media posters discussing the exploitation of foreign drivers.”

The example it offers is a TQL employee allegedly liking a November 2025 FreightCaviar meme asking how the pyramids were built without brokers contracting “shady Eastern European trucking companies.”

The complaint calls it a Facebook post. The screenshot is from LinkedIn.

The complaint says employees frequently post about exploitation. The presented example is one employee liking somebody else’s meme.

And if we have to pull out the dictionary, Oxford describes a meme as “an image, a video, a piece of text” shared online, “often with slight changes that make it humorous.”

A Like Is Not a Confession

The preceding paragraph alleges that TQL’s high-pressure, quota-driven environment creates a “race to the bottom in carrier selection and freight rates.” It quotes a finding from the separate Hendricks v. Total Quality Logistics overtime case that TQL’s “singular goal” is to book loads “at the lowest possible rate.”

Then comes the meme.

The plaintiffs place an employee’s alleged reaction to industry satire alongside their claims about broker practices. But recognizing a joke about an industry problem is a thin basis for concluding that the employee or their employer participated in it.

Attorney Matthew Leffler made that distinction on X. Asked about the interaction’s admissibility, he predicted counsel would try to exclude it before trial, explaining that “a low-level employee liking a meme is far from a corporate admission.”

Let People Laugh

John Ferguson, founder and CEO of Pivot Supply Chain Solutions, defended laughing at freight memes: “Let people laugh. The job is not easy.”

Timothy Dooner, freight podcaster and host of the Dooner Show, suggested the lawyers were using jokes about unsafe drivers to make a point about company culture.

“It may be weak,” he wrote, “but they’re going to try to say that all this is part of the company culture.”

People working at brokerages and trucking companies follow FreightCaviar and like our memes because they’re funny. That doesn’t mean they support cheap labor, unsafe driving, or anything illegal.

We apologize for being funny. We didn’t realize the lawyers were following.

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 🌎 AROUND THE FREIGHT WEB

🤝 The Biggest Broker Just Got Bigger. C.H. Robinson is buying RXO for $5.8B and promising $300M in cost cuts within two years. We'll dig into what it means for brokers and carriers later this week.

🏢 Hub Group's Board Just Lost Two-Thirds of Its Members. Three directors were pushed out, three more quit, and four new faces took their seats, leaving the board with seven members as the company works through a restatement of three years of financial results.

🛃 Identity Thieves Are Hijacking Customs Payments. Fraudsters are impersonating customs brokers and importers to redirect cross-border payments, and one identity-verification firm says attempted fraud in logistics has roughly quadrupled since 2023.

🚢 Hackers Took Control of a Supertanker's Engine Room. The FBI boarded a fully loaded oil tanker bound for Texas after its network got hacked, and officials are now tracking cyber threats against nearly 20 ships worldwide.

⚖️ Truckers Keep Winning Procedural Battles Against Union Pacific. A federal appeals court just upheld a ruling keeping a fingerprint-privacy lawsuit alive against the railroad, the same legal playbook that cost BNSF $75 million.

🚚 An 80-Year Trucking Company Is Shutting Down. Creviston Trucking started by hand-carrying mail bags to trains and helicopters before it ever owned a truck. Now the founder's widow is retiring, and the business is closing for good.

📉 R&R's CEO Just Filed for Personal Bankruptcy. Rich Francis says his assets and debts both run $10M to $50M, and the real picture arrives Oct. 6, when his full financial disclosures are due in court.

🎣 THE FREIGHT CAVIAR CORNER

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😂 FREIGHT HUMOR

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🎧 THE FREIGHT CAVIAR DOCUMENTARY

Join us as we take a deep dive into Moldova's outsourced freight dispatch boom.

Thousands of people in Moldova now work inside the American freight system, booking loads, managing carriers, and keeping U.S. freight moving from behind the scenes.

We traveled to Moldova to meet the people behind the screens, and find out how this outsourcing boom happened, why the country has become tangled in America's freight-fraud conversation, and what they would like Americans to know.

A FreightCaviar investigation, in cooperation with BMN Dispatch, Route One, and Kovin Group.