Supreme Court confirmation hearings for nominee Neil Gorsuch are under way. And as he faces scrutiny by U.S. lawmakers, truck driver Alphonse Maddin is shedding light on the Neil Gorsuch decision that he just cannot shake. Abovethelaw.com wrote about the case recently, highlighting Gorsuch’s decision making:
The Tenth Circuit decided a case called TransAm Trucking v. Dept. of Labor. The case talked about how Maddin broke down on a freezing Illinois road, at night, out of gas.
‘The frozen trucker’ Alphonse Maddin
He called TransAm. They told him to wait with his load.
He found that the brakes had frozen. The cab of the truck was unheated. He called TransAm again, who told him to wait again. Hours passed. He called TransAm again, explaining that he had symptoms that sound a lot like the early onset of hypothermia. TransAm told him, according to court records, “to either drag the trailer with its frozen brakes or stay where he was.”
After three hours in the cold, Maddin unhitched the trailer and went in search of gas. Eventually, the trailer was secured, and Maddin was fired for violating orders.
Maddin sued, and an arbitrator ruled that his termination was illegal under laws that protect employees from being compelled to operate vehicles in unsafe conditions. Appeals ensued, and the Tenth Circuit sided with Maddin, 2 – 1.
The one dissenter was Neil Gorsuch. In his opinion, Gorsuch wrote:
“It might be fair to ask whether TransAm’s decision was a wise or kind one. But it’s not our job to answer questions like that. Our only task is to decide whether the decision was an illegal one. The Department of Labor says that TransAm violated federal law, in particular 49 U.S.C. § 31105(a)(1)(B). But that statute only forbids employers from firing employees who “refuse to operate a vehicle” out of safety concerns.
“And, of course, nothing like that happened here. The trucker in this case wasn’t fired for refusing to operate his vehicle…. The trucker was fired only after he declined the statutorily protected option (refuse to operate) and chose instead to operate his vehicle in a manner he thought wise but his employer did not. And there’s simply no law anyone has pointed us to giving employees the right to operate their vehicles in ways their employers forbid.”
When describing Gorsuch’s dissent recently, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said: “According to [Maddin’s] recollection, it was 14 degrees below. So cold, but not as cold as your dissent, Judge Gorsuch.”
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