By a vote of 4-1, the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) upheld a legal decision that said that ocean carriers violated federal U.S. laws when they required trucking companies to use specific intermodal chassis providers when moving containers in and out of ports and transporting them on trucks or via rail.

In March 2023, Erin Wirth, the chief administrative law judge of the FMC, ruled in favor of the American Trucking Association’s (ATA) Intermodal Motor Carriers Conference (IMCC), which filed charges against the Ocean Carrier Equipment Management Association (OCEMA) and 11 international ocean carriers claiming they violated the Shipping Act of 1984 by inflating prices for intermodal chassis at several American ports.

According to Transport Topics, the OCEMA appealed the FMC’s final ruling, which was announced February 14, and asked five members of the organization to hear the case.

“The commission finds that respondents’ rules and practices designating an exclusive chassis provider for merchant haulage and using merchant haulage volume to lower their carrier haulage rates when motor carriers have no choice of providers are unreasonable,” wrote FMC chairman Daniel Maffei. “Respondents are ordered to cease and desist from the restrictive practices found to be unlawful under Section 41102(c) in the four regions covered by this administrative law judge’s initial decision: Los Angeles/Long Beach, Chicago, Savannah and Memphis.”

Section 41102(c) is the part of the federal code that shipping companies are regulated under.

“The FMC has now confirmed that the actions of these ocean carriers are a clear violation of federal law and must stop,” said 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.”