Prime Inc.’s Training Discriminated Against Female Drivers, Judge Says

This story appears in the Aug. 25 print edition of Transport Topics.

A U.S. District Court judge for the Western District of Missouri ordered trucking company Prime Inc. and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to proceed to trial after ruling the company’s driver training policy discriminated against female applicants.

The Aug. 14 order from Judge M. Douglas Harpool, who sits on the court’s Springfield division, dealt with six motions for summary judgment filed by EEOC, Prime and driver-training applicant Deanna Roberts Clouse, who filed the original complaint in 2011.

“In 2004, Prime implemented a training policy that required that its over-the-road truck driver trainees be trained by someone of the same gender,” Prime general counsel Steve Crawford said.

He said the company believed its policy addressed significant concerns for the safety and privacy of its female driver trainees and satisfied a long-recognized exception to the discrimination laws.

But Harpool ruled Prime’s same-sex policy was the company’s standard operating procedure and is “facially discriminatory, resulting in disparate treatment of female applicants and drivers.”

Crawford said the company respects the ruling of the court, though significant issues remain to be determined in this case.

Clouse was described as “ecstatic” over the ruling, according to her attorney, Paul Taylor of Truckers Justice Center. Clouse, who lives near Gadsden, Alabama, has been working in retail.

“She’s very delighted by the decision. . . . This is a big victory,” said Taylor, who practices in a suburb of Minneapolis.

EEOC attorney Dayna Deck said Prime has known its policy was a problem since the EEOC sued another trucking company in 1997 for the same policy.

“But Prime continued its discriminatory policy until it suspended the policy in March 2013,” Deck said.

Prime is based in Springfield, Missouri, and ranks No. 22 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of for-hire carriers in the United States and Canada. It provides refrigerated, flatbed, bulk, dry van and other hauling services.

The case history in Harpool’s order said Prime previously faced legal issues on sexual harassment, which prompted the same-gender training policy. But as of March 2012, Harpool said, Prime had only five female trainers.

That meant female applicants had to wait months for one of the few female trainers while men who applied for driver training could get paired quickly with a male trainer. Female applicants who asked for expedited training with a man were not given that option.

“There is no question the [Prime] policy created an impermissible impediment to training and employment for female drivers that the male drivers did not face. This was no small impediment, but one which could require women to remain on the waiting list for a year or more while men faced no such delay,” Harpool wrote.

Ellen Voie, president of the association Women in Trucking, said many of her group’s members prefer a same-gender trainer and Prime’s policy was a “reasonable” way to avoid potential sexual harassment.

“I cannot think of any other industry that must put two unrelated individuals in an enclosed space during a training situation for weeks at a time, where the line of work (cab forward) and off-duty (sleeper berth) are mere inches apart,” Voie said.

The day after issuing his order, Harpool told attorneys in the case he wants to receive written status reports by Sept. 19 that will help him decide how the trial should proceed.

Taylor, Clouse’s attorney, said it is possible the parties could negotiate an out-of-court settlement during that time.