Movers gathered on trucks

Licensed to Move: The Mob, Our Towed Truck, and How to Check Any Portland Mover

Featured Category: Moving Advice

By Adam Sweet, founder of 2 Brothers Moving & Delivery

In February 2008, Adam Sweet showed up for what looked like an ordinary job: a customer moving out of a house and into storage. There were boxes in the middle of the room and sheriff’s deputies standing around. Adam figured they were the customer’s friends, there to lend a hand, so he picked up a box and got started.

They had to stop him. It was a sting on unlicensed movers in Clackamas County, and the mover they were after was Adam.

The deputies searched his truck and had it towed. Our business phone number was shut off, and the gate of our yard was chained shut with a lock we had no key to. Adam was a Portland State student who had started the company with his stepbrother. The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) fined him $2,100 for doing moves without a state certificate.

Getting that certificate wasn’t a matter of filling in a form. ODOT told the movers already in business about every new application. If one of them objected, the newcomer had to prove Oregon needed another mover.

So we sued the State of Oregon. This post is the story of that rule:

  • where it came from;
  • where the mob comes into it;
  • how our lawsuit helped end it;
  • what a mover’s license does for you today.

It finishes with a five-minute way to check any mover, us included.

When moving was run like a utility

The permission slip goes back to the Depression. The Motor Carrier Act of 1935 put interstate trucking under the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), and new trucking companies needed a “certificate of public convenience and necessity”. Who pushed for it? Mostly the railroads, which were losing business to trucks, along with state regulators and the ICC itself. For the next 40 years, a newcomer could rarely get a certificate if an existing carrier objected. Often the only way in was to buy the rights of a company that already had them.

States built the same system for moves inside their borders and handed it to their utility regulators:

  • Oregon. Movers answered to the Public Utility Commission until 1995, when the job moved to ODOT.
  • Washington. The Utilities and Transportation Commission still licenses movers, alongside garbage haulers, and Washington’s moving law still carries the old “public convenience and necessity” wording. Taxicab companies have a chapter in the same title of Washington law. For garbage, the old veto is still on the books: a new hauler can get a certificate for an area that’s already served only if the existing hauler doesn’t object, or isn’t serving customers to the commission’s satisfaction.

Closed markets also tend to cost customers more. An FTC staff study of state trucking rules found that limits on new carriers raised some freight rates by as much as 20%. It looked at freight rather than household moves, but it suggests what a closed market does to prices.

Then there’s who sets the prices. Some states let movers set rates together through their trade associations, and that only stays legal when the state actually supervises the rates. In 2005 the Federal Trade Commission ruled that a Kentucky movers’ association’s joint rate-setting was illegal price-fixing, because Kentucky wasn’t really supervising it, and a federal appeals court agreed the next year. Oregon works differently: ODOT prescribes and approves movers’ rates, and every mover has to charge from its approved tariff.

A closed market makes extra money for the companies inside it, and for the people who work there. Economist Nancy Rose studied what happened after trucking was opened up. She found that union drivers’ pay premium over non-union drivers fell from about 50% to under 30%. Her results suggest union workers had been capturing more than two-thirds of the extra profit the closed market produced.

Where the mob comes in

The licensing laws weren’t the mob’s idea. But closed and controlled markets throw off money, and in documented cases organized crime got at it through corrupt union officials, cartels and payoffs. The story starts right here in Portland.

  • Portland, 1956. Oregonian reporters Wallace Turner and William Lambert exposed a plan by corrupt Teamsters officials to take over Portland’s vice rackets. Crooked union officials could squeeze a tavern or a grocery store just by stopping its deliveries. The series won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. It also helped prompt the U.S. Senate’s rackets committee, the McClellan Committee, which had Robert F. Kennedy as chief counsel.
  • New York movers, 1964 to 1985. Members of the Bonanno crime family and corrupt officials of Teamsters Local 814, the union for van drivers, packers and furniture handlers, took money from New York’s moving and storage companies. They did it through extortion, payoffs and rigged bids for government moving contracts. Bid papers for moving the FBI’s own New York office came up in one defendant’s appeal, in a claim about lost evidence. Bonanno leader Philip Rastelli and others were convicted in 1986, and the appeals court upheld the convictions in 1989.
  • New York garbage. New York City found that an organized-crime cartel had corruptly influenced commercial garbage hauling for years. A 1995 indictment charged that the cartel divided up customers, made a hauler pay when it took another’s customer, and met outsiders with threats and violence. The city’s answer in 1996 was a new licensing commission built to screen the mob out, and a federal appeals court rejected the haulers’ constitutional challenge to it.

  • Las Vegas, 1979. As Congress weighed loosening the trucking rules, two men met Nevada Senator Howard Cannon in his Las Vegas office:

    • Roy Williams, a Teamsters vice-president;
    • Allen Dorfman, whose insurance company had insured many of the Teamsters pension fund’s assets.

    A Teamsters lawyer laid out the union’s objections to deregulation and left the room. Then Williams and Dorfman offered the senator and his neighbors the exclusive right to buy pension-fund land across the street from his home. In 1982 a federal jury convicted five men of conspiring to bribe him, among them:

    • Williams, by then the Teamsters’ president;
    • Dorfman;
    • Joseph “Joey the Clown” Lombardo, who was later convicted again in the FBI’s case against the Chicago Outfit.

    Cannon was never indicted, and the deregulation bill passed anyway. Dorfman was murdered before he could be sentenced.

Those cases are decades old. The question they leave is still worth asking of any license: does it protect the companies already in the market, or does it protect you?

How a towed truck changed Oregon’s law

Congress loosened federal control of trucking in 1980, and in 1995 it passed a law abolishing the ICC. Oregon kept its need test for moves inside the state. In 2008, an ODOT spokesman told a reporter that the Legislature had reaffirmed the policy in 2003, and that the field would stay as it was unless a newcomer could prove a need.

Adam could have given up. He was a college student, but he had already run a business before this one and had saved his earnings. He decided to fight, and put a lot of those savings into it.

In June 2008 the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a public-interest law firm, filed Sweet v. Myers in federal court in Portland on Adam’s behalf. The argument was simple. The government can regulate movers to protect customers, but not to protect existing movers from competition, and the U.S. Constitution protects the right to earn a living.

Part of our evidence was price. We compared what a mover cost on either side of the Columbia. At the time, two movers and a truck ran about $75 an hour in Seattle and $105 an hour in Portland. That was our argument: the rule wasn’t saving Oregon customers anything, and they were paying more for it.

In court, the Attorney General’s office asked the judge to throw the case out, and a hearing was set.

Just before that hearing, an ODOT official called Adam with a different idea: a retiring mover’s certificate was available, and Adam could buy it for $100,000 and let the lawsuit go. Oregon certificates could be bought and transferred, much as federal trucking rights had been. Adam said no. We record our calls, so we had the conversation on tape, and we brought it to the court at the hearing. The court went on to turn down the state’s request to dismiss the case.

With the case still alive, we took it to the Capitol. PR was part of the plan, and the Freedom Caravan was the best of it. We rounded up other movers who ran insured, professional businesses but didn’t have a state license under the old rule. Together we drove our trucks around the Capitol in Salem, with signs telling lawmakers to “Let us compete!” We gave a speech, and we honked.

Then the Legislature’s transportation committee reached out. It already had a draft bill, and Adam, with help from his lawyer, gave feedback on a few parts of it. The committee’s bill, House Bill 2817, passed, and Governor Ted Kulongoski signed it in June 2009. From October 1 that year:

  • ODOT stopped sending new movers’ applications to existing movers for protest;
  • new movers no longer had to prove a need.

With the bill signed there was nothing left to fight, and the lawsuit closed about two weeks later.

There’s a twist we like. The bill was formally filed at the request of the Oregon Moving and Storage Association, the established movers’ own trade group. Nobody ever told us why they came around. Our guess is that after the court refused to dismiss the case, the companies that had protested newcomers for years didn’t want to find out what a federal court would say about it.

Reason magazine later reported that within six months, about 30 new movers had joined the licensed system. Many of them had been working without a license. That’s good news for customers, because a mover inside the system has to follow the rules below.

PLF calls Adam’s case its first lawsuit against a certificate-of-need law. By PLF’s count, movers’ vetoes have since ended in Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania too.

Cascade Business News reported the filing, and Reason magazine later reported the result. Three groups backed Adam’s side: the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation (which publishes Reason) and the Cascade Policy Institute. PLF still tells it in its report Competitor’s Veto: Roadblock to New Businesses.

What Oregon’s license does for you today

If a move starts and ends in Oregon, the mover needs an ODOT certificate to offer it, advertise it or do it. ODOT no longer asks whether Oregon needs another mover. It checks that:

  • the company is fit, willing and able to do the work;
  • it certifies that its trucks meet Oregon’s safety rules;
  • its service won’t put other road users or the public at risk;
  • its rates are approved;
  • it carries insurance.

After that, the rules work for you:

  • A free, written estimate, given after someone has seen your things, either in person or on a live or recorded video walk-through.
  • On moving day, the estimate plus 10% gets your things home. Oregon estimates are always non-binding, because the final price follows the mover’s filed rates. But movers aren’t allowed to underestimate by more than 10%. If the bill does come to more than 10% over your estimate, including any add-ons you signed, you can ask to pay the estimate plus 10% on the day. You then have 15 days, not counting weekends and holidays, to settle the rest.
  • Background-checked crews. Anyone who comes into your home for an Oregon-licensed mover must have passed a criminal background check, renewed every three years.
  • ODOT’s own guide. Oregon movers must give every customer ODOT’s General Information Bulletin for Moving Household Goods in Oregon.
  • A number you can look up. Oregon law requires a mover to put its certificate number in its internet advertising.

Our certificate is No. 217157. In plain words, it covers three kinds of move:

  • local moves within the Portland area (ODOT calls it the Portland commercial zone, Oregon’s own term, not the federal zone below);
  • moves within Clackamas, Multnomah and Washington counties, the three Oregon counties around Portland;
  • moves that start in those three counties and end anywhere else in Oregon.

Moving to another state: USDOT and MC numbers

For most moves to another state, the federal rules take over. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) gives each company a USDOT number, and interstate movers also need federal operating authority, shown as an MC number. Federal rules then require:

  • The name and number in every advertisement, written exactly as “U.S. DOT No.” followed by the number.

  • A written estimate based on a survey of your belongings, unless you waive the survey in writing. The estimate must say whether it’s binding or non-binding:

    • binding is a guaranteed total for the items and services listed;
    • non-binding is the mover’s best estimate, and the final price is based on the actual weight and the mover’s rates.
    • The 110% rule. On a non-binding estimate, you don’t have to pay more than 110% of the estimate at delivery to get your belongings, apart from a few charges the rules allow on top, such as services you ask for after signing the bill of lading. Anything above that is billed later.
    • Two FMCSA guides with your estimate: Ready to Move? and Your Rights and Responsibilities When You Move. A mover’s website must also link to Ready to Move? We send links to both with every estimate.

Portland to Vancouver: what the river changes

Crossing the Columbia means crossing a state line, but for most moves between Portland and Vancouver, FMCSA’s household-goods rules don’t apply.

Federal law draws a “commercial zone” around every city. Moves that stay inside it aren’t covered by FMCSA’s household-goods rules, even when they cross a state line; FMCSA’s own consumer booklet gives the example of a move from Brooklyn to Hackensack, New Jersey. For a city Portland’s size, the zone reaches about 15 miles in a straight line from the city limits, river included, and any town even partly inside that line counts in full. That takes in Vancouver and the nearby Clark County towns. So a move from Portland, Beaverton or Gresham to Vancouver doesn’t need federal interstate moving authority. The move has to start and end inside the zone, though, and not be one leg of a longer trip, such as Portland to Vancouver on the way to Seattle.

It also means that neither FMCSA’s interstate moving rules nor Oregon’s mover certificate and estimate rules, which cover moves that start and end in Oregon, apply to a cross-river move. Whoever you hire, get the estimate in writing and ask how the price works. With us, a move across the river is handled like one of our local moves: you get the same written estimate and the same hourly rates as on a move within Portland.

Washington’s moving permit covers only moves within Washington, so a move across the river doesn’t need one. Moves that start and end in Washington, such as Vancouver to Camas, do. The federal commercial zone only applies to interstate moves, and Washington’s law has no exception for it. We don’t hold a Washington permit, so for a move within Washington we’ll point you to the UTC’s list of permitted movers.

How to check any mover in five minutes

  1. Moving to another state? Search the mover’s name, USDOT number or MC number on FMCSA’s SAFER Company Snapshot. Check that:

    • the legal name matches the one on your estimate;
    • the status is active;
    • the mover is authorized for household goods.

    FMCSA’s mover search also shows complaint history.

  2. Moving within Oregon? Find the mover on ODOT’s Authorized Movers List and read what its certificate covers.

  3. Moving within Washington? Look the mover up on the UTC’s company lookup.

  4. Watch for FMCSA’s red flags:

    • a price over the phone or online without anyone seeing your things;
    • no written estimate;
    • a demand for cash or a big deposit;
    • blank papers to sign;
    • a website with no local address and no information about registration or insurance;
    • a phone answered “Movers” instead of a company name.

It’s worth the five minutes. A licensed mover carries insurance and follows the estimate rules above. ODOT warns that with an unlicensed mover, you may have little or no protection if something is lost or damaged. ODOT still runs stings to catch unlicensed movers, working with local police such as the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office. We’d know.

Why our numbers are on our website

The rules require it. Federal rules want our name and U.S. DOT number in our advertising, and Oregon wants our certificate number there too. FMCSA also tells you to be wary of a mover whose website has no local address and no information about registration or insurance.

We’d show them anyway. We went to court for the right to be licensed on fair terms, and showing the license is our half of that deal. You’ll find our numbers below and in the license box on our Moving Guide, and every estimate comes with links to both FMCSA guides.

Check us

2 Brothers Moving & Delivery (legal name: 2 Brothers Services, Inc.)
3571 NW Yeon Ave., Portland, OR 97210 · 503-516-4944

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