MURPHY:

Because they owe money to their boss every week, the companies use that as sort of a constant threat of punishment or retaliation. So, for instance, if they don't want to work 14 or 16 hours, the boss might say, well, then, you can't work tomorrow. So, they use it as a control, right, to make them work around the clock.

We are looking at guys doing 100 hours a week, 120 hours a week. And even if the pay is so bad they're taking home pennies on the hour, they have no choice but to say yes, because — so, if they fall behind, for instance, on a week, the debt carries over to the next week. And they can actually owe their boss money come Friday.

And we saw cases where guys would come home after double shifts — 16, 18 hours a day — they would try to go home, you know, back to their families, they were tired. And the boss would actually lock the gates to the parking lot and say, no, you need to go back. You need to go back on to the road and deliver more containers.

So, they're constantly in these situations where they have really no agency or options. They can't take the truck and go work for somebody else. They're really tied to it. Their whole investment gets tied up into this truck.

They went bankrupt. Houses got foreclosed on, all because they were pouring their life savings into this thing that they really never qualified for to begin with. They didn't have the creditworthiness. That's what the companies knew when they were drawing up the agreements, and that's why they stepped in to kind of be the middle man.