The company waited two years to fight the forum - then asked the court to hurry
A marine logistics company failed to stop a federal whistleblower case against it, after a judge ruled it had waited too long to complain.
Centerline Logistics Corporation and its subsidiary Harley Marine NY asked a federal court to freeze an ongoing US Department of Labor proceeding tied to the firing of a tugboat captain. On August 18, 2026, the judge said no.
The captain of the Ernest Campbell, a tugboat in Harley Marine's fleet, was fired on March 28, 2022. The company said he was let go for "unauthorized welding on the vessel's deck while fuel and vapors were present" - at a moment when the tug was tied to a loaded 60,000-barrel oil barge and sitting directly above its own fuel tanks.
The worker told a different story. In September 2022, he filed a complaint with Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) under the Seaman's Protection Act, saying he had been fired for reporting safety violations to the US Coast Guard. In May 2024, the Labor Department found "reasonable cause to believe" the company had "retaliated against" him, and ordered it to reinstate him with back pay, damages, and attorney fees. The company objected and asked for a hearing, which sent the case to a department administrative law judge.
Then the employer switched strategy. Instead of fighting the retaliation claim on the facts, it sued to shut the proceeding down. It argued the whole structure was unconstitutional - no jury, an administrative judge shielded by "two layers of for-cause removal protection," and no power to subpoena outside witnesses.
The court did not rule on whether the proceeding is unconstitutional. It denied the request on a single point: the company had not shown the kind of urgent, irreparable harm an injunction requires. The company had known about the Labor Department hearing for more than two years before going to court weeks ahead of a filing deadline. That delay, the judge wrote, undercut any claim of urgency. Settled law, she added, holds that being made to sit through an agency proceeding - even one a party calls flawed - is not by itself irreparable harm. And because the company might still win at the hearing, any further injury was too speculative to act on.
For HR and employment teams, the signal is about strategy. The company leaned on two recent Supreme Court decisions, that questioned how agencies run their in-house courts. This ruling shows those arguments rarely freeze a proceeding already in motion. The whistleblower case continues, and whether the company retaliated remains undecided.
