Once the most prominent trucking company,Yellow Corp. stopped functioning on Sunday, July 30, after being in business for 99 years after laying off all its 30,000 workers.
The company had workers form unions within and was in a long term battle with the Teamsters union which comprised 22,000 of its drivers and dock workers. Furthermore, the Nashville based company had been failing to provide its workers with pensions and healthy insurance plans. This had prompted a strike which was canceled by the union a week back, granting the company another month to fulfill the payment requirements. However, the negotiating committee of the Teamsters union sent out a memo to local unions on Thursday stating its failure to reach agreement on the new contract. On early Monday, July 31, the union was notified of the company’s shutdown.
But by midweek, the company had stopped picking up freight from its customers and was only delivering them to the ones already registered in their system, according to the union.
Teamsters President Sean O’ Brien said in a statement to CNN, “Today’s news is unfortunate but not surprising. Yellow has historically proven that it could not manage itself despite billions of dollars in worker concessions and hundreds of millions in bailout funding from the federal government. This is a sad day for workers and the American freight industry,"
Even though the company was located in Tennessee, it has employees spread over 300 terminals nationwide. The company had been taking on huge amounts of debts for 20 years now in order to obtain other trucking companies, according to CEO of AFS Logistics, Tom Nightingale, a third-party logistics firm that places about $11 billion worth of freight annually with different trucking companies on behalf of shippers. “The Teamsters had made a series of painful concessions that brought them close to wage parity with nonunion carriers,” Tom said to CNN. Yellow’s book pointed out $1.5 billion in debt which was more than the cost of the union contract.
Reports said that there was a forthcoming bankruptcy filing by July 31 for the trucking company.
Image source: KMPH
Edited by: Nandini Roy
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