Samuel Messidor
Citing financial difficulty from low prices in the less-than-truckload business and an inability to pay back massive debt from Federal Covid relief loans and private lenders, Yellow Freight has filed for bankruptcy according to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
22,000 Teamsters-organized drivers at Yellow will be put out of work with Yellow closing shop and selling off its assets.
Teamsters-organized drivers and workers had “bailed out” the company with pay cuts and other concessions in 2010 and 2014. Yellow was asking for more concessions from the workers—in particular withholding pension payments—to help the company pull itself out of its crippling debt, but the Teamsters were holding firm against offering more concessions to help the company “modernize.” Instead, they threatened to strike over the company withholding healthcare benefits.
The strike was averted when Yellow agreed to resume benefits payments, but shortly after the company sent out termination notices to its employees.
A class action lawsuit has been filed by a union activist on behalf of the laid-off workers alleging the termination notices in did not adhere to Worker Retraining and Notification Act time frames in several states.
Aside from this, there has been no action yet in defense of the workers facing unemployment, demanding work or wages or to be bought out of their contract by the company. In the absence of struggle, companies failing in the anarchy of capitalist profit-seeking means the big investors divide the carcass while the workers lose out.
Yellow was one of the last unionized less-than-truckload freight companies, a delivery method which has less grueling hours and a much lower worker turnover rate than the long-distance, point-to-point trucking industry. Non-unionized companies came to dominate in the US once the government reduced regulations on the long-distance trucking industry. This opened the field to a swarm of lower-cost companies and independent contractor truckers, breaking the once-unionized hub network.
photo credit: Cam Vilay, Wikipedia Commons
