Union Matters Teamsters say trucking giant Yellow Corp. is ceasing operations, filing for bankruptcy

By WYATTE GRANTHAM-PHILIPS

AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Troubled trucking company Yellow Corp. is shutting down and headed for a bankruptcy, the Teamsters said Monday.

An official bankruptcy filing is expected any day for Yellow, after years of financial struggles and growing debt. Its expected liquidation would mark a significant shift for the U.S. transportation industry and shippers nationwide.

“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,” Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien said, in an announcement saying the union had been served with legal notice for the bankruptcy filing. “This is a sad day for workers and the American freight industry.”

Yellow is one of the nation’s largest less-than-truckload carriers. The closure of the 99-year-old Nashville, Tennessee-based company risks a loss of 30,000 jobs. Yellow shut down operations Sunday, according to The Journal, following the layoffs of hundreds of nonunion employees on Friday.

As of Tuesday morning, no bankruptcy filings from the company could be found on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website.

The company’s collapse arrives just three years after Yellow, formerly known as YRC Worldwide Inc., received $700 million in pandemic-era loans from the federal government. But the company was in financial trouble long before that — with industry analysts pointing to poor management and strategic decisions dating back decades.

When reached by The Associated Press, Yellow did not comment directly to the bankruptcy reports, but addressed contract negotiations between the Teamsters and the company, which sued the union in June after alleging it was “unjustifiably blocking” restructuring plans needed for Yellow’s survival. At the time, the Teamsters called the litigation “baseless” — with O’Brien pointing to Yellow’s “decades of gross mismanagement” and accusing the company of wanting workers to “to foot the bill” amid the company’s financial chaos.

“Yellow has not asked its union employees for any concessions in its efforts to approve its long-planned modernization effort... Yellow offered to pay its employees more, a lot more, but the (Teamsters) refused to negotiate for nine months,” a company official said in a statement sent to The Associated Press Monday night, accusing the union of trying to “destroy” Yellow.

Reports of Yellow preparing for bankruptcy emerged last week — as the Nashville, Tennessee-based trucker saw customers leave in large numbers, per The Wall Street Journal and FreightWaves. And the company reportedly stopped freight pickups earlier in the week.

These reports arrived just days after Yellow averted a strike from the Teamsters. On July 23, a pension fund agreed to extend health benefits for workers at two Yellow Corp. operating companies, avoiding a planned walkout. The fund gave Yellow “30 days to pay its bills,” notably $50 million that Yellow failed to pay the Central States Health and Welfare Fund earlier in the month.

Yellow has racked up hefty bills over the years. As of late March, Yellow had an outstanding debt of about $1.5 billion. Of that, $729.2 million was owed to the federal government.

In 2020, under the Trump administration, the Treasury Department granted the company a $700 million pandemicera loan on national security grounds. Last month, a congressional probe concluded that the Treasury and Defense departments “made missteps” in this decision — and noted that Yellow’s “precarious financial position at the time of the loan, and continued struggles, expose taxpayers to a significant risk of loss.”

The Teamsters supported the $700 million loan when it was first announced. As of June 30, Yellow had paid $67 million in cash interest on the loan, which is due in 2024, the company said.

The prospect of bankruptcy and current financial chaos at Yellow “is probably two decades in the making,” said Stifel research director Bruce Chan, pointing to poor management and strategic decisions dating back to the early 2000s. “At this point, after each party has bailed them out so many times, there is a limited appetite to do that anymore.”

An investors note from financial service firm Stephens last week estimated that Yellow was burning daily amounts of $9 million to $10 million in recent days. Yellow handled an average of 49,000 shipments per day in 2022 according to Satish Jindel, president of transportation and logistics firm SJ Consulting. On Friday, he estimated that number was down to between 10,000 and 15,000 daily shipments.

Former Yellow customers and shippers will face higher prices as they take their business to competitors, including FedEx or ABF Freight, experts say — noting that Yellow historically offered the cheapest price points in the industry.

Yellow’s prices have historically been the cheapest compared to other carriers, Jindel said. “That’s why they obviously were not making money,” he added. “And while there is capacity with the other LTL carriers to handle the diversions from Yellow, it will come at a high price for (current shippers and customers) of Yellow.”

Children’s Law Center workers remain without contract

By KAREN JUANITA CARRILLO Amsterdam News Staff

More legal services employees are trying to unionize as they face working without a contract.

Staff at the Children’s Law Center (CLC) held a threeday strike in late July, protesting management’s delays in coming to a contract agreement with its workers.

“No contract? No work! No peace!” staffers chanted as they marched along Brooklyn’s Court Street with picket signs and a symbolic giant inflatable rat.

“We have not had a contract in the entire time that we’ve been negotiating, for over two years,” Carly Coats, a CLC staff attorney, told the AmNews.

Staff have been asking to establish a contract with the management at CLC, a nonprofit, direct legal services agency that has never had contracts with any of its employees since its founding in 1997.

After voting to unionize with the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, UAW Local 2325, in 2020, CLC workers proposed a contract March 31, 2021. They wanted job securities and protections, and an increase in salaries to make sure that their incomes were more commensurate with average rates in the city.

But staffers say management has been bargaining in bad faith: They don’t appear to be genuinely interested in negotiating a true contract. Workers registered their complaints against CLC management with the National Labor Relations Board.

“We are attorneys, social workers, paralegals, and administrative staff, so there are several different levels of experience and levels of education that staff members have, but that doesn’t always factor into our salaries,” Coats said.

contract, as well as practices for our employment in general. We represent children and it’s exhausting work, but none of us get into it without really, really caring about the work that we do, and we wanted some protections for our caseloads and our case counts and for our supervision. Right now, we have extensive employee evaluations, but we don’t have any way to offer any feedback for our supervisors, and that can be very difficult and frustrating when we are working so hard, and we want to weigh in on the organization’s day to day operations.” tributed

The not-for-profit CLC describes itself as a “legal services agency [that] provides zealous and effective representation to children in custody, visitation, domestic violence, guardianship, paternity, and related child protective cases.” They say their focus is on providing legal representation to vulnerable children.

CLC attorneys say that on average, they are assigned to work on more than 150 legal cases at a time—but that can mean more than 150 actual clients, who aren’t always accessible during standard work hours.

“We wanted to make sure that that was indicated in a

“We have to interact with every single one of our clients, and our clients are children, so we have to interview them after school or late in the night or when they’re not in school,” Coats explained. “We have to come in on school holidays and speak to them to provide the direct representation that we provide. And 150 cases doesn’t necessarily mean 150 clients: We have several cases where we represent four children in a family or even five or six children in a family...Right now, I think that most of us have between 140 and 170 cases, but there have been several times, especially in our less-staffed boroughs, where we’ve have had as many as 200 cases at any given time.”