American Freight Trucking Giant Yellow Declares Bankruptcy After Firing 30,000 Workers

Several days after shutting down operations, US trucking company Yellow has filed for bankruptcy. Executives have tried to pin the blame on the Teamsters union for blocking their restructuring plan, but the union said its members were justified in defending their benefits and blamed execs for failing their workers.

Last week, Yellow fired all but about 1,600 of its 30,000 workers, retaining a core staff of non-unionized workers to wind down operations.

“It is with profound disappointment that Yellow announces that it is closing after nearly 100 years in business,” Yellow CEO Darren Hawkins said in a Monday statement. The company said it had filed Chapter 11 documents in a federal bankruptcy court in Delaware.

Hawkins told US media that the company had “faced nine months of union intransigence, bullying and deliberately destructive tactics,” adding that the Teamsters union “was able to halt our business plan, literally driving our company out of business, despite every effort to work with them.”

However, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a labor union that represented 23,000 Yellow employees, blasted the company for trying to pin the blame on the union, saying that the “restructuring” effort was really an attempt to exploit their workers.

“Yellow may try to use the courts to eradicate its financial responsibilities, but they can’t escape the truth. Teamster families sacrificed billions of dollars in wages, benefits, and retirement security to rescue Yellow. The company blew through a $700 million government bailout. But Yellow’s dysfunctional, greedy C-suite failed to take responsibility for squandering all that cash. They still don’t,” Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said on Monday.

“They shamelessly pin their corporate incompetence on working people. This is what’s wrong with Big Business. This is a reminder of why workers’ ability to organize and collectively bargain is so crucial to protecting and creating good jobs in America,” he added.

Yellow has long been in dire straits, posting just three profitable quarters since 2009 and boasting a massive debt problem since at least 2000, when it began buying up or merging with smaller competitors. However, in the summer of 2020, Yellow received $700 million from the federal government as part of a massive $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package intended to prop up key parts of the US economy after the massive crash triggered by the Spring lockdowns.

Yellow, then known as YRC Worldwide, received the bailout because it delivers to US military bases, and used the money to launch a restructuring plan the company said would help it consolidate the many regional trucking brands it had acquired over the years into a single large company.

However, by April 2023, the company’s outstanding debt had swelled to $1.5 billion, half of which was the loan repayment owed to the federal government. The company has said that despite the bankruptcy filing, it will still pay Washington back.

The company said it has more than 100,000 creditors and more than $1 billion in liabilities, including $2 million owed to Amazon and $1.7 million owed to Home Depot. The company also lost some $6.85 million in a settlement after the Justice Department accused Yellow of defrauding the federal government.