Future Of Freight In Question After Trucking Company Yellow Files For Bankruptcy

 

Future Of Freight In Question After Trucking Company Yellow Files For Bankruptcy

Rachel Premack:

Yes, so Yellow has been really on the brink of financial crisis for the past decade-and-a-half. They nearly filed bankruptcy four times going from the Great Recession all the way up to 2020.

What sort of began this downfall, you could say, was several costly acquisitions that Yellow made in the early 2000s of other trucking companies. They failed to integrate those trucking companies fully into their network. And, by 2008, the financial crisis, of course, hit trucking particularly hard.

And Yellow was saddled with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and these various trucking networks that weren't fully integrated. And we didn't actually see Yellow attempt to integrate those networks until the late 2010s, early 2020s. By that point, it was too late. This company was just simply — many folks watching the trucking industry would describe Yellow as mismanaged.

And they just simply weren't able to pull out of this. Now, they would say the real cause of the collapse, the company is certainly blaming Teamsters, which refused to negotiate with Yellow on certain work rules and certain changes made to their networks throughout the past year. Teamsters would say, well, this company has been mismanaged. That's the key reason why it went bankrupt.

So we're kind of seeing right now these two big parties blame the other one for the loss of these 30,000 jobs.