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99-year old trucking company Yellow shuts down, putting 30k out of work

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31–40 of 143 posts

Re: 99-year old trucking company Yellow shuts down, putting 30k out of work

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> taxpayers holding 30% of its outstanding stock. It's always amusing that they frame this as the lowly taxpayer holding stock in a company after the government bails a company out. I've never received the stock certificates, and I certainly don't see any dividends or have the ability to sell my commensurate portion of the stock holdings. The taxpayer pays for the bailouts but does not see any benefit for doing so.

Not a fan of government bailouts or funding any company at all nor an American, but this framing is weird. Citizens don’t get dividends from government property. They get their tax benefits from government services, e.g, infrastructure, healthcare, police, etc.

Not only are you not an American, you have no idea how our government works apparently. States can pay out financial benefits to citizens in the form of checks to residents, for example see Alaska. During my life time there have been multiple instances of the federal government refunding taxes collected for one reason or another.

Re: 99-year old trucking company Yellow shuts down, putting 30k out of work

#32
The union was planning a strike but canceled and gave some leeway on late pension payments due to Yellow's financial hardships.

I often hear that it's good for companies to fail if they can't meet a minimum threshold of compensation. If that's the case the unions should have gone on strike.

Re: 99-year old trucking company Yellow shuts down, putting 30k out of work

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They walk away with $0 in equity.

They have filed for bankruptcy, so leadership will still likely get their compensation packages. I'm not going to waste time doing the research, but I would assume leadership had been receiving all of their usual comp and bonuses right up until the end as well. The workers will get $0.

Those aren't the owners. And since the bonuses are in stock, those aren't going to be worth anything.

> I'm not going to waste time doing the research

Yeah that's pretty clear.

Re: 99-year old trucking company Yellow shuts down, putting 30k out of work

#34

I hope there will be a HBR or some other case study done on Yellow, because the interplay between bad loans + union demands + poor management seems like something US businesses need to be more prepared for.

From the sounds of it, its mostly the bad loans + poor management part that killed Yellow. Management of the company have been asleep at the wheel for some time now, union demands are not likely the precipitating factor here. EDIT: All I'm pointing out here is that I don't think this can land squarely on union demands, which is what I think some of the press are making it out to be. The actual financial mismanagement…

The company entered into questionable acquisitions though largely to try to become more competitive in the LTL market with their non-unionized competitors. Now they executed the mergers poorly and failed to integrate for too long, but even some of those integration challenges were due to union considerations. So yes management was incompetent but I think being unionized did play a large role in their demise as well.

Re: 99-year old trucking company Yellow shuts down, putting 30k out of work

#35
> Higher prices will hit Yellow customers, Jindel said.

> “The reason they were using Yellow was because they were cheap,” he said. “They’re finding out that price was below the cost of supporting a good operation.”

What happened that made them decide to shut the company down instead of raising their prices?

Re: 99-year old trucking company Yellow shuts down, putting 30k out of work

#36
Funny how this is being framed by the article writer in terms in unionization. Are they suggesting that the workers should just give up their pensions and wages so that a clearly broken and mismanaged company should just lurch onwards? Why is it when a company succeeds everyone praises the management and heaps huge bonuses on the C suite but when they fail they try and blame the workers.

Re: 99-year old trucking company Yellow shuts down, putting 30k out of work

#37
post #12

The company was an unmitigated shitshow for a long time, and didn't perform its basic duties as a shipper. I've had LTL shipments lost for weeks at a time with nothing but a shrug and an "It'll (maybe) get there when it gets there". So it doesn't surprise me at all that they couldn't reach an agreement with their labor.

Sounds like Schroedinger's shipment. If we don't know where it is, can it really be lost?

Isn't that the definition of something being lost, i.e., not knowing where it is?

Re: 99-year old trucking company Yellow shuts down, putting 30k out of work

#38
post #22

"The closing is bad news not only for its employees and its customers, who generally used Yellow because it offered some of the cheapest rates in the trucking sector." Perhaps they shouldn't have offered the cheapest rates in the trucking sector while failing their obligations. Taxpayers ended up holding 30% of this company's stock and they still couldn't figure out how to become profitable after a $700 million infus…

This works in a vacuum, but in many industries you get undercharging and living off investments, be it Uber or a gajillion startups, many of them mentioned here on HN.

Re: 99-year old trucking company Yellow shuts down, putting 30k out of work

#40

I hope there will be a HBR or some other case study done on Yellow, because the interplay between bad loans + union demands + poor management seems like something US businesses need to be more prepared for.

[flagged]

At worst, trade unions are a symptom of a ridiculously inefficient capitalist system.

The rise of unions in 20th century America was a compromise by the capitalists, who feared an actual "Bolshevik" revolution.

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