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

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

#61

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.

Privatize the gains, socialize the losses. Even in the news.

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

#62
post #46
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…

Pensions seem like an outdated concept, when 401Ks and IRAs are options. Pensions are essentially a tradeoff of lower pay now in exchange for benefits in the future, with a sprinkle of an incentive for increased retention added in, but with the critical downside (to the employer) of it basically being an unbounded, undefined financial downside for them at the tail end. Employers should pay people, contribute to their…

Exactly. Pensions might have been practical back in the day when people worked for "the company" for their whole career. But when so many change jobs every 5 years or less, they make no sense.

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

#63
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.

This mirrors my experience. Not once did I have a Yellow LTL shipment arrive on time, and typical delays ranged from 2 days to 2 weeks or longer. Shipments would get lost in a terminal, down to staff insisting it never arrived on the trailer, and then spontaneously reappear after a loss claim was filed. I would've loved to avoid them but vendors would often choose them due to their cost.

It's very difficult to implement radical change in an organization when unions prevent you from firing low performers w/o exorbitant costs.

You see this across the public sector where it's practically impossible to get fired unless you do something egregious.

Lots of union defenders here ignoring that unions make reform impossible.

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

#64
And this is a perfect time to talk about worker owned corporations.

The employees should be able to buy the company. Not only that, but they should also be given first rights to do that. And if government was serious about keeping businesses in operation through bankruptices, they would also issue a loan to the employees to complete this.

That would keep the company running, under employee control, and save a whole pile of jobs.

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

#65

Let's take a second to recognize the ironic branding of Yellow corporation. It's orange. Nothing yellow about it. Some person or group of people made that decision.

why are yellow trucks orange:

https://www.myyellow.com/us/en/about-us/extra-mile-blog/why-...

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

#66
post #59
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would presume it was because the union contract did not allow them to lay-off or furlough any workers, and they'd lose less money by being 'cheap' than by being more expensive and having workers sitting around. Put another way, their labor was probably their largest cost center, and a fixed cost, which means that their marginal cost to provide the service was actually low, but the company was unprofitable due to th…

But even if their labor cost was fixed and high, why not attempt to recover that cost by raising prices?

The market for truckload and LTL shipping is currently very thin, and they'd likely lose more revenue than they'd make.

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

#67
post #24

So 30000 people lose their job and the US taxpayer is out more than $700 million in loan guarantees. The only question remaining is how much money do the owners of the company walk away with?

CEO was making close to $1M/yr for a few years.

I’m not making any statement on whether that CEO did a good job or not, but I’d like to point out that if you had a failing company, it might make a lot of sense to hire an expensive hotshot CEO to turn it around (and to get the best you would also offer benefits like golden parachutes). So it’s not necessarily a case of “the CEO is getting paid exorbitantly to do a bad job”.

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

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not defending how our stuff is set up, but it would be interesting to know how much taxes Yellow paid over it's lifetime. Excluding taxes paid by employees.

I would presume they paid the least they were legally obligated to pay, as any normal person or company would do. Trucks also pay a lot of road use taxes. Some would say not enough, but trucking is not a low-taxed line of business.

It would be interesting to see the net benefit a company had. Obviously putting money in employee pockets is a net benefit, but it stops being so great if tax dollars are just subsidizing bad business leading to a net drain on tax payers

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

#69
post #66
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But even if their labor cost was fixed and high, why not attempt to recover that cost by raising prices?

The market for truckload and LTL shipping is currently very thin, and they'd likely lose more revenue than they'd make.

Maybe, but at least a couple of quarters of demonstrable uncompetitiveness would be solid evidence to take to the negotiating table with the unions to get the labor cost down (if that really was the primary cost problem).

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

#70

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.

Though the article did hit the nail on the head with this statement from the Teamster's head: “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."

The workers conceded quite a bit over the years, but despite that and the bailout, the management of Yellow still couldn't make it work.

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