Yellow closure affecting 800 Hoosier union truckers
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Editor’s Note: This article was updated to reflect the correct number of Hoosier workers affected. A previous version stated it was 900 people.
About 800 union Hoosiers lost their jobs following Yellow Corp.’s sudden closure. Glen Brannon was one of them.
Brannon drove for Yellow for about 20 years though he never applied to work there. His prior employer, Roadway Express Inc., was bought by Yellow in 2004.
Yellow drivers acted as “a happy, dysfunctional family.” The cohort would take new drivers in, answer questions and hand out cards for Brannon’s website chock-full of resources. They would help out guys in a tough spot, then laugh it off because they’ve been there before. too. It’s the family Brannon’s losing that hurts.
As for the company, there’s no love lost.
“We’re getting zero from the company,” he said. “The company through all of this has treated us as adversaries.”
Tennessee-based Yellow, which was the third largest carrier in the country, permanently shut down its operations July 30 and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection a week later.
The closure ultimately laid off 30,000 employees, 22,000 of which are represented by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Indiana was home to four Yellow terminals in Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, South Bend and Evansville.
The nearly 100-year-old company was known for its “less-than-truckload” business model, meaning it delivered freight for multiple customers on the same truck. The company was significantly popular, growing to be one of “the Big Three” carriers in the country until trucking was deregulated in 1984. That meant nonunionized carriers could come to market, building competition for the big three.
Glen Brannon talks about the last days of Yellow’s operations, how he felt after the closure and maintaining professionalism.
The company ran into trouble when it started buying and merging with its unionized competition, including Roadway, USF and Holland. In its bankruptcy filing, the company reported total assets of $2.15 billion and total debt of $2.59 billion. The company also received a $700 million PPP loan in 2020, which the company said in a news release it plans to repay.
Brannon said they noticed the trend.
“What they did was they would buy other companies and then merge them into and got a little bit of relief,” he said. “When they bought Roadway for just under $1 billion and so sort of like ‘okay, we know their track record.'”
After the 2008 recession hit, Brannon said the company was looking to get a handle on its looming amount of debt and went to the union to push for pension and benefit concessions. At that time, he said a contract was not yet agreed upon and they were working under a memorandum of understanding.
“They pretty much got what they wanted,” he said of Yellow.
When announcing its intention to file for bankruptcy, Yellow blamed the Teamsters for the company folding and its members losing their jobs. It’s a relationship Yellow had long blamed for the company’s woes.
“All workers and employers should take note of our experience with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (“IBT”) and worry,” Yellow CEO Darren Hawkins said in the release. “We faced nine months of union intransigence, bullying and deliberately destructive tactics. A company has the right to manage its own operations, but as we have experienced, IBT leadership was able to halt our business plan, literally driving our company out of business, despite every effort to work with them.”
The company mentioned its “One Yellow” modernization plan, which planned to consolidate operations and change how drivers’ jobs functioned. The Teamsters voted down the plan and released a video on Facebook in June with General President Sean M. O’Brien saying thousands of jobs would have been “decimated” and the company was attempting to modify their previous agreement.
The Teamsters originally okayed an initial rollout of the One Yellow plan in the Western half of the country, but issues arose and the company moved to make it essentially nationwide. In this process, Yellow launched a lawsuit against the Teamsters for its impeding of the expansion. Brannon said the plan gutted the union contract and the company’s second offer doubled down.
“The union was above and beyond trying to keep Yellow afloat,” he said. “I know the bankruptcy statement that they came out with. Hawkins blamed everything solely on the Teamsters. The company did not pay our health and welfare for two months.”
Brannon said they were heading toward working for cash only and losing personal and family health insurance earlier this year. In July, the company narrowly avoided a strike when it agreed to pay over $50 million of owed worker benefits and pension accruals. He credits the Teamsters, not the company.
What Yellow had going for them, Brannon said, was the benefits and the union. That’s why many stayed, he said. Drivers didn’t work there for wages, he said. If they did, they’d go somewhere else.
In a federal shutdown notice, the company said it hoped to complete a deal to prevent liquidation to no avail and that the closure was not “reasonably foreseeable.” However, Brannon said he and other drivers saw the writing on the wall.
After the strike was avoided, Brannon said Yellow directed drivers only to finish their jobs and not pick up new freight. He and other drivers understood that to be a result of the strike, he said, and the company didn’t want to leave their customers’ goods in limbo. However, they never received the go-ahead to start picking up deliveries again.
“We’re kind of like, ‘Okay this isn’t right. You know something’s going on here,” he said. “Bells are going off.”
Soon after, he said the drivers’ corporate cards, which they use to pay for hotel rooms, weren’t working. This resulted in some anxious situations, he said, where the driver would have to pay for it themself or see if a terminal manager could use a company credit card if that wasn’t also shut off.
A few days later came the notice the company was closing down.
“We saw that coming, and I won’t say that didn’t hurt,” he said. “When you’re in a place for that long, you build relationships, and that’s the part that hurts.”
His website, 2trailertrucker.com, was free, didn’t require a login and had no ads — “revenue negative” as Brannon called it. The website had video instructions for certain terminals, hotel locations and other need-to-know information.
Now, it looks much more like a job board. When he sees job postings, he’s added them so other drivers can take advantage. He thought his website traffic would taper off, but to his surprise, it’s just as busy with about 12,000 page views.
Soon, Brannon will start at a new company working nights, which he’s accustomed to, and traveling within 500-600 miles of Indianapolis. He said he’s in a lot better of a position than other drivers, having no debt and a paid-off house. Some were devastated, he said.
“If you’re a good company and you treat us well — and believe me it won’t take much to treat us better — you’ll have an employee for a long time,” he said.
The trouble is a lot of them want to finish out what’s left of their careers at union shops, he said, but several aren’t hiring as the economy heals. Another issue, he said, is the perception of union workers wanting to go into a non-unionized company and change that.
“A lot of companies will not hire us because of our union backgrounds,” he said. “That couldn’t be farther from the truth.”
Brannon said there are drivers, including himself, who had not been paid in full yet, as of Aug. 8. He mentioned they also had vacation time they won’t get paid for. He points out, though, that drivers have maintained their professionalism and had not tried to “show them who’s boss” by destroying equipment or a delivery.
“We delivered the freight as professionals. We conduct ourselves as such, knowing what was going on,” he said. “There is a heck of a workforce here that a lot of companies would be envious to have.”