Aug. 7 (UPI) — Yellow Corp., one of the country’s largest trucking and logistics companies, announced it has filed for bankruptcy, blaming the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union for driving it out of business.
Yellow in a statement late Sunday said the company and its subsidiaries continue to manage their businesses and properties as “debtors-in-possession” under the jurisdiction of the Bankruptcy Court.
“It is with profound disappointment that Yellow announces that it is closing after nearly 100 years in business,” Yellow’s CEO Darren Hawkins said.
Hawkins blamed the Teamsters for standing in the way of modernizing the trucking company and improving customer service, which would have allowed it to survive.
“We faced nine months of union intransigence, bullying and deliberately destructive tactics,” Hawkins said. “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.”
Yellow said it was “met with hostility” after it agreed to open up contract negotiations nearly a year early.
“Instead of negotiating a contract, Yellow faced months of public insult from IBT, including a social media post depicting a tombstone with Yellow’s name and the dates 1924-2023,” the company said. “This ruthless campaign included repeated public taunts calling for Yellow’s demise and was intended to put Yellow out of business.”
The announcement comes a week after the Teamsters said it received a legal notice from Yellow saying it had stopped operations despite ongoing negotiations between the two for a new labor contract.
Last week, the Teamsters accused Yellow of mismanaging the large trucking company while its workers repeatedly gave concessions to keep it afloat.
“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,” Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said last week. “This is a sad day for workers and the American freight industry.”
