News: US century-old giant Yellow Corp faces bankruptcy, putting 30,000 jobs at risk

Strategic HR

US century-old giant Yellow Corp faces bankruptcy, putting 30,000 jobs at risk

Yellow Corporation offers services to clients such as Walmart, Home Depot, and others, is preparing to file for bankruptcy.

After being in business for 99 years, the titan in the trucking industry, Yellow Corp, is just days away from closing down.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Yellow Corporation, the company that provides services to Walmart, Home Depot, and other clients, is getting ready to file for bankruptcy. 

On Friday, the company already laid off hundreds of nonunion employees, and an additional 30,000 jobs are at risk of being lost.

The Nashville-based company, which obtained a $700 million CARES Act loan from the Trump administration in 2020, faced scrutiny due to objections from the Defense Department. The impending possibility of its shutdown poses a threat to 22,000 Teamsters' jobs.

"Teamsters have kept this company afloat for more than a decade through billions of dollars in wage, pension and work-rule concessions," a union spokesman told WSJ. "Yellow couldn't manage itself, and it wasn't up to Teamsters to do it for them."

According to WSJ, the Teamsters conveyed in a memo to union members on Friday that the chances of Yellow's survival are becoming increasingly grim. Customers have allegedly been shifting to the company's competitors while discussions are underway regarding the potential sale of portions of the business.

The average income of truckers today stands at half the amount they earned in 1980, which was $110,000 per year. This decline can be attributed, in part, to the Motor Carrier Act, which was passed in the same year. 

The act deregulated the trucking industry, allowing trucking companies to establish their own rates, impacting the earnings of truckers significantly.

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Topics: Strategic HR, #Layoffs, #HRTech, #HRCommunity

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