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After 99 years, trucking company Yellow Corp. is closing down after filing for bankruptcy. The company had been involved in a dispute with the Teamsters union, which represented about 22,000 of the company's 30,000 employees.
While the union called off a threat to strike last week, the two sides could not come to an agreement on a new contract.
Yellow has seen a significant decrease in freight contracts over the past few years. As a result, the company has accumulated over $1.5 billion in outstanding debt. The company owes roughly half of the debt to the federal government, which gave Yellow a $700 million loan during the pandemic.
"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. This is a sad day for workers and the American freight industry," said Teamsters President Sean O'Brien in a statement.
Yellow was the nation's third-largest less-than-truckload shipper, making over 14 million shipments in 2022. Satish Jindel, president of transportation and logistics firm SJ Consulting, said that Yellow handled about 7% of the nation's less-than-truckload shipments last year. He did not expect the closure to result in any supply chain issues, noting that the industry has an excess capacity of between eight and ten percent.