Trucking giant Yellow’s collapse hits hundreds of WA employees

Over 400 Washington workers are expected to lose their jobs with Yellow Corp., as the trucking company contracts under financial struggles and looming bankruptcy proceedings.

The Nashville, Tenn.-based company began layoffs in Washington at the end of last month, according to a Monday filing with the state’s Employee Security Department. It expects to let go 437 employees at all seven of its Washington locations. Yellow operates out of Seattle, Tacoma, Everett, East Wenatchee, Union Gap, Pasco and Spokane.

It is unclear when the current round of layoffs will end, or if the company expects further cuts. Yellow did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Aug. 6, though the International Brotherhood of Teamsters went public with the news more than a week earlier. Though companies are usually able to continue operations through Chapter 11 proceedings, Yellow is expected to be liquidated.

Before the bankruptcy, Yellow employed approximately 30,000 workers across the country, the company said.

The filing comes just three years after Yellow received $700 million in pandemic-era loans from the federal government. By March of this year, the company had racked up approximately $1.5 billion in outstanding debt, according to The Associated Press.

Yellow CEO Darren Hawkins blamed union bargaining efforts for the company’s closure. A strike of Teamsters workers was narrowly averted on July 23, after a pension fund agreed to extend health benefits to two Yellow subsidiary companies.

“We faced nine months of union intransigence, bullying and deliberately destructive tactics,” Hawkins said in a news release. “A company has the right to manage its own operations, but as we have experienced, [Teamsters] leadership was able to halt our business plan, literally driving our company out of business, despite every effort to work with them.”

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said the news of Yellow’s bankruptcy was “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,” O’Brien said in a statement. “This is a sad day for workers and the American freight industry.”

On July 25, the Teamsters reached a tentative agreement with UPS after several months of protracted contract negotiations. UPS averted a strike by agreeing to raise hourly wages by $7.50 over the length of the new five-year contract. The Teamsters called the agreement “historic.”