Nashville-based Yellow Corp. on Sunday announced it and some of its subsidiaries would seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as part of the company’s “planned operational wind-down.”
The trucking company, which relocated its headquarters to Nashville last year, has already laid off an unknown number of its 30,000 employees.
CEO Darren Hawkins in part blamed the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents more than two-thirds of Yellow employees, for the century-old firm’s downfall.
“All workers and employers should take note of our experience with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and worry,” Hawkins said in a 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.”
Yellow has faced financial challenges for years, including a $700 million loan from the federal government in 2020. The Teamsters threatened a strike earlier this summer after Yellow missed millions of dollars in payments for employee benefit plans. Yellow also sued the Teamsters earlier this year for opposing a company modernization plan.
According to the release, Yellow is partnering with the American Trucking Associations to find employment for Yellow workers.
“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 late last month. “This is a sad day for workers and the American freight industry.”
