Current rates are now below fleet operating costs! It's official!

I promise, I wasn't hopin to see you out this way.

 

Teamsters brass said Monday that less-than-truckload carrier Yellow Corp. has informed them it will be out of money by August if a proposed change of operations isn’t approved. The union, however, says the company has been mismanaged for years and vows to not bail Yellow out again.

“Yellow has been unable to effectively manage itself for a long time,” said Sean O’Brien, Teamsters general president, in a video to members. “Now, the company says it’ll be out of money by August. Do not forget — Teamsters have already given back everything they possibly could to keep Yellow afloat.”

O’Brien said the union has given billions to the company in the form of wages, benefits and work rules concessions in the past. He also pointed to the $700 million the carrier received from the government in the form of a COVID-relief loan, which it used to catch up on delinquent health and pension payments and buy new equipment.

“It is not left for the Teamsters to save this company; we have given enough,” O’Brien said. “What happens next is out of our control.”

Unbelievable.

 

Some folks would call that livin, I've been livin pretty good here lately. Ain't got time to sit and beech about things I can't change.

 

Because so much of the freight movement out of the PNW is agricultural and those products mostly go to big union controlled DC's and stores, the unions have a big say in what carriers get to haul those loads. A few years ago I got a call from a 4 truck O/O in central CA who was going to be down 2 trucks for an extended period and was looking for a 1 truck O/O like me to pick up the slack until he got his fleet going again. I agreed, and he had me hauling fresh produce north to Washington and loads of apples and pears south to places like Safeway and their DC's. He was paying me at least twice the spot market rate, and he was still making a tidy profit. I asked him how long he had been doing this, and he said that he inherited the company from his dad who had been doing it since the 60's under contract with the unions. He basically said that the unions control everything that gets shipped to the big union run DC's and stores, and anything that winds up on a load board is just a freak occurrence for a last minute load that got overlooked and needed to be covered.

 

And they will continue to fly off the boards as long as you have idiots that won't wake up and smell the java.

 

That four truck company...were they in Orland?

 

No, down near Stockton.

 

I'm old enough to remember the union for Eastern Airlines saying something like this. I'm sure it's going to work out differently this time, though.