Yellow Freight closure thread

How did they rip off 22,000 workers while filing bankruptcy?

 

Say your paycheck was short $500. Are you showing up for work on Monday? What about when you're shorted $500 for two weeks in a row?

That's effectively what happened before the "strike that killed YRC".

YRC violated the WARN Act, they've shorted the pension fund, and have made every effort to put its creditors above its employees.

 

Even then that should’ve been sending up all kinds of red flags. I wouldn’t trust that management to run a lemonade stand!

 

WARN act has already been ruled on, that they didn't violate it in regards to Union employees. No one shorted their paycheck, the non-payment to insurance and pension was a contract violation that was being negotiated at the end and was part of the bankruptcy. The upper management was idiots for sure, but this belief they tried to bankrupt the company, or ripped off the union is just as dumb.

 

Some of the VP level management was better than others, Yellow's problem was the President and CEO more than terminal or regional management.

 

When it’s all said and done,the company F’d up,big time!

Now mind you,this video was taken over a year ago at one of the terminals in Florida. And this is the EDITED version-can’t put the uncut version because the moderators will delete it!! Other drivers at other terminals (in St. Louis for example) were sharing similar sentiments!

 

Is a janitor making $50 an hour any more unreasonable than the executives being paid whatever they make?
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/512/159/a5e.jpg

 

Yellow found themselves a favorable court to hear their bankruptcy case. The WARN act lawsuit was ruled on in Yellow's favor but it will be appealed. As for the ripping off their workers, I am referencing the thousands of hours of unpaid PTO and accrued vacation time that their employees earned from the previous year. The workers are definitely entitled to that.

 

I do not get it either. The way Yellow was spending it was staggering. Yeah, a lot of stuff was antiquated, but to purchase an entire fleet of new tractors, trailers, and forklifts for all four companies was a bit absurd. The other portion is that Yellow was not known for taking care of and maintaining their equipment. That is how you had brand new trucks with 30k miles going down and brand new trailers with rollup doors that got stuck. I was driving a brand new Freightliner from a linehaul guy and had to be wreckered at least twice.

The $700,000,000 or whatever amount was gone the moment it hit Yellow's bank accounts. I remember I got a nice bonus the following Spring,. and while I am always ok with being paid more; I felt a bit like wondering if this money should be better used paying down their debt. It sure would have been nice to still have a job 5-10 years down the road. But no, instead they blew through it faster than free beer tokens at a Oktober Fest beer tent in Germany.

I remember I lost my job July 20something and I did not have a new job until September 5 or so (with my first paycheck not coming in till the following week). By that point my mortgage was due, my electricity was past due, and my water was about to be shut off. I've depleted our emergency savings, our hurricane emergency food pantry, and we were down to eating backup military food rations (MREs) that I had stashed away. Now .....could you imagine what would have happened if I pulled a page out of Yellow's playbook when my first paycheck hit? Hey look! Money!! I should go out and get a new truck!

My wife would have pulled me apart like a freshly baked loaf of bread. Y'all would be seeing my story on Netflix on a True Crime documentary. That would seriously have been the end of me if I did that. Yet that is exactly the type of logic that Yellow used. Spend money we don't have on trucks/trailers we don't really need, to impress all the other LTL carriers and customers that think we are living on borrowed time. I mean, what could possibly could have gone wrong? They would have been better off betting it all on a horse.

 

You are correct the employees are entitled to the PTO that was accrued, and payroll wasn't aware that it couldn't be paid after the case was filed. I can speak that some terminals were smart enough to put it in before the closure to get it paid out, but once the bankruptcy was filed nothing but payroll could be paid out, looking at the sales v debt there should be enough cash to make the employees whole. I can also speak to the fact most of the upper management had no idea how bankruptcy work and the asset freezing that occurs. After the layoff, the salary people that were kept on, many were sent out to secure unstaff terminals, which meant rental car and hotels. 3 days into bankruptcy the court froze all credit cards and the employess were told they would need to pay for the items themselves and the company would petition the court for reimbursement. Trash services were frozen and took almost a month or more in some cases to get restored, not counting other issues. They were as unprepared for bankruptcy as they were for the computer system changes the year prior at non-yellow terminals that caused pick ups in the midwest and east to be shut down for almost 2 weeks, or for the change of operation or many other things. The union employess seem to think it was malicious and it wasn't, it was just unpreparedness and bad leadership.