Never Stand Still

bankruptcy happens real slowly for a long time, then all of a sudden.

 

I know what I’m about to say falls under the heading of industry lore and maybe even conspiracy theory... It is my belief that at the time that video was produced the highest Ievels of Condolidated Freightways leadership were playing a long game, they planning to kill off old CF one way or the other. I think they believed the best way to drive shareholder value in the future was to cultivate Conway, Menlo and Emery, and to one way or the other rid themselves of their old unionized legacy carrier CF.

As far as the airplanes are concerned, I get their desire to innovate and differentiate themselves in the marketplace with airfreight service. After all the noose of trucking deregulation was starting to tighten and they were looking for diversification. Where I think one could level criticism at the leadership was how sloppy the airfreight business was handled.

I don’t know if the C-suit was being payed above industry standards for that time, so I will not comment on that.

 

One other thought on this. It seems to me that the book reveals a certain degree of negligence on the part of the board of directors. I don’t feel the C-suit leadership was made accountable for their many blunders.

 

Yup, that's about what went through my mind while I was watching it.

Bloomington seems an odd terminal to use for an investor video. Wonder if they were trying to keep the underlying motive hidden from the union by pretending to shoot a training film, so they picked a small terminal out in the middle of cornfields.

If so, they likely underestimated how observant rural people are. If there had been a TTR back then, there likely would have been a post about it on here.

 

I know many ex CF drivers who claim to have been suspicious about the leaderships motivations at the time of Conway’s creation. These concerns were expressed to the companies leadership,the corporate leaderships response to these concerns were adamant, Conway was always going to be a regional carrier (a side show), and CF would always be the core of their business .

The rest is history.

 

I don’t buy the company line, I strongly suspect there were other long term motives. So rather then CF Inc pumping a bunch of money into a new startup (Conway), why not spend those resources to restructure the existing LTL (CF) company so it works better? Like I said before I believe the leadership had long term plans to rid themselves of CF. It would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall listening to CF Inc’s C-suite backroom discussions during that era.

 

The legacy of unions vs management goes back before trucking existed. Back to mining and railroads and wobblies and Pinkerton strikebreakers. The violence got sublimated but it remains burning and destructive under the surface like Centralia, PA,

That smolder appears to have adversely affected CF's judgement and mindset.

An example from right now is how it's affecting UPS contract negotiations as they argue over the same old bones rather than reinventing their relationship. That's another company that's chipping away at its good thing like CF did.

Workers tend to want (or think they want) a steady paycheck and bennies and retirement locked in. Even if they are bored to pieces hanging on to the prize slot they waited for and wish they could change.

Changing market conditions? That's the company's problem. For a while.

CF faced and did what other companies faced and did, but running a three-legged race tied to legacy agreements, practices, and internal conflicts, distracted from clarity by a submerged war with their own people.

TNT appears to have used their acquisition power to try markets and labor arrangements without getting overly involved in one type; that habit of putting their identity on anything and removing it just as quickly showed fluid and fluent sorting and discarding practices. They eventually grokked how hidebound Reddaway and their other US LTLs were and decided to cut them loose after trying to make something out of them, like CF did with Penn Yan.

Except that TNT got something out of it by fostering USF's origination somehow (I'd like to know more about that) rather than just cutting them off to die and losing money just to spite some labor people like CF did.

TNT seems to have had a mentality that tried to make every move profitable. They moved on from bad deals better, had more experience with breakups than CF.

 

For those saying you need more for ltl, depends of what kinda ltl use to do ltl in straight trucks otr. Made good money but you have to stay gone awhile to do it.