On today’s episode of WHAT THE TRUCK?!? Dooner is covering Hurricane Idalia’s impact on freight as it makes landfall. WeatherOptics’ Scott Pecoriello gets us strapped down for the storm.
Why did Teamsters allow 22,000 union jobs to vanish? FreightWaves’ Rachel Premack discusses if labor and unions are winning, why did Yellow lose so badly?
AIT Worldwide’s Greg Weigel predicts peak season, alerts us to supply chain disruptions on the horizon and shares the impact nearshoring has had on trucking.
Trucker Tricky Mick hauls cars and drops bars. We’ll take a look at the life of a car-hauling music producer.
FreightWaves’ Justin Martin talks about how a 100-truck carrier could operate for the U.S. Postal Service without insurance; Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams’ abrupt shutdown; driver shortage narrative violations; living in a mansion on 18 wheels; and delivery instructions gone wrong.
Russell Say
Well said, I was going to say a lot of the same, the teamsters didn’t ruin this company management did, or lack there of, I started at Roadway in 96 and that company was well ran as the same for Holland, anything yellow ever touched closed
Craig
You stupid idiots thank think Teamsters cost 22,000 jobs. Yellow CEO cost those jobs.
Eric
To whom it may concern… I was an employee of Holland. Yellow took us over in 2005. It went downhill from there. Shortly after, We, as Teamsters, gave 15% of our wages and a week’s vacation, back to keep the company alive and in business. After we voted to do this, as much as it hurt our wages, we still had jobs and our families still had insurance. But no sooner than the ink had dried on that contract, we we’re hearing about the millions in bonuses being handed out at the top. Talk about a ” punch in the gut” feeling. That did not sit well with any of us. But I still went to work and did my job. When the last contract came around, we said enough was enough. If we didn’t get our wages going back up in the right direction and our weeks vacation back, I was already looking to go to another company. Yellow settled and did just that. We were still the lowest paid drivers among the union carriers, but it was going in the right direction. As a driver, we could see the writing on the wall as the decisions being made by Yellow just didn’t make sense. Yellow was wasting money on taking us backwards in technology. We were already using handhelds that customers would sign rather than paper bills. We were well on our way to going paperless and Yellow took us back10 years, or at least it felt like it! We went back to outdated equipment, making it harder to do our jobs. We needed to get back to what made Holland a great carrier….service! But instead we had the bean counters telling us that we couldn’t deliver freight that was in the route of where we had to take an empty to a customer. We were told that it would count against us!?! To us, that was pure stupid. We are in this business to pick up and deliver freight, and do it efficiently. They switched back to velocity terminals and all that did was create more damage claims. We saw so much more damage from the stack and pack mentality by people that were not being trained properly or having to be held responsible. We could have saved so much money by just addressing the damage claims, but nobody did. If we would ask for pictures to be taken, the supervisors would say, “Why? Nothing will be done about it.” It fell on deaf ears. Towards the end, the decisions just didn’t make sense. Why, when we’re hurting, would we be leaving freight out there? Limiting how many drivers that they would put on the street. And the ones that were out there, left late with a full trailer, and wouldn’t return till they were full, sometimes after 12 hours. So now you’re burning out drivers, and we’re losing good drivers that have a lot of experience, only to make the job harder for everyone else left behind. Yellow, then wanting to consolidate all its companies into One Yellow, combined terminals in a lot of cities. This was difficult on the drivers to work efficiently on an already crowded dock, but we did it. And eventually we continued to lose more freight to where it got down to manageable levels. Then they wanted to open the contract early because they could see, and said, that the money is running out and we won’t make it past August if they didn’t implement the changes needed to make us One Yellow. Most people don’t realize that ABF’s and UPS’s contracts were up before ours. Ours was in force till April 2024. After they got those taken care of, the Teamsters then had the time to negotiate any contract changes early with Yellow. Then Yellow told us they were no longer able to pay our insurance. By breach of contract, that forced Teamsters to be ready to go on strike. Another bad move by Yellow. No one wanted it, and that’s not what you want your customers to hear. How could they expect any driver to still work a dangerous job without insurance??? I guess what bothers me most is the fact that people blame the Teamsters for Yellows demise. But all the money and vacation we gave back as well as a 730 million loan from the government, and nobody questions the management??? But they felt it ok to hand out bonuses when we were trying to keep it afloat??? There’s that punch in the gut feeling again. Starting over after 23 years isn’t easy. But I know that Yellow going bankrupt wasn’t our fault. Hopefully this sheds some truth on what really happened with Yellow. Proud Teamster, Eric