Less-than-truckload carrier Yellow Corp. filed revised change-of-operations notifications with the Teamsters union on Monday. An original plan to consolidate operations at regional carriers New Penn and Holland with its national YRC Freight network received pushback from the union in December, forcing the carrier to revisit the process.
A key sticking point in the original notification was the creation of 998 utility positions, requiring drivers to work across the different operating companies and handle freight on the docks. The latest submission shows a provision for only 121 such positions originating from 39 terminals.
Yellow (NASDAQ: YELL) also wants to refine linehaul movements to include more turns in the system where drivers relay freight to other drivers, or to other terminals, returning home at night. A “designated terminal turn” would have a driver haul freight to a terminal, work on the dock there and return to their origin facility at the end of the shift.
The documents showed there would be a total of 36 designated terminals.
“Increasing the number of ‘turns’ is a quality-of-life issue for many of our drivers who will now be able to make it home at night,” a Yellow spokesperson told FreightWaves. “In addition, this change will add consistency to our drivers’ schedules and enable Yellow to provide enhanced on-time service.”
Union workers, however, don’t want to rebid for jobs or be tasked with dock operations, which they view as outside of their job description as a driver.
In the notifications, Yellow said it wants to utilize this procedure on 20% to 25% of linehaul operations in the East, Central and South regions and that 395 of its road drivers at Holland are currently performing this type of work.
“The result of this proposed change will create additional road turns, meet [and] turns and will increase the speed, velocity and consistency of freight moving between our designated terminals as well as our end of line terminals,” a document read.
Yellow also seeks to realign the ZIP codes covered by 204 terminals to optimize pickup and delivery by creating shorter routes and improving efficiency and capacity.
“The optimized terminal ZIP code coverage will streamline our city pickup and delivery,” the form stated. “Translating to earlier pickups and deliveries, improved response time and increased capacity to handle our customer’s shipping needs.”
Yellow requested a hearing date for the week of March 10 with implementation of the plan no later than April 30.
“YRC Freight, New Penn and Holland must change in order to become competitive in the marketplace,” the document continued. “Significantly improving our transit times is imperative to our success.”
Yellow has already engaged in the process of merging all of the different operating companies onto the same technology platform in efforts to reduce costs and eliminate redundancy. The company executed the first phase of the overhaul last year, which included the restructuring of 89 YRC Freight and Reddaway facilities in the West.
Management from Yellow has said in the past that a total of 28 terminals, or 6% of doors, would be closed in the process.
Yellow is a unionized carrier and party to the National Master Freight Agreement, which governs union-employer relations and requires the filing of changes to operations.
“As part of this change, we are modernizing the business — integrating our networks, optimizing our footprints, aligning our operations and expanding our regional capabilities (Super Regional) to better serve our customers and redefine our value proposition in the LTL marketplace,” Yellow said.
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Totally Awesome Shipper, AAA-rated
As an enterprise size LTL shipper for over 12 years, as well as shipping and receiving multi-mode shipments from one of top worst outbound, never heard of, Southeastern US (where AL met FL met GA) little town. Hour and a half hours away from everywhere, Lord bless it. I always liked YRC, but they are only 1 of 10 options that I will even consider moving LTL & VLTL. Unfortunately for YRC, damages began being much more frequent as we approached 2019-2020 and I’ve backed off to hardly anything as a result recently.
39 terminals, yeah they’ve got their work cut out for themselves, for sure! Maybe they can secure the “board” once again.
Mark Duncan
Well funny. Roadway was operating at a loss. Yellow should have let them go under and cherry picked the business but the cameraman wanted to be Mr Big Shot to Wall Street and thought it was a great idea to buy several companies to compete against themselves instead of consolidating freight and reducing over all empties. But the Z man got his $100m and bailed
Robert Perkins
I retired from Holland Kansas City when yellow freight took over Holland it was the kiss of death I don’t know of any company that yellow freight has touched that didn’t go broke or they sucked all the freight out of it and got rid of it I worked for y’all for a while running team that was a nightmare running team hell they ran sleeper trucks like we ran in the 1960s it was not a good experience yellow freight will end up bankrupt there’s never been that I know of any truck line that has taken a cut and pay and a cutting benefits that has survived and when they file bankruptcy and everything is settled they’ll come back with a different name probably non-union
RJ
Sounds like a bunch of crybabies
John
Like UPS ruined OverNite Transportation.
Steven Redman
When Yellow bought Roadway, it set Roadway back 20 years. So now, 20 years later, they are proposing changes so the new company will have the same thing Roadway had before Bill Zollars came calling. Yellow was in trouble and convincing Roadway’s block shareholders to sell was Yellow’s lifeline. Roadway had the opportunity to buy Yellow at various times prior but rightfully never saw the need. I have reviewed the proposed change of operations and see a lot of Roadway coming through. The change reopens many of Roadway’s old terminals or road boards, most using the old Roadway terminal codes. It also whittles down New Penn’s and Holland’s presence in many areas, but offers opportunities in other, new areas. It’s the rank and file that gets to pull up stakes and move in order to maintain seniority and all that goes with that. The company wants to have this change of operations up and running in under 60 days, but the timeline for the company to pay for the moving expenses for families to move is one year. That gets pretty tight when you have to find a new place and prepare and sell your old.
Kenneth Reid
That’s right
James Lawless
Every company Yellow got a hold of either went out of business or lost considerable profitability. They continually try to reinvent the wheel. Bottom line is geography in the United States never changes. Columbus Ohio is still the same distance from Chicago. Holland was a profitable trucking company with extremely low damage claims until Yellow took control then damage claims went thru the roof. Why change what Holland was doing if it worked?