On a much smaller scale, I feel this man's pain. This viral moment was sparked by news that long-time Yellow employees are at risk of losing their pensions after years of bad company performance. I have a faint sense for what it means to give good years and effort to something that does not last beyond employment.
Key facts:
Yellow, the 3rd largest US freight carrier notified staff on Friday that it is shutting down and laying off employees at all of its locations.
The closure will be a loss of approximately 30,000 jobs and will be the end of a business deemed so critical by the US government as to justify a $700M CARES Act loan.
Yellow has a total debt liability of $1.5B - half is owed to the Federal Government and the other half to Apollo Group, a private equity firm.
Months-long negotiations to renew labor contracts with Teamsters union employees adds a wrinkle.
The viral element revealed in the Tik Tok video is that the pensions of 22,000 Teamsters are at risk. Some on the union side claim Yellow management is "terrible". They bought and ruined competitors like Preston, Roadway, Holland, and New Penn.
It is unclear to this writer whether it was legacy Yellow management or PE-installed management who took taxpayer cash to pay themselves bonuses. I guess someone has to take credit for keeping them afloat during the global health mandates as they report a DAILY burn of $10M!
Questions formed by my aggressively typing fingers include the following:
Does anyone believe the supply chain and logistics industries will recover and normalize from the previous 3-years of global health mandates?
Who believes "new normal" is a concept that must be accepted?
Comment below.
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