Apparently Yellow Freight is filing bankruptcy after all. https://www.freightwaves.com/news/y...Hnhbg3_5awBEPY1sUw8AOt2O16tyGT1nxLH3v1WBjF-KQ
I wouldn't be surprised if Yellow ceases to exist within a couple weeks. Or at the very least, continue operating under some form of bankruptcy protection. The LTL industry cannot sustain itself long term under a union environment. Who remembers Consolidated Freightways, aka CF. They couldn't afford to replace aging equipment due to wage and pension obligations. If memory serves me correctly, their assets became Conway, which is non union. Motorways was once Canada's largest freight hauler. Deregulation, coupled with wage and pension obligations, along with strict job descriptions, helped put them out of business by the early 90's. Their highway drivers ran short routes, about 250 miles/day. They'd switch loads with other drivers so they were home every night. They rarely worked overtime and union rules didn't permit them to deliver their load direct to the customer. All inbound loads were dropped at the terminal for the next available city driver to deliver. This resulted in overall lousy customer service. Their equipment was old and ratty.
union and yellow are still having negotiations. lots of things are being thrown around. not over til the fat lady sings as it were. without a deal with the teamsters the co isn't able to get the financing. but as I've been told by a little birdie, if the co gets a deal done with teamsters and can't get financing the ibt will look at helping them secure the money to keep the doors open. not sure how true but that was the rumor. either way, I'll be down there tomorrow and until they lock the gate as long as they keep the compensation coming.
abf and t force freight seem to be making profit with union labor and have agreed to five year deals recently. we(yellow) are the lowest paid wages in our market for an ltl carrier. we also have the lowest rates. old dominion, fed ex freight, Estes , r&l carriers AAA Cooper all have higher pay and higher rates. not sure how to put that across but If the mgmt does not charge enough and picks up anything I'm not sure that is the best plan. that said we have excellent health insurance and is the reason myself and probably most of my coworkers are there. this low wage doesn't help recruit new drivers. young guys don't care about insurance.
My wife places an order for work needs every other week, and until last week the supplier shipped with UPS. That always worked well, the driver knows the days she works, the days they’re closed, and where to leave it if it’s an off day. Last week the supplier tried FedEx due to the looming strike and FedEx warning that they wouldn’t take new customers once the strike started. That might have been a ploy on FedEx’s part, but FedEx has failed miserably. The order has been ‘out for delivery’ or ‘there by 4:45 today’ since Saturday. Her supplier finally agreed to reship the order (with UPS) but it’s waaay late now. Fed Ex had an opportunity to earn the business, but that episode just solidified our preference for UPS. Patrick
I believe Yellow's recent troubles began years ago when they chose to expand. They somehow managed to buy the number 1 LTL company, Roadway, in 2003. Yellow was number 2 at the time. Sounds like an LBO. The recession of 2008 didn't help matters, or their bottom line. https://investors.myyellow.com/news...ation-acquire-roadway-corporation-966-million I certainly don't wish to see them fold leaving thousands unemployed. The Teamsters tried to organize Purolator Courier in Canada around 1989-1990. I was part of the Winnipeg, MB management team at the time. We listened to employees concerns, and did our best to respond to them. Employees didn't always get the answer they wanted, but respected us for listening. Teamsters got less than 10% to sign cards. They managed to sign up enough smaller terminals across the country to meet the national certification requirements. I was told by several employees the Teamsters "fined" every Winnipeg employee who didn't sign a card something like $50.00. It's likely that also occurred elsewhere. Unionization essentially ruined a great management/employee relationship at our terminal. I left there in January 1991.
I agree with your last sentence, but they need to be reminded that they don't stay young forever. Looking back, I would take a little less money and great healthcare over the reverse. In our case we had the best of both worlds; she had a lower salary then I, but fabulous healthcare insurance. My job paid quite a bit more, but the healthcare plan was lousy. We kept her (family) healthcare plan and I never took any healthcare from my employer. Needless to say I paid for half of her plan coverage, but it worked out very well.
Latest info concerning Yellow doesn't look very promising. Selling a profitable asset might not the best plan. https://www.thetrucker.com/trucking...sHN72HRAzczPXoOpbzugxLMDOLgTEpOF4UGOHc87SEVtU
Here's an old sign I have . Tobin was President from 1931 to 1952 . English was appointed Treasurer by Tobin in 1946 where he served until 1969 when he died at age 80 .
Here's my take as a Teamster member for about a dozen years.. My Father was a IBEW member all his life.. Union's were critical back when that sign was new.. The Robber-Barren industrialists were in fact working recent immigrants nearly to death in the early 1900's. Unions stopped that practice, and made the jobs livable, while providing a good wage. Interestingly enough, it was not the unions that directly forced changes, far sighted individuals that ran these companies realized that workers produced more when they were in a better environment.. Henry Ford comes to mind.. do the research.. But Unions did force those who were not so far sighted into providing reasonable working conditions. That's good, and was at the time often was a life saver to the general labor population. Fast forward to the 21st century: We have the alphabet soup government agencies that have so many rules and regulations for employers that the unions role in worker safety is irrelevant. They exist now only to negotiate salaries and benefits, and run a pension system. And over the years, many unions, the teamsters included, were famous for under the table loans and their deals with organized crime. Graft and corruption were/are rampant. Mismanagement of union pensions funds were the norm.. I know, my own pension fund, managed by Local 937 went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the Feds. For the consumer, as was stated, unions are bad.. we all pay for those big union jobs and benefit packages. Union Companies are crippled in a competitive marketplace, with overseas goods flooding in. They simply can't compete on price when paying union wages. That's not a moral judgment, simply the fact of the matter. The answer was not for Americans to buy only american made goods, which is a wonderful notion but will never be reality, the answer was for our government to level the playing field for our American companies with union labor forces, and to tarriff the snot out of those "cheap goods" flooding into our ports and across our borders. But our leaders were doing the exact opposite. They were bantering about "free trade zones" and passing regulations and laws that both crippled our companies, as well as opened our markets to cheap goods.. NAFTA was only one of those wonderful agreements. Ross Parot was famously quoted as saying "there will be a giant sucking sound" as companies move to Mexico for cheap labor if the NAFTA agreement was passed. He was derided and ridiculed at the time by the politicians and the press.. but we all found out how correct he was, as companies closed union factories in the heart of our country and moved production to Mexico.. And where were the Unions in all of this? It was their responsibility to protect those union jobs, but they sat quietly on the sidelines during that period.. Remember the big AFL/CIO marches on Washington DC protesting legislation that allowed those Union jobs to go away? No, you don't because they never happened.. by in large, the unions were supporting the very politicians who were promoting these union job destroying policies. So.. what point is there to having these organizations, if they are no longer a boon to the worker, but could end up pushing their jobs right out of the country? Blaming the employers/corporations is a wonderful slogan for a poster, but back in the real world, everyone has to benefit from a labor agreement, because if they don't it's the union member that pays the ultimate price. Look up the history of the UAW if you have any doubts about that. Getting $20/hour plus full benefits back in the 80's to screw on door handles was great for the worker in the short term, but in the long term, that job disappeared. As far as my personal experience in a union shop, I did enjoy the good pay and benefits, but they were not that much more than other non union dealerships were paying at the time.. It seemed that the main function of the union was to protect the lazy bums who did not want to work, but to just punch the clock, and serve their time until they could retire and collect their pensions. It took nearly an act of God to fire anyone.. As both a union member, and then later an employer, I can see both sides of the issues, and have lived both. I think that a union should be working for the short and long term benefit of their membership, and if they do that, then that's a good thing, and we are lucky to have them. But if they are really doing that is open to interpretation and debate.. JW
I agree with what Jim said. Unfortunately, unions got comfortable and maybe complacent (edited to be more kind) and people took them, and American production and labor for granted or blamed them for the economic malaise that was setting in. That made it easier for those who wanted them gone to convince voters and politicians to throw out the bathwater and the baby. Cheaper (and in many cases, better made) goods helped make the case that US labor was too expensive and maybe even lazy. As he (and I) said, it took 30 years to vindicate Mr. Perot. It took 30 years for all that free trade to kill our mills, foundaries and factories. It took 30 years to replace the downtown stores with WalMarts. It took 30 years for management to transfer the cost savings from cheaper labor to their stock value and executive pay. It took a generation for the rich to get sooo much richer while so many stayed behind. Our country has a very short attention span and a lot of shiny things to distract it. Add in the ignorance of many who figure ‘the band is still playing, don’t worry about the tilting floor..’ and we arrive at today, where huge swaths of the working public want ‘someone’ to fix it and will listen to any huckster who claims he can fix it while choosing not to trust the authorities who watched, allowed or encouraged it to happen. Patrick
Massachusetts used to be the shoemaking capital of the United States, and due to New England's plentiful water power, also the USA's textile capital. Precision machinery including firearms were manufactured along the banks of the Connecticut River. Pretty much all of the shoemaking is gone - New Balance is a rare exception - textiles are virtually non-existent, and the firearms industry is contracting. Although I like the concept of high union wages, there is a limit to what the corporations can pay. The reason that we buy so many foreign products is that we have priced ourselves out of the market.
The company I work for got a delivery from Yellow Freight last week consisting of several pallets of material. The next day it was discovered that Yellow Freight also left a pallet of stuff that was supposed to be delivered to a different customer, but there is no name or full address on it. Calls were made to Yellow Freight (not easy getting anyone from YF on the phone) and YF said "We are not making any more pick-ups or deliveries. We are done." Unfortunately there is no name or address on the pallet of material. Just some sort of internal number for Yellow Freight. So there is a customer somewhere that didn't get there stuff and we have no way to even let them know they could come here and pick it up. The material also isn't something we can even use. So it will likely go into a dumpster. Bummer for everyone.
I disagree. I sold clothing and shoes in a department store in high school and college (about the time manufacturing was leaving), and I could explain and demonstrate why Dexter, Bass, Sperry, Johnson & Murphy, Carolina Boot and other US made shoes were more expensive. Better stitching, all leather uppers and soles, better quality hides, better structure, more consistent fit, ability to resole, reheel, polish and maintain for years. Sure, some customers were the ‘haint ya got sonepin cheaper’s, but many of my customers were willing to buy good quality. Apparently not enough were, though, and just like the unions didn’t make their case well, the shoemakers didn’t either. They chased the cheap customer and found that many buyers only care about price and will buy any shoe, regardless of it being vinyl and glued together, as long as it’s cheap and squishy feeling. And now those Massachusetts towns have few small town stores, fewer choices for good quality shoes, probably zero shoe repair shops or cobblers, and fewer opportunities to earn much more than minum wage. But they got WalMart! Patrick If cheap shoes meant people who would be barefoot or have to skip a meal to buy shoes can have footwear and lunch, I’d be more sympathetic. But it doesn’t. The Walmart mentality is not ‘look how much less I spent on neccessities, now I can save more for the kids’ college or my retirement!’; the Walmart mentality is ‘look how much crap I can buy!’ …And Nike isn’t using cheap labor to make their shoes cheaper to buy, either!
Observations on two of your points: First, I worked for a textile/clothing company that never had a unionized shop in their US operations despite their name. When they moved lots of operations to Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador, the guys that were losing there jobs had to train their Central American replacements. Some of them kept their jobs longer as they moved the machines to Latin America and set them up. One of our Honduras plants voted to unionize. Nothing much changed until a few years later when we hit a slump and they closed 3 facilities. One of them was the union shop. Somehow, colleges around the country threatened to boycott unless we reopened the union shop. They didn't give two craps about the non-union shops as they were being manipulated by agitators. In Honduras, we paid well by local standards. Second, about the union lazy workers not getting fired. I never worked for minimum wage in my life because I never did the minimum. My first job in 1976 at 14 years old paid $0.15/hour more than minimum because I got up at 2AM to fry donuts. After I was there a month, he gave me a $0.25/hr raise because I showed up and did the work. While I was there, he hired 2 other people that didn't last 2 weeks. Plus, I got free donuts! Throughout my career I never wanted to be a part of a union because I was certain that I was being paid more than my lesser motivated coworkers that didn't put in the effort I did. I didn't want to get paid the same as the average worker because I was never the average worker.
I do not disagree that wages were not the only issue in the Demise of American manufacturing in the North, but there is a reason why the foreign and some domestic manufacturers are building or relocating in the Southern states. Unions are about as popular South of the Mason-Dixon line as Crab Lice.
As I previously stated, my father was president of his local union for most of the 1960's. He worked for Swift's Canadian Meat Packing at the time. Started there in 1952 or 53 and worked his way up the ranks to ultimately become one of their delivery drivers after 20 years inside the plant. Most of his coworkers were close to the same age, and got along very well. As the most senior employees retired, they were replaced by younger guys with different attitudes about work. Before long, the younger guys, and they were all males at the time, began to usurp the union hierarchy. My father was soon voted out of his job and replaced by a more militant and less capable negotiator who was full of rhetoric. Even though he did regain his president's title a couple years later, he soon resigned as the damage had already been done. The plant closed for good after a few more years throwing several hundred out of a job.
Now I'll add a few personal experiences in dealing with union shops. First time I made a delivery to CN Rail's Winnipeg warehouse, walked up to an old guy standing at a shipping/receiving desk. He grabbed my paperwork, stared at it for 30 seconds, and said "I'm a shipper, not the receiver" and threw it back at me. Told me the receiver would be along any moment. Refrained from making any comment until the proper guy showed up. He then had to hunt down a forklift driver to unload the 350 lb crate I had. Total waste of time. Similar story at what's now Magellan Aerospace. Every time I'd deliver there was 15-20 minutes for one or two small pallets. Delivering to unionized food warehouses when doing over the road was often a nightmare. Check in at dock office, wait for a door assignment, hear "suggestion" to hire a non union lumper to hand bomb product onto pallets for quickest service. Or I could hand bomb it myself, but unloading would likely take longer. Hated those loads with a passion despite the workout they provided. Union shops tend to have specific jobs meaning more than one person was needed even for the simplest task. It's stupid to need 3 or more people to unload one pallet or a truckload. Not every union shop I went into was difficult to deal with. Some were fairly decent. I have worked in a union shop, but didn't always follow the only do your job and nothing else rule. Loved going to most non union shops as one person often handled the entire job. They tended to be happier as well.
