Yellow Corp., a once-dominant US trucking company, has filed for bankruptcy as it winds down its 99-year-old business that employs 30,000 workers.
The Nashville-based logistics provider announced Sunday it had filed for Chapter 11 relief in the US Bankruptcy Court for the district of Delaware.
“It is with profound disappointment that Yellow announces that it is closing after nearly 100 years in business,” CEO Darren Hawkins said in a statement.
“Today, it is not common for someone to work at one company for 20, 30, or even 40 years, yet many at Yellow did. For generations, Yellow provided hundreds of thousands of Americans with solid, good-paying jobs and fulfilling careers.”
Yellow said it expects to reach an agreement with its creditors, pending approval from the court, that will allow it to pay certain wages and benefits, as well as some obligations to vendors and suppliers.
The company disclosed a long list of creditors in its court filing, with Amazon (AMZN), Home Depot (HD) and Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company (GT) among the top 30 with unsecured claims.
The filing comes more than a week after the trucking company halted operations, putting 30,000 people out of work. It warned in a lawsuit last month it was at risk of running out of the money it needed to continue to operate.
As it sought a cash infusion that never came, it struggled with slowing business, an unaffordable debt load and a long-running battle with the Teamsters union, which represented 22,000 of its 30,000 employees, including its drivers and most of its dock workers.
Once an industry stalwart
Yellow Corp. was started in 1924, primarily operating under the name Yellow Freight.
The company was one of the dominant carriers in a segment of trucking known as “less-than-truckload” (LTL) — moving pallet-sized shipments of freight. Along with two other unionized LTL rivals — Roadway and Consolidated Freight — Yellow made up what was known as “the Big Three.”
But with deregulation of trucking in 1984, the Big Three and other unionized LTL carriers faced greater competition from nonunion carriers. Consolidated went out of business in 2002.
While the nonunion LTL carriers started with a significant cost advantage, repeated concessions by the Teamsters union helped close much of that gap. So did a shortage of drivers nationally, which helped lift wages at the nonunion carriers.
But Yellow faced other problems. It started taking on debt to buy many of its unionized rivals, including Roadway for nearly $1 billion in 2004.
The company had about $1.5 billion in long-term debt on its balance sheet in its most recent financial report. Nearly half that debt came from a pandemic relief loan it received from the federal government in 2020, with the US Treasury taking a 30% stake in the company in return. Those shares have lost nearly all their value since then.
In its final year, Yellow was still a major player but its dominance had faded. The company handled only about 7% of the nation’s 720,000 daily LTL shipments in 2022, according to trucking consultant Sa