Tracy Cullen drove for Yellow Freight for nearly 40 years, well before it moved its operations to Nashville. In the past few weeks, he’s seen the company lose customers.
“It’s easy to lose freight. It’s a lot harder to get it back,” Cullen says.
Cullen is part of the Teamsters union, which had threatened to go on strike in mid-July, after Yellow missed a payment for workers’ health benefits. The freight company drew Teamsters back to the negotiating table with an $11-an-hour raise over the course of a few years.
“So, like, OK, that’s some legit money,” Cullen says.
But the money never came. Yellow is expected to file for bankruptcy before it can pay up, according to a statement from the national Teamsters union.
“We have a contract. The union, my union brothers, we did not violate it. We upheld our end of the contract,” Cullen says. “They negotiated that contract. They agreed to it. Some things in it I didn’t like, but I had to live with it. Things in it they don’t like, you live with it.”
Living with it, for Cullen and all of the other union drivers, now means looking elsewhere for work.
“Oh, they won’t have any problem getting jobs,” says David Owens, the president of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies. “A good truck driver can get a job anywhere in the country every time. There’s a huge shortage of good people that we need desperately.”
Another union job, however, will be hard to find. Tennessee is a right-to-work state, which makes it harder for workers to unionize.
“We’ve got over 15,000 member companies, and there may be one or two that are union,” Owens says. “The union broke (Yellow).”
Cullen doesn’t see it that way.
“We took pay cuts for several years to keep them in business. If it hadn’t been for us giving back, this company would have went out of business a long time ago,” Cullen says. “We upheld our end of the contract. They did not.”
Yellow did not respond to WPLN’s request for comment.
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