The collapse of one of America’s largest trucking companies is reverberating across the economy, from domestic shipping and real-estate markets to Wall Street, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Yellow was a $5.2 billion business as recently as last year when it moved around 50,000 shipments a day in a trucking network that made it a fundamental part of the supply chains of hundreds of U.S. companies. The rapid wind-down of its business last month, capped by the shutdown of all operations and a bankruptcy filing in recent days, is leaving behind a trail of winners and losers as the 99-year-old trucker disappears from the highways. The most immediate winners are Yellow’s competitors in the less-than-truckload sector, known as LTL, a segment of the trucking industry that acts as a kind of circulatory system for the goods economy by having trucks carry cargo for multiple customers on the same trailer in fast-paced distribution networks. The clearest losers in Yellow’s demise are the company’s workers, who were laid off, dismissed and locked out of closed terminals and offices last month as the trucker wound down its business. The loss of some 30,000 jobs is the largest at a single company since Boeing at the end of 2020 announced it would cut its workforce by around 30,000 jobs, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement services firm.
