High Desert affected as Yellow trucking company closes facilities, prepares for bankruptcy
Once a major player in the High Desert, Yellow Corp. shut down its trucking operations on Sunday as it prepared to head for a bankruptcy filing.
The Teamsters Union made the announcement on Monday about the Nashville, Tennessee-based trucking company, which shuttered sites after laying off hundreds of nonunion employees last Friday.
“Today’s news is unfortunate but not surprising,” Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien wrote in a statement. “Yellow has historically proven that it could not manage itself despite billions of dollars in worker concessions and hundreds of millions in bailout funding from the federal government."
O’Brien added that the announcement of the closure is a sad day for workers and the American freight industry.
Yellow is one of the nation’s largest less-than-truckload carriers. The closure of the 99-year-old company risks a loss of 30,000 jobs.
Hope of survival?
Shares of Yellow jumped more than 121% on Tuesday, after more than doubling in the previous session, following a news report that private equity firm Apollo Global Managementwas nearing a deal to provide new capital to the firm after it ceased operations and prepared to file for bankruptcy, Reuters reported.
The U.S. asset manager, which owns most of one of Yellow's term loans, is well-positioned to provide backing and is finalizing a deal to lead a debtor-in-possession financing for the cash-strapped trucking company, according to Reuters.
Yellow in the High Desert
The bankruptcy announcement meant the shuttering of several facilities in Southern California, including the Adelanto, Bloomington and Fontana sites in San Bernardino County.
In 1973, Yellow Freight Systems announced it would move its Barstow relay facility on West Main Street to a new 60-door terminal being constructed on 50 acres off Lenwood Road.
After opening in 1974, the Barstow facility employed nearly 700 and ranked seventh in the city in property tax revenue, generating about $40,000 annually, the Daily Press reported.
The Barstow Yellow Freight shut its doors in May 2001 and relocated to San Bernardino, mainly due to issues with the BNSF intermodal yard, according to Yellow.
After closure, the building had mainly been unused while construction along the Interstate 15 interchange boomed.
The former Yellow Freight terminal sprang to life in 2019 as the American Quartz Group hosted a groundbreaking of its state-of-the-art quartz-surface manufacturing facility.
In February 2023, an unplanned raid at a Barstow warehouse owned by the quartz-countertop company revealed a more than 80,000-square-foot cannabis-growing operation.
Imminent demise
Yellow, whose 17.5 million annual shipments made it the third-largest in the nation, had an outstanding debt of about $1.5 billion as of March and has continued to lose customers as its demise appeared imminent.
With customers leaving — as well as reports of Yellow stopping freight pickups last week — bankruptcy would “be the end of Yellow,” Satish Jindel, president of transportation and logistics firm SJ Consulting, told The Associated Press, noting increased risk for liquidation.
With bankruptcy looming, the company has been battling against the union for months.
In June, Yellow sued the Teamsters after alleging it was “unjustifiably blocking” restructuring plans needed for the company’s survival, litigation the union called “baseless."
O’Brien referenced Yellow’s “decades of gross mismanagement,” which included spending a $700 million pandemic-era loan from the government, which the company has failed to repay in full.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
Daily Press reporter Rene Ray De La Cruz may be reached at 760-951-6227 or RDeLaCruz@VVDailyPress.com. Follow him on Twitter @DP_ReneDeLaCruz
This article originally appeared on Victorville Daily Press: High Desert affected as Yellow trucking company closes facilities
