99-year-old trucking company shuts down, putting 30,000 out of work – National & International News – MON 31Jul2023

Yellow trucking company shuts down, puts 30,000 out of work.

Voting rights groups say Alabama GOP flouting SCOTUS election map order.

NATIONAL NEWS

99-year-old trucking company shuts down, putting 30,000 out of work

Yellow Corp., a long-haul trucking company founded in 1924, is shutting down and headed for bankruptcy. This will leave over 30,000 employees out of a job, including about 22,000 union truck drivers and dockworkers.

Yellow is one of the few major trucking companies left that had a fully unionized driving team. The company’s management has been in negotiations with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents Yellow’s truckers, for several months. Management was demanding that the Teamsters agree to more changes in work rules for drivers as well as concessions on pension.

or nearly two decades, the Teamsters had allowed Yellow to significantly reduce pay, pensions and other compensations for its members as Yellow claimed it was the only way they could stay in business. Back in June, Sean O’Brien, who became Teamster’s leader last year, signaled he wouldn’t be nearly so charitable to Yellow at the expense of his members. “After decades of gross mismanagement,” O’Brien wrote, “Yellow blew through a $700 million bailout from the federal government, and now it wants workers to foot the bill“.

O’Brien called today’s news,” unfortunate but not surprising. 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.T his is a sad day for workers and the American freight industry.”

Yellow’s shutdown is bad news for US taxpayers as well, who owned 30% of its stock.

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Voting rights groups say Alabama GOP flouting SCOTUS election map order

Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court ruled that a congressional map drawn up by Republican legislators in Alabama was in violation of the Voting Rights Act. The map they had drawn up created only one majority-Black congressional voting district out of seven, which the court ruled did not adequately represent Alabama’s 27% Black population.

After the ruling, the legislators drew up another map which barely moved the needle. One majority-Black district remained, and another majority-white district was boosted from 30%-39% Black. The NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund is representing voting rights groups who are demanding the legislature go back to the drawing board. They are appealing to a special panel of three judges, saying that hte legislature is deliberately flouting the Supreme Court’s order by refusing to draw up a second majority Black district.

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