A Fieldwork Profile of Yellow is a 12 chapter book that examines Yellow Freight. This insider look studies a flat plane apparatus, internal dock designs, tools, culture, and directives. Yellow Corporation chose to enter the strange. The company rolled out a new business plan and immediately one of its largest terminals out west became a loser within the Yellow system. This is the story of the destruction of Yellow within its last stages.
Introduction & Final Entry
I'm not new to the experience of watching a corporation fold. Even before I joined the Yellow tribe, I learned that gates can close. People and things can quickly disperse. Time will pass and memories will surely fade.
This book began as mere fragments of a vision. Yellow was already in trouble and I had been taking notes for a while. Then with the introduction of Yellow’s new “roll-out” business plan, the sudden changes to the way we operated were beyond alarming. The company had entered the ridiculous and was choosing to stay there. Some workers here were hip to the LTL game. They knew the Tracy 813 jungle. It was clear that awkward looking pieces were moving into place and that uncertainty was all over the terminal. A mood arrived which frequently pulled my memory back to my working days at Consolidated Freightways. CF was an experience that I kept close to the vest while working at Yellow. CF was specific and there were stark contrasts. Also, there was already enough fear all around the barn in Tracy, I didn't need to run my mouth and add to it. But people knew I had been in the industry for awhile, so occasionally when I did get asked I was careful with those discussions. I never forgot how the carpet was pulled out from underneath us while at Consolidated Freightways. And when the whole CF-spin-off-pride-team-charade was over, it was like we had lost our home. However, my working tenure there wasn't all bad, far from it. The Sacramento terminal at CF had a big seniority roster which was filled with adults. Working that dock forced me to grow up quickly. It taught me how to respect the space of others. It also taught me how to identify those workers who were positively contributing. There were a few dud workers to be sure, but CF had a big horde of proven products who were bottom-line contributors, especially on its outbound end. Every time those workers hit the dock the company was in a position to make money off of their labor. Many people there were intelligent. Many people there were working near optimal levels. Many workers there were mature. And many of the workers there were hard. Some of the finest LTL dockworkers in the 1980's and 1990's came from two LTL giants, P.I.E. & Consolidated Freightways. Both carriers, despite the fact that they had shut their doors, had produced large amounts of absolute work horses, and some of those workers were long in years. Despite the history of both carriers, middle management and labor must have been doing something right especially on the hiring and training level. The sheer number of good workers didn't lie. They were all over the industry.
CF was something like a 10 year trial run. During my 21 years at Yellow/Roadway I frequently found myself looking back to old lessons. All the big fundamentals were already ingrained in me, but I had sharpened a few habits while working at Yellow. Note taking and paying close attention to my work environment took on a new meaning, especially during the period when Yellow began its long sputter. Yellow was a melodrama filled with changes of operations, more and more collisions of actors, more and more alterations, and finally a collective work behavior the product of which had become detrimental to the business. I can effectively say that because if, as an LTL business, too many poorly loaded trailers are being created (especially on the outbound end), then something is not only wrong, but the situation has become dire. The business is in trouble. Like Consolidated Freightways, Yellow Freight had its own share of adults, and Yellow workers were talking. People knew that this place could quickly end, Warn Act or not. And for myself, trust had left the building a long time ago. Despite all of the rhetoric and lack of real communication, a sudden work closure was a real prospect. It could arrive quickly and unexpectedly. The tumbleweeds could roll and all of the scenery here could soon become mere wisps of smoke. During the first week of the roll-out my gut was telling me there was still some time, but not much.
We had a new business plan, a strange new mix, a grand design, a building contradiction, a paradox, a self-inflicted gash. It was a new Yellow style. We followed our computers, we were told to load as much as we could, and we ran. Dockworkers were reminded over and over again that this newfangled way of doing things was the future at Yellow. We were like a pack of west coast guinea pigs. Soon this business plan would be implemented across the board, and not relegated to a selection of barns. A wave was coming. Yellow was changing. Yellow was trying to keep pace with something, somewhere. It was a new order. It was a new business requirement. We couldn't survive without it. And as we drove towards this new yellowfied future, everybody had to do their part especially during times when we got behind, when more and more unfamiliar faces were flown in from other parts of the country in order to get us caught up. It was like turning on a switch; all of the sudden the barn in Tracy had become a bottom feeder terminal.
We weren't making beer here. And we weren't pressing ingots. We were picking up freight, and we were delivering freight. And in between was the endless game of stripping trailers and loading them up. We were in the game of making cube. It was freight handling action that the public couldn't see. Achieving responsible one-and-done cube was the goal. Keeping an eye out for the next terminal had to figure into our thinking especially inside the Yellow satellite-to-consolidation center shipping engine. Before the customer ever saw their freight, there were a few more touches. Underneath the hood, maintaining cube quality had been the order year after year. Tracy was far from perfect but we kept the engine running even during times when our graveyard manpower wasn't full strength. But along came the roll-out, and with it came several new alterations. Labor was flip-flopped. The actors handling the freight on the outbound end had completely changed. The terminal had been invaded. Work responsibilities had been inverted. The seniority roster had been shaken up and punctured. But the real victim was the freight coming here from our satellite terminals. Those trailers were getting emptied out night after night by a big pack of out-of-house truck drivers. Those workers produced differently. Running cube within outbound load doors was grossly altered. Yellow was quickly and quietly changing. In summary, the outbound loads in Tracy suddenly stunk. The standard at terminal 813 had changed. Quality control had virtually disappeared overnight. And it was passed off and explained away as the future is here.
A subset of us watched it. Some of us were cynical. Some of us were unyielding. And some of us simply weren't buying it. But we continued to do as we were told. Somehow we would fit in around this new problem while simultaneously trying to adhere to strict freight fundamentals. We were products of experience. We knew our stuff and we knew how to effectively stuff trailers, especially in tandem with one another. We also knew the inherent value of cube and its meaning to the business at hand. But now, Yellow had chosen to dummy up the place. There is no other way to describe it. It's like looking at an organization, a department, or a bureau where valuable experience is a requirement, but instead, somehow a decision is made to go another direction where experience gets dismissed, sidestepped, or somehow is shown the door. It's a move that comes with risks. That direction also comes with new questions. Who do you really want working, especially in high impact areas? Does it matter if they are effective or not? If a choice is made not to go with real proven experience, then what should the expectations really be? Are there predictable repercussions? What types of products are on the horizon? What should a corporation expect if what it has constructed is fundamentally unsound? And if the results are poor, and those results continue to be encouraged without remedy, then the real pressing question becomes:
Who the fuck is in charge?
Well, Yellow made its choice. Somewhere people had designed it. Somewhere people had agreed to it. And right out of the gate its shape was utterly grotesque, its mass and momentum nothing more than bad business. This strange problem, this collection of directives, was getting stressed. Moreover, this strange problem was causing stress on our ability to maintain responsible outbound cube. And none of it was getting remedied. This was the new direction at Yellow, an LTL giant which boasted an alternative freight methodology.
And what a drive home it was! What a golden future it was! What a beautiful message! What precision! A blatant tool had been fashioned in order to drive the whole thing home. Yellow chose to cycle in massive amounts of inexperienced bodies to do the same dummy up cube building bullshit night after night. And by acting so, the corporation sidestepped its own hands-on experience. It was an LTL contradiction in real time and real space. It was passed off as a hunky dory visitation, like it was business as usual. In working reality this massive night time puzzle building endeavor was nothing more than a funeral march. In summation, the days at Yellow Freight had to be numbered. The freight, the ichor of the business, continued to be poorly handled and recklessly compromised.
Bankruptcy was declared. The Yellow sarcophagus was now ready to be occupied. Dockworkers and drivers were talking about getting a piece of the bankruptcy pie, but I wasn't expecting anything. All assets would soon get soaked up, Yellow would get picked clean, and the little people would probably get moved to the back. To suggest there would be any table scraps leftover from that carcass was borderline naiveté. Could it happen? Maybe. But when trust is gone, it's gone. Also, with all the finger pointing going on during Yellow's final weeks, it seemed like nobody was responsible for this pirated ship. Given all of the shoddy roll-out arrangements during Yellow's last stages, it felt like corporate skulduggery to me. So why should I expect anything at all? I know bad treatment when I see it; sometimes it can leave behind much more than just another unemployed worker. It can produce a snarling dog. Were all the bankers, and liquidators, and lawyers going to look out for our best interests? The fact is, reality can be a mother fucker! When the doors closed it was time to thank a few people. It was time to permanently put away my boots. It was time to switch gears. And it was time to start thinking about this project.
I wasn't excited about it, but I knew eventually this thing had to get done. Procrastination was somehow averted and within a few weeks I began writing some of the easier material. I found a few good writing spaces and kept a personal log in order to stay focused. With a bare bones word processor, I gradually began to move ideas around and as the material expanded I could see the project moving far beyond a multi-layered treatise. A book was emerging. This thing was going to require a spell. It was also going to require a specific plan.
The project had to be kept completely private from start to finish. Even if I could see the value of sharing ideas with others, I couldn’t draw anyone into this while under construction. During edits, much of the venom had to be removed, and details needed to remain deadly accurate. In the end, every chapter had to be cold. I would write the book, build a simple web site around it, fix it free within the internet, then walk away from it.
The problem of length was a haunt that wasn't going away. With old chapters needing refinement, and with new chapters emerging out of nowhere, I had to make a decision. What kind of book length was I really looking at? I was presented with three different choices:
The first choice was obvious. The whole work had to be tight even if it was overly wrought with a tired repetitiveness. It needed to be free of schematics, of more and more dock lay-outs, and all of the flat space materials of design. Without throwing a lasso on it, the book could morph into an unnecessary operating manual, something that would take the work completely off point. Also, I was in no mood to draw on anything I had written previously, whether any of those ideas were applicable or not. I might reference them, but I couldn't draw on them. Yellow Freight was the subject so the book needed to focus on Yellow ground. It had to get wrapped in under two hundred pages with no more than a dozen chapters. I wanted a lean snake of a book.
The second choice had a weird potential. Two chapters could mushroom and get out of control if I wasn't careful. I could see a full range of ideas that could draw me in, then pull me away. The book might take on a different style and settle somewhere in the 300-350 page range. In my mind, this direction didn't seem to work. The project was already rickety.
The third choice was a rock pile of a book. I had plenty of notes to draw upon. The change to door frequency and the generation of new flat planes over and over again suggested something. Every change created a new card. Every poor decision within this so-called business plan was something new to consider. Every new card was packed with meaning, especially if the cards were erroneous. One big west coast facility was throwing paint against the wall and calling it a business plan. Some workers believed (believed mind you) that the alterations were so bad that they had to be calculated. Yellow not only invited a business ogre, but it had created one. And there was no shortage of material to examine. However, I had my own ogre of a project to consider. I could see the development of a 500 or 600 page lumbering giant. This direction was tugging on me a little, but not a lot.
By September 2024 the book was done. It was also time to close my log. I remember leaning back on Labor Day and telling myself that it could stand as is. So, a hard copy was printed out and notarized. There have been some revisions and edits to it since then, but not much.
Help was clearly needed on many levels, but the mission was to privately create it then place it somewhere within the internet. There was no desire to market it. Though I had noted it on a few boards and sent it as an attachment within a few waves of emails (mostly to academia), as a 12 chapter collection I consider it an underground work, an obscure book with purpose. I can let it ferment. Soon it won’t pull on me at all. My only obligation as author is to keep the final version of the work fixed and available. A site building company will be paid annually to keep it afloat and to ensure that the whole work remains free, undiluted, and easy to access for years to come. I'll always stand by it.
Time to respectfully clock out,
Daniel A. Pino
Author and former employee of Yellow Freight