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 very hip to the LTL game. They knew the Tracy 813 jungle. For these types of workers, the blatant atrophy of the place was obvious. Also, awkward looking pieces were moving into place. Responsible cube had been compromised. At this stage, I had an obligation to keep the notes accurate, and to keep them going since uncertainty was all over the terminal. That collective mood pulled my memory back to my working days at Consolidated Freightways, an experience I kept close to the vest because it was specific and it was different. There was already enough fear in the barn at Tracy, I didn't need to add to it. But if asked, I might volunteer some common flags, maybe some bad parallels. I never forgot how the carpet was pulled out from underneath us while at Consolidated Freightways. And when the whole CF charade was over, it was like losing your home. However, my working tenure there wasn't all bad, far from it. The Sacramento terminal at CF was hard work, the place was big, and the seniority roster there 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 special bottom-line contributors, especially on its outbound end. Every time those workers hit the dock the company was in a position to make money. Many people there were intelligent. Many people there were working near optimal levels. Many workers there were mature. And many of the men there were hard. The real question was: Could the company take advantage of those qualities? Or, after losing its vision with ConWay, did the company even care?
CF was something like a 10 year trial run for me. Later, during my two decade run at Yellow/Roadway I frequently found myself looking back to old lessons, sometimes lost in reflection mode. All the big fundamentals were already ingrained in me, but it was a few little things (some smaller tools) that I had learned which once again became priorities at Yellow, especially once the company began its long sputter. The first tool was the value of taking notes. The second tool was paying close attention to my work environment. Yellow was a different melodrama filled with changes of operations, more and more collisions of actors, and finally a collective work behavior the product of which was detrimental. I can effectively say that because the name of the game is cube. If, as an LTL business, you are in the game of creating too many poorly loaded trailers (especially on the outbound end), then something is not only wrong, the situation has become dire. Those of us who knew what we were looking at discussed it among ourselves. Like Consolidated Freightways, Yellow Freight had its own share of adults, and these people were talking. The activity of building poor outbound trailers became serious business. So, for myself, the smaller tools became bigger tools. Paying attention and note taking became top priorities. And as the notes piled up I already knew that sometime later I would be able to glean value from them, so I continued to maintain them. I knew that this place could quickly end, Warn Act or not. And for myself, trust had left the building a long time ago. A sudden work closure was a real prospect, it could arrive quickly, unexpectedly. The tumbleweeds could roll and all of the scenery here could soon become mere wisps of smoke. I had already thrown all of the company rhetoric right into the trash can. My gut was telling me there was still time, but not much.
We had a new inheritance, a growing paradox, something we did to ourselves. A massive problem of cube loomed, a problem designed then rolled out. They pointed us into directions, and we ran. And even if resistance was large or small, as dockworkers we were reminded over and over again that this newfangled cube building endeavor was the future at Yellow. This was a vision that soon 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 pure shit. 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, we were in the game of making cube on a responsible basis, then taking it apart, something the public couldn't see. That's what was going on underneath the hood. That was the standard. But the standard had gotten away from us.
Some of us watched it. Some of us were unyielding. And some of us simply weren't buying it. However, 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 stuff trailers. 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 the DOJ, the FBI, the DHS, or the CDC, or any other bureau or department where valuable experience has been tossed aside and sidestepped. It's all a choice. Who do you want working? And in what areas? Do you run with experience or not? And if you choose not to go with real proven experience, what should the expectations be? What types of products are on the horizon? What should a large organization, a bureau, or a large corporation be willing to accept especially if all of it is self-constructed and fundamentally unsound? And if the results are poor, and those results continue to be poor without remedy, then the real question is: Who the fuck is in charge? What are the real long term risks? Or, is a large influx of mediocrity and/or inexperience just a negligible write-off, marginal in nature, barely out of bounds?
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 a bad business momentum. This strange problem was getting stressed, and 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 futuristic Yellow, an LTL giant which boasted a new freight methodology. This was the drive. This was the direction. And as workers we were helpless to do anything about it.
And what a drive home it was! What a golden future it was! And what beautiful messaging! A blatant tool had been fashioned in order to drive the whole thing home. And what surgical precision! 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 business as usual, and it quickly added up. In summation, the days at Yellow Freight had to be numbered. The main product (the freight) had been poorly handled and recklessly compromised.
The Yellow crypt finally closed. The smoke of bankruptcy was everywhere. All the assets would soon get soaked up. Yellow would get picked clean. Dockworkers and drivers were talking about getting a piece of the bankruptcy pie, but I wasn't expecting anything. For myself, to suggest there would be any table scraps left on that carcass was borderline naiveté. It could happen to my surprise, but when trust is gone, it's gone. Near the end there was plenty of finger pointing, but too many people were missing in action and nobody was responsible for this pirated ship. And given the shoddy roll-out arrangements during Yellow's last stages, all of it felt like corporate skulduggery to me. So why should I expect anything at all? Were all the bankers, and liquidators, and lawyers going to look out for my best interests? Reality can be a mother fucker! So when the doors closed, I thanked a few people and put Yellow Freight in my rear view mirror. Besides, it was time to focus on the project ahead of me. I had thought about this project for a few years, and I had documented plenty even before the roll-out. It was time to switch gears. With virtually no energy to draw upon I wasn't excited about starting it, but it had to get done. Once enough personal steam was built, I began writing some of the easier material. I found a few good writing spaces and kept a personal log to help 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 and this thing was going to require a spell.
It became evident that the project needed to remain completely private from beginning to end. Even if I could see the value of sharing ideas with others, I couldn’t draw anyone into this while under construction. I would keep to some simple personal by-laws. The observable had to be deadly accurate. I also needed to take all of the venom out of each chapter, or as much as I could. In the end, the book had to be cold. So, I would write the book, then build a simple web site around it. I'd 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/direction 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/direction 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/direction was just a demolition derby of a work. I had a mass of notes to draw upon. And there was plenty of value there. 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/web record. I had no desire to sell it nor 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