Yellow Corp. said Tuesday it has approved Teamsters selection David Webber to serve on its board of directors. As a holder of the company’s series A preferred stock the union is allowed to hold two board seats.
Webber is a law professor at Boston University and an expert in pensions, shareholder activism and litigation, according to a news release. He is the author of the book “The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor’s Last Best Weapon.”
Webber will receive an annual cash retainer of $160,000 and is entitled to the equivalent of $100,000 in restricted stock units each year, the same compensation structure as other non-employee directors.
His appointment increases the size of Yellow’s board to 11 directors. He did not appear as a member on any of the board’s committees at the time of the filing.
Douglas Carty, co-founder of Switzer-Carty Transportation, holds the union’s other seat on the board.
In recent weeks, Yellow and the Teamsters have been involved in a heated exchange regarding the less-than-truckload carrier’s proposed change of operations it asserts is integral to its survival. The company seeks to consolidate terminals and redefine some job duties as it struggles to maintain profitability.
Similar operational changes to the Western part of Yellow’s network were accepted by the union last year. However, union leadership rejected the new changes without putting it to a vote by its members, which Yellow believed it would win.
Union heads maintain the proposed change of operations violates supplements in the National Master Freight Agreement and is merely a workaround to the existing agreement. It had previously suggested reopening the contract a year early, which Yellow has formally requested.
“We are pleased to welcome David to the board,” said Yellow Chairman Matt Doheny in a news release. “We look forward to his perspectives from a labor standpoint and we will benefit from his insights as we continue our company-wide modernization to become One Yellow.”
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Freight Zippy
Things must be going great ay Yellow with the Teamsters on the Board?
Oh sorry, they have never run a for profit business..
But they did receive $125 BILLION in corporate welfare for their pensions, that were already paid for….
john loughlin
anything yellow owned over yrs turned out bad new penn roadway jevic preston all made money til yellow got them kiss of death
DD
Fire yellow ceo Darryl Hawkins. His & others’ idea of the “FedEx way” is not the future or he’d still be at FedEx. It’s a bad path.
ABF righted their ship years ago & are once again a profitable entity..happy union employees, upgraded equipment, pension, etc,.
Rich
This is why we are starting a DeAuthorization petition at my company. Everything touched, withers and dies.
Joe Sunday
They need to put a union member on that board instead of some guys that never drove a truck or handled a piece of freight. Another thing..Look at the money just to sit on a board and meet a few times a year. Obseen. And they wonder why profits is a problem.
David Nebenfuhr
100% agreeable —- I left a similar reply last week and retired from Yellow in 2005.
Do we want a demise analogous to Consolidated Freightways , P.I.E , System 99 , Navajo, Wells Cargo , Time DC , Viking Transportation, —–( West coast, a few of the above) . And there have been addition union carriers that are in the “history books “.
TS
Would somebody please put a fork in Yellow, they’re done already
Dick Bischoff
Inviting the fox into the henhouse is an act of desperation. Yellow is in the worst financial position in its history and it could not come at a worse time with the economy entering a recession. The only reason the shipping public uses Yellow is because they go everywhere and they are cheap. Same reason the shipping public uses TForce Freight. Teamsters hard line rhetoric is laughable, it won’t last. If it does they’ll be seeking jobs at the non union LTL carriers.