LTL

Beyond its team of experts, Rice Lake has come up with an online guide to integrate a new cubing and weighing station into your shipping process.

LTL anticipating second-half bounce.

Following its March announcement in which Phoenix-based Knight-Swift Transportation, the largest player in the truckload market, with $4.5 billion in 2022 revenue, said it was acquiring Chattanooga, Tenn.-based U.S. Xpress, which ranked ninth in TL revenue last year at $2.2 billion, Knight-Swift said today that the transaction is now a done deal.

After coming to terms on a new tentative agreement in early June, ABF Freight System, the nation’s seventh-largest less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier with $2.95 billion in revenue last year, said late last week that its new five-year ABF National Master Freight contract with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters was “overwhelmingly ratified” by its ABF Teamster-represented employees.

Yellow Corp., after decades of losses in excess of $1 billion, is asking for presidential assistance in helping solve what it calls an “ongoing, intractable labor dispute” with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) union over a new contract that doesn’t expire until the end of next March.

With yesterday’s news that Nashville-based Yellow Corporation, the third-largest United States less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier, has filed a lawsuit for more than $137 million against the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), due to what Yellow called a breach of the Teamsters’ biding contract with Yellow, it leaves a lot of questions unanswered about what happens next for Yellow, whom moves roughly 8%-to-10% of the total national LTL market, and, by extension, the market itself.

Nashville-based Yellow Corporation, the third-largest United States less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier, with about 8% of the national market, said today it has filed a lawsuit, for more than $137 million, against the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT).

Logistics Management Group News Editor spoke with Frank Hurst, Executive Vice President, LTL, for Chicago-based third-party logistics and technology-enabled transportation services provider Echo Global Logistics, at this week’s SMC3 Connections conference in Orlando. Hurst addressed various supply chain and logistics trends and themes over the course of their conversation.

The new edition of the BlueGrace Logistics Confidence Index, which was recently released by Tampa, Fla.-based non-asset-based 3PL BlueGrace Logistics, pointed to variation across some key metrics, including revenue, inventory levels, and order levels, with a forward-looking slant.

There is a sharp, telling contrast among yields of trucking companies, depending on which niche they are operating. An expected slow first half for freight demand has morphed into uncertain expectations for the rest of the year. Most truckload (TL) executives are hoping for a second-half rebound to make up for a below-par first half.

ABF Freight System, the nation’s seventh-largest less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier with $2.95 billion in revenue last year, has won five years of labor peace under a tentative new National Master Freight Agreement with the Teamsters union. The Teamsters National Freight Industry Negotiating Committee (TNFINC) and ABF have tentatively agreed to terms for a new national contract. It will be sent out to approximately 8,600 ABF truck drivers, dock workers and other members nationwide. The current five-year agreement expires June 30.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) and Yellow Corp., which controls about 8% of the national less-than-truckload (LTL) market, are moving fast toward negotiating a settlement over a major change of operations that Yellow says is vital to revitalizing the 94-year-old trucking company.

ODFL reported that revenue per day fell 15.7% in May compared to May 2022, which it said was mainly driven by a 14.4% decrease in LTL tons per day. And it said that the decrease in LTL tons per day was due to an 11.4% decrease in LTL shipments per day and a 3.4% decrease in LTL weight per shipment.

The Teamsters union has come out guns blazing in the first of four separate negotiations with freight companies in the United States and Canada over the next year. In what is likely merely a negotiating ploy, the Teamsters negotiating committee said a strike authorization had been approved by members covered under ABF Freight’s National Master Freight Agreement (NMFA).

Freight demand did not pick up toward the second half of the first quarter, as it usually does in the LTL sector.