UPS

It is only fitting that the low point of the American labor movement occurred in 2009, the Year of the Rat. The Great Recession may have started with Wall Street speculation in the housing market, but your average American had most likely never heard of Henry Lehman or his siblings until the day Dick Fuld drove the 150-year-old bank bearing their name into the ditch. But General Motors, Chrysler? Cars, even more than Hollywood, jazz and the semi-automatic rifle, are the quintessential American business. How could those get driven into the ground? As soon as freshly evicted homeowners finished packing the remains of their subprime split-levels into the backseats of their battered Tahoes, they went looking for culprits. They settled on the United Auto Workers.

Walmart has reportedly stopped using Yellow as the shipping company stares down bankruptcy and a major strike by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Craig Fuller of FreightWaves tweeted that Walmart was one of Yellow’s largest customers, meaning their exit will cost the company dearly. The implosion of Yellow could magnify the impact of any potential IBT strike against UPS, which alone could have ground the US economy to a halt. Yellow had received a $700 million federal loan during the Covid pandemic, but has run into challenges paying it back, and the New York Times reports that the company had $1.5 billion in debt in March 2023.