A total of 77 people were laid off from Yellow Corporation locations in Westbrook and Fairfield, according to Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notifications (WARN) filed with the state of Maine.
The trucking company announced earlier this week that it was shutting down and had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In a statement, Yellow blamed its union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, for creating unease among the freight company's customers over heated contract negotiations and the threat of a strike.
But the company was in trouble long before that. It received a $700 million pandemic relief loan from the federal government three years ago. A congressional inquiry later found that Yellow never should have received the loan in the first place, and that the company was in poor financial condition well before the pandemic.
In a statement, the Teamsters said the 22,000 union workers around the country who lost their jobs with Yellow should not be blamed for the company's shutdown. The union also said that the workers who lost their jobs should be "first in line" for relief as the bankruptcy proceedings more forward.
