Roadway Express to shut terminal in West Sencea that employs 198

The idling U. S. economy is putting the brakes on a local trucking facility

Roadway Express will close its West Seneca facility March 1 as part of a national consolidation effort by parent company YRC Worldwide to “integrate” 80 facilities into a total of 450 consolidated operations.

“These closures are a result of combining two operations and eliminating duplicate capacity and assets,” said spokeswoman Cecile Fradkin.

The company’s Yellow Transportation facility in Tonawanda will remain open. YRC Worldwide said some of the 198 union, hourly and clerical employees at Roadway Express may be taken on there, but declined to say how many or how they would be chosen. Nelligan said he expects very few workers will be given the opportunity to transfer.

The closure will come just three years after company restructuring led to expansion of Buffalo operations, which added 130 jobs at the West Seneca facility. But the slowdown of the U. S. economy has greatly decreased the volume of freight shipped by the company.

“We haul freight, so if the economy is in the toilet, we’re in the toilet,” said Ken Nelligan, secretary and treasurer of the Teamsters Local 449, which represents the workers. “Trucking feels it before anyone else, and we’ve been feeling it for a while.”

Word of the closing comes even as Roadway’s unionized employees here and across the country vote whether to accept a 10 percent pay cut. Those ballots were expected to be counted today in Washington, D. C., but bad weather extended the vote through Tuesday. The pay cut is expected to pass, Nelligan said.

“[Workers] understand the country is in bad shape as a whole,” he said.

The American Trucking Associations’ index of monthly freight tonnage blipped up in November but basically has been on a downward trend that saw it hit its lowest mark in five years the month before.

During the first half of 2008, meanwhile, nearly 2,000 trucking companies went out of business, the highest level since 2000-’01, according to industry analyst Donald Broughton of Avondale Partners. During the period, more than 88,000 trucks, or about 4.5 percent of the country’s capacity, were idled, Broughton estimates.