Arrow Trucking Company: The Grinches Who Stole Christmas 2009

On December 22, 2009, Arrow Trucking Company (based out of Tulsa, Oklahoma) shut down their operations…unbeknownst to their employees.  The drivers for Arrow were informed about this not from the CEO himself, but when they went to use their fuel credit cards and were denied, leaving them stranded three days before Christmas.  Drivers were also told to take their trucks to the local Freightliner and call a special toll-free number to arrange for a bus ticket.  The sad thing is this:  most of the drivers were nowhere near a Freightliner yard and were hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles away from home.  But, I’m happy to report that just recently the last of the stranded drivers have finally been accounted for.  In my research, I came across an article from KRMG (a Tulsa station) about this injustice.  I read the comments left by drivers from other companies and was deeply touched reading about all the help that was being extended to former Arrow employees.  One gentleman in particular offered for any drivers that were stuck and around his area to come and have Christmas dinner at his home.  Many other companies offered jobs to any former Arrow employees, trying to help where they could.  You can read the full article and comments at www.krmg.com/localnews.

The company is now in a world of legal woes, to which they shouldn’t be surprised.  Arrest warrants have been issued by a Cleveland County District Judge for Chairwoman Carol Pielsticker and her son Doug Pielsticker, the company’s former CEO, because of their failure to appear at a hearing on assets that stems from a DWI accident of an Arrow driver that killed another driver in which the plaintiff won a $50,000 judgment.  Class action suits have also been filed because the company broke federal law by not giving its employees a sixty-day notice about shutting its doors.  This violates the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) for companies with 100+ employees.  Claims are also surfacing from employees that their paychecks from December 15, 2009 bounced which set yet another stress on their shoulders beyond the loss of their jobs.  Employees also state that they have unpaid medical premium payments (yet the premiums were withheld from their checks), and no reimbursed out-of-pocket expenses.  One gentleman discovered that even though his child support was taken out of his paychecks, the payments were never sent in to the Attorney General.  The Oklahoma Tax Commission filed a $345,571 lien against Arrow on December 31 with Tulsa County Clerks office from their failure to pay withholding taxes from December 1, 2008 to September 30, 2009.  $50,000 in interest and penalties have been tacked on to this lien as well.  We are still awaiting news of the arrest of the Peilstickers and further proceedings.  All the while, their ex-employees are having problems getting work because Arrow isn’t supplying the information needed for other trucking companies to appropriately verify these drivers under federal guidelines.  No one to answer the phones…website is shut down…and the Grinches are still at large.

What has corporate America come to?  The lack of ethics, morals and humanity for that matter has rotted away the pure foundation of what this country has to offer like termites feeding off the support beams of a home.  When will the deceitfulness end?  Who is going to help bring these treacherous termites to their knees?  Will the government take a stand for its working class?  “Big Brother” gets involved in everything else, why not dirty their elbows a bit to help clean up corporate America?  These wrongdoings need to be made right with more than just a slap on the wrist.