Laid off from Ruan Transportation.

What Ruan Transportation layoffs have meant for employees

Price came up in reports on more than one of the contracts Ruan lost. Kroger said it had to cut its transportation costs when it gave the Columbus deliveries to Brisk in 2003, according to Heavy Duty Trucking, and a lower bid for Bunge's soybean oil hauling may have helped close Decatur in 2011, Area Development reported. A long relationship didn't save a contract either. At Tolleson, Teamsters Local 104 members had hauled for Kroger for more than 26 years before that contract ended, the union told FreightWaves.

If you work at a Ruan site that serves one customer, the contract behind your job is between Ruan and that customer. At Tolleson, Ruan's three-year Kroger contract, signed in 2023, let Kroger exit on 90 days' notice, CDLLife reported, citing AZ Central, so that contract could end well before its term. Ruan's Virginia letter said it came late because Ruan had been negotiating an extension with its customer, in Columbus the contract expired and Brisk won the rebid, and in California a Teamsters agent described a rate Ruan couldn't get. In those three cases a rebid, extension talks or a rate dispute over the customer's contract came before the layoffs, so news of one at your site's customer is a signal they share.

California shows how long a Ruan operation can shrink before it closes. Ruan bought Tulare-based Kings County Truck Lines in 2006, picking up that terminal and 11 others in California, Oregon, Idaho and Arizona, and Odus Hall, the business agent for Teamsters Local 948, told Trucking Dive that Ruan once had some 500 bulk tank drivers in the area before years of downsizing. The Tulare terminal was up for sale while the January 2024 layoffs went through. That arc, a purchase, a long thinning and then a rate dispute, is the fullest account these sources give of how one Ruan operation wound down. If your site has been shrinking for years, as the Tulare operation was before Ruan closed it, it may be worth keeping your resume current.

Ruan's Virginia letter counted the affected jobs by title for each operation number and location, from drivers and technicians to dispatchers, so workers at Gordonsville, Rural Retreat and Beaver could each find their own location's count in it. Ruan's recent notices in our WARN tracker name the filer as Ruan Transport Corporation, its older Seattle and Ripon filings use Ruan Transportation names, and the Oklahoma filing from December 2024 lists Ruan's Des Moines address rather than an Oklahoma town. Ruan's notices since 2023 went to California, Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, and the drivers it based in Beaver worked in West Virginia, so the benefit pages for those workers are Virginia unemployment benefits, California unemployment benefits, Arizona unemployment benefits, Oklahoma unemployment benefits and West Virginia unemployment benefits.

In the two moves where the union spoke out, its complaint was what the new carrier would pay. In 2003 Gil Litton, president of Teamsters Local 413, estimated that drivers earning $45,000 to $50,000 at Ruan would make $15,000 to $20,000 at Brisk once they covered the costs of owning a truck, the same Heavy Duty Trucking report said. In 2025 the Teamsters' letter to Kroger, quoted in the same FreightWaves story, gave the union's impression that Ruan's replacement wouldn't provide wages and conditions equal to Local 104's contract. If a carrier taking over your site's freight offers you a job, setting its pay basis, who owns the truck and whether a union contract covers the work beside what Ruan paid you gives you a like-for-like comparison before you decide.