ArcBest Corporation (NASDAQ:ARCB) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Jack Atkins: Absolutely. Okay. Great. And for my follow up question, there’s, I guess, quite a bit of confusion around the potential impact to these multi-employer pension plans from this, last time I checked, Central States was almost fully funded. Would there be any sort of potential risk to your pension expense or costs or liabilities, and I don’t know how you want to take that, if you were to see, the other major player within Central States, no longer be able to participate? I just want to clear that up for people, because I think that’s a concern. And I just wanted to let you have a chance to address that.

Judy McReynolds : I absolutely appreciate you asking the question. And really, you said it well, with the American rescue plan that was passed, and then, has funded some large dollars into all this use Central States pension plan as example. It is a well-funded plan years ago. And you can imagine why they might do this. But I think that the actuaries for those funds started looking at the potential for insolvencies by some of the participating employers and what impact that would have on the fund. And what — after doing that, what we learned is that a lot of the success of the fund is dependent on their investment returns, and it has a lot less to do with employer contributions. And in Yellow’s case, I believe, that their contribution level was much lower, for instance than ours, for instance, ours was $9 an hour versus two, something for them, and the benefit levels had been haircut correspondingly.

And so, I feel like there will be an impact — I certainly feel for those individuals involved in all of this, and I don’t mean to just look past that, because it’s real, and it’s serious. And we we’ve always wanted and tried to achieve. And I think we’ve done it to have good solid retirement benefits for our employees. And in this recent round of negotiations, we really felt like that we were in a good place in terms of our contribution level for pension. And that was kind of where that landed. But we, we don’t see any risk, that is really created in a near term way or even a longer term way to our people. And we paid in, as for them, as well as a portion of what we pay is for people who never worked for us. And the good news about that is our people feel really good and solid about their retirement benefits in this labor of this competitive labor environment.

That’s important and good.

Jack Atkins: Just to be crystal clear, this will not impact your pension liabilities or your pension expense, it’s just to be crystal clear.

Judy McReynolds : All right, right. Our contribution levels are contractually determined, and they are determined with the passing of this latest union contract will not change. And we’re told that the pension funds, again, understand that I’m mostly referencing Central Sites, because there’s a most discussion about that 50% of our contributions go to them. Our understanding is it’s 90. I want to say 97.5 % funded, at this point, and that is not going to be a factor that we have to deal with.

Jack Atkins: Okay, thank you for the time.

Judy McReynolds : Thanks.

Operator: Our next question is coming from the line of Ken Hoexter with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Ken Hoexter : Great, good morning. Certainly, a seminal moment here in the industry, creating the chaos that I think we all knew was coming. I just want to clarify a few things you went from 21,000 shipments in in the second quarter to 19.05 in July. Is that shedding all of the transactional freight? Is it some – I just want to clarifying an earlier answer is that, can you talk maybe then also after that the volume levels as you exited July?

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