Laid-off Yellow drivers will have a tough time finding good jobs

Since Sunday, Mark Roper, a truck driver for 32 years, has been out of a job, along with 30,000 of his fellow workers at now-defunct transportation company Yellow.

Roper, who turns 59 in October, said he’s not ready to retire and has already started applying for jobs elsewhere. But the kind of trucking job he had at one of Yellow’s regional carriers — the kind that lets him see his family every night — is difficult to find in the trucking business, far less common than the jobs that keep drivers on the road for weeks at a time, moving full trailers of freight.

Roper said the company hasn’t told him anything about severance. He’s worked 28 years at Holland Freight, which Yellow bought in 2005.