Truck transportation jobs fell in July for the fourth consecutive month and now are 30,000 jobs less than where they stood a year ago.
The four-month sequence of job declines in the truck transportation sector reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, following revisions, is a decline of 1,600 jobs in April, 6,800 jobs in May, 900 jobs in June and 2,400 jobs in July.
At 1,544,700 seasonally adjusted jobs, truck transportation employment stands exactly 30,000 jobs less than where it was in July 2023.
At the other end of the spectrum was a stunning rise in warehouse jobs in July, combined with a revised figure for May that has taken up total employment in that sector by 16,200 jobs in just two months.
Warehousing and storage jobs rose 10,700 jobs to 1,794,900 jobs, according to BLS data. There were upward revisions for May and June as well, leading to a three-month gain of 23,600 jobs.
The 10,700 gain in warehouse jobs in July was the largest since a 16,700 jobs increase in March 2022. That increase was near the tail end of the pandemic-inspired surge in warehouse jobs of about 645,000 that started the month after the April 2020 nadir of pandemic-related employment and its peak in May 2022.
After that warehouse jobs peak, jobs in the sector fell 18 of the next 19 months. But they now have increased six of the last seven months.
In the same way that the national unemployment rate rose, so did the overall unemployment rate for Transportation and Warehousing, a classification that includes truck transportation and the warehouse sector. That rate was 5.7%, up from 4.8% a month earlier. However, that rate does tend to fluctuate considerably. Two months ago, it was 5.5%.
Shannon Gabriel, the vice president of leadership solutions at TBM Consulting, looks to various data points within the job searching platform of Indeed for evidence on the status of employment in the logistics sector.
In an email to FreightWaves, Gabriel said there were 1,284,233 resumes in transportation in Indeed with the status of “ready to work” on July 8. On Friday, she said that number was 1,098,522.
That sort of trend flies in the face of a broad BLS report with a jump in the unemployment rate to 4.3% from 4% and one of the weakest one-month increases in job additions in a long time at 114,000 jobs. But Gabriel said that “given the economic growth of 2.8% last month, I anticipate the labor market to stabilize back closer to 4%, we will continue to see fewer people leaving jobs for new jobs due to layoff anxiety.”
David Spencer, VP of Market Intelligence at Arrive Logistic, said the trend of declines could mean that “we are seeing carriers and drivers who had been patient throughout the duration of the ongoing downcycle throw in the towel after another lackluster peak season.”
“While there are signs of improvement in market conditions to be excited about, exactly when the spot market will become fruitful again in a sustained way is unclear,” Spencer said in an email to FreightWaves. “With many analysts now indicating a rate recovery may be another year away, it would make sense we continue to see a reduction in market participants from the carrier side.”
Mazen Danaf, senior economist with Uber Freight (NYSE: UBER), expressed a similar sentiment. “Carriers recognized the purely seasonal nature of the latest ump in spot rates, after which the market softened significantly after the Fourth of July” he said. “Despite the recent headcount reductions, the market remains far from equilibrium.”
Mazen also cited the one-month lag data on specific sectors, noting that in long-distance trucking in June, “employment also continued to fall, though it was still about 16K higher than the 2019 peak, which was back then an oversupplied market.”
In other highlights from the report:
–The not seasonally adjusted data for truck transportation rose 800 jobs, suggesting that most of the decline in the seasonally adjusted figure came from the BLS adjustment process. The BLS has described what goes into the seasonal adjustment as a process that “removes the effects of events that follow a more or less regular pattern each year. Over the course of a year, such events affect the rate of wage and benefit change. For example, wage and benefit adjustments in state and local governments, especially schools, are concentrated in the June-September period. Increases in the Social Security tax rate and earnings ceiling, when they occur, take effect in the December-March period.”
For an industry that has long been under pressure from regulators to add personnel, rail is trending in the opposite direction. June employment was revised down from its original report by 1,400 jobs, a relatively large amount for a sector whose month-to-month changes are measured in the hundreds at most. July jobs declined a further 200 jobs from that revised June figure, and May was revised downward by 500 jobs. The end result is that in July 2023, rail jobs were at 153,100 jobs. In July, they were 1,400 fewer jobs.
Workers in truck transportation worked longer and got paid less on average. For production and nonsupervisory employees in June — that data is on a one-month lag — the average hourly wage fell to $29.81 from $29.95, and the hours worked rose to 40.5 from 40 hours.
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