The number of seasonally adjusted jobs in the truck transportation sector reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday could be viewed as either another data point in a rut of seven months or more in duration or the first sign of a breakout to the upside.
With the 2,900-job increase in November from a revised October figure, truck transportation jobs stood at 1,548,700 jobs. Supporting the view of the numbers as a rut is the fact that the November total was just 700 jobs higher than where truck transportation employment stood in May after a particularly large drop that month from April, or the fact that the job total is just 1,400 jobs fewer than where the figure stood a year ago.
Additional evidence for that perspective comes from the fact that since May, the lowest number of jobs was 1,545,000 in July and the highest number was the latest report, for a range of just 3,700 jobs.
However, the gain in jobs in November – 2,900 – was the largest one-month increase in more than a year, but more than two years if the impact of the Yellow shutdown is considered.
The increase for November was the largest since September 2023. But that month’s gain of 8,000 jobs (after later revisions) came after a decline of 31,600 in August, which was the month that Yellow shut its doors. That 8,000-job increase could be seen as something of a bounceback as former Yellow drivers found work.
Excluding that from the calculation, the gain of 2,900 jobs in November is the highest since a 3,800-job gain in October 2022. Since that time, the trend in employment has been steadily down, interrupted by an occasional upward bump. Jobs in October 2023 were 1,585,700; in November 2024, they were 37,000 fewer than that.
Possible reasons for the gain
David Spencer, the vice president of market intelligence at Arrive Logistics, said in an email to FreightWaves that several developments may have contributed to the job gain in November, which was outsize by recent standards.
“Coming off a few disruptions in the month of October from back to back hurricanes and a brief strike at the East and Gulf Coast Ports, carriers likely saw a pickup in access to better paying spot freight,” he said. “Following these disruptions there was optimism heading into peak retail season later in Q4, as well as a strong positive reaction from the trucking community around a new administration in the White House. We can confirm that we have seen increased demand and rate volatility consistent with traditional seasonality, a trend that was more absent a year ago.”
Spencer said “atypical” activity at ports is likely a result of fears about tariffs, as well as the anticipation of a renewal of the port strike next month.”
Mazen Danaf, an economist at Uber Freight, looked into the subsegment report that lags by a month.
He said employment in the long-distance truckload segment was down by 1,800 to its lowest level since October 2022, a 2.1% drop from the peak.
Wages in the long-distance truckload sector also remain 1.7% below their peak despite wage inflation in other sectors of the economy, suggesting that carriers continue to prioritize cost-cutting measures.
Only one more report will be calculated on the basis of the current model being used by the BLS. Starting with the report issued in early February, the annual changes to the model will be implemented in calculating January employment. The base number for the transportation and warehousing sector will be revised upward, in contrast to most other sectors, which the BLS has said will be reduced.
Downward move in warehouses
It isn’t just truck transportation where job totals have been in a narrow range. Warehousing jobs have been in a limited range, if not a rut, especially after the volatility of the pandemic.
Warehouse jobs totaled 1,772,200 in November, down 1,400 from a month earlier. After 12 months of ups and downs, warehouse jobs were a grand total of 100 fewer than they were a year ago.
After a huge decline in October 2023 that sliced almost 17,000 jobs off the total, warehouse sector jobs have been in a range with a low of 1,765,900 (March) and a high of 1,782,800 (July).
Economist Aaron Terrazas took special note of those warehouse jobs, as well as the courier segment, and said the decline was unusual at this time of year. (Courier jobs were down by 2,200.)
“Package delivery and warehousing jobs were down from October on a seasonally adjusted basis — -2.2K and -1.4K, respectively (but up on a non-seasonally-adjusted basis),” Terrazas said in an email to FreightWaves. “That’s unusual for the holiday shopping season, perhaps suggesting slightly softer-than-usual holiday hiring in these two backend retail sectors that have become a bigger and bigger feature of the American employment landscape in recent years.”
But in the same way that the truck transportation jobs don’t count independent owner-operators, Terrazas noted that there is a hole in the courier numbers.
“The payroll numbers don’t capture self-employed workers — and particularly in the package delivery sector, there has been a growing reliance on independent/self-employed drivers,” he said.
In other notable numbers from the report:
- The industry is working its employees pretty hard. The average hours worked for nonsupervisory employees in truck transportation was 40.5 in October, the latest month for which data is available. But the hourly rate of pay is dropping slightly. It was $29.96 in July. In October it was $29.94. The 40.5 hours worked per week is a long way from past numbers; in 2021, every month was more than 41 hours, and there were two months when it exceeded 43. In the first four months of this year, the figures were all below 40 hours.
- Rail jobs remain flat to down. There were 150,000 rail jobs in November; there were 150,000 in October, though that figure was revised down by 500. A year ago, rail jobs totaled 152,800 jobs.
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