Jobs report: Downward trend continues in trucking; warehouses see huge drop

Truck transportation employment peaked this year in March at 1,556,400 jobs, according to the BLS. The jobs number has drifted downward since then and is now 12,800 fewer than that recent peak figure.

Mazen Danaf, an economist at Uber Freight, looked at the sector-by-sector data that is released on a one-month lag. He said the Yellow bankruptcy continues to impact the monthly figures. 

Danaf, in an email to FreightWaves, noted that comparisons of total employment now to just before the pandemic show that job growth has netted out to a gain of just 1.8%.

“However, a closer examination of individual sectors reveals a different story,” he wrote. Because of the Yellow bankruptcy, he said, there has been a drop of 21,000 jobs in the less-than-truckload sector.

“Despite this, LTL pricing has remained relatively stable due to increased market discipline among LTL carriers, which exhibit more control over market prices compared to TL carriers,” he said.

It was in the warehouse sector that a recent trend toward more employment saw huge reversals.

Warehousing and storage jobs plummeted by 11,000, to 1,776,600 jobs in September. It is the second consecutive month of a decline after increases in six of the first seven months of 2024.

Warehousing jobs peaked in May 2022 at the height of the pandemic-spawned blowout freight market. Jobs in warehousing hit their high-water market that month at 1,942,200.

But the end of that frenzy sent warehouse jobs on a more precipitous drop than truck transportation jobs with declines in 17 of the next 18 months before the rebound this year.

Most of those 2024 gains are now gone. The low point this year after a decline in March was 1,765,900 jobs. With revisions, the peak this year in warehouse jobs was 1,782,800 in July. But the latest number is now 12,200 jobs fewer than that and only 4,700 more than the March low.

The overall combination of a drop in truck transportation and warehouse jobs was the focus of comments by Aaron Terrazas, an economist who has long worked in the logistics sector.

“At a moment when the broader U.S. economy seems on a glide path to a soft landing, the transportation and warehousing sector is still on shaky ground with hiring and headcount gains seemingly stuck,” he said in an email to FreightWaves. “Historically, this has been a canary for trouble brewing in the consumer economy. But this cycle it appears the disconnect is driven more by the long echo of pandemic-era efficiency and process management improvements.”

Shannon Gabriel, the vice president of leadership solutions at TBM Consulting Group, tracks job openings listed in LinkedIn and Indeed. Her take on the most recent numbers: softness in the transportation job market.

“As of this morning, there are 1,645,240 active job seekers in Transportation on Indeed, which is roughly 100k more than last month,” she told FreightWaves in an email. “Of that number, 1,103,617 are ‘ready to work’ now, which is a tremendous increase from last month’s ready to work at 54k. If you dig further into the data, 28,587 are Transportation Drivers (including Class A).”

And in a summary that is not good news for job seekers, Gabriel said, “Major competition for those roles can be expected in the coming months – and the employers have the upper hand.”

Among other highlights in the report:

• Wages for production and nonsupervisory employees in truck transportation surpassed $30 an hour for the first time, at $30.04. For all trucking employees, including management, the hourly wage broke $30 an hour in February 2023.

• Pressure on the rail industry to increase its numbers is on aggregate not having much impact. The August seasonally adjusted figure for rail employment was revised downward by 900 jobs, to 150,300 from 151,200, which for slow-moving rail numbers is a significant move. September was down an additional 100 jobs. The end result is that rail jobs are now 2,700 fewer than they were a year ago.

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