Truck transportation employment ranks rebound

Truck transportation jobs have rebounded sharply from the low levels reported a month ago, when the closure of Yellow Corp. resulted in a big decline in employment.

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its August report in early September, jobs in the truck transportation sector showed a decline of 36,700. That was largely attributed to the collapse of Yellow in late July and early August.

But the BLS report for September jobs, released Friday, shows that almost half that original decline has been recaptured.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, truck transportation jobs in September rose 8,800 from August, to a total of 1,584,500 jobs. But at the same time, the BLS adjusted its initial August number up by 8,100, for a net gain of 16,900 jobs over what was originally reported for August.

The upward move was tempered slightly by a downward revision of July numbers. July truck transportation jobs were revised downward to 1,600,900 jobs from the 1,404,300 jobs reported last month. The July data is now final in the sense that it is no longer subject to monthly revisions but could be — and probably will be — revised when the big annual model revision is published in February.

The end result of all these changes is that the peak number of truck transportation jobs was 1,609,200 jobs recorded in May. With the current report, truck transportation jobs in September total 24,700 jobs less than that peak.

When the August report came out last month, that gap between the most recent report and the May peak was 41,600 jobs.

Even with the revisions, truck transportation jobs haven’t been this low since June 2022, when they were 1,591,400 jobs.

The July and August revisions “indicate job losses were understated in July, and overstated in August,” David Spencer, vice president of market intelligence at Arrive Logistics, said in an email. He also noted that the increase this month was the first in the last four.

“Large quantities of drivers entered the market when there was money to be made in the spot market, and balance must be restored before conditions can improve,” Spencer said in looking to the future. “Unfortunately, that means a likely continuation of driver exits from trucking for at least the next 9-12 months.”

Warehouse jobs continued their decline. For the month, on a seasonally adjusted basis, September warehousing and storage jobs declined to 1,884,100, a drop of 3,800 jobs. But a big revision in the warehouse numbers took the August total down to 1,887,900 from what was initially at 1,899,200 jobs, for a revision of 11,300 jobs.

With revisions, the number of warehouse jobs in September was down 65,100 jobs from where they were a year ago.

In other highlights from the report:

The not seasonally adjusted numbers for truck transportation actually declined 1,300 jobs. One observer told FreightWaves that the difference between the two suggests that carriers had reduced payrolls less than what would have been expected with the usual trend in seasonality.

Individual sector data also lags a month. The August LTL numbers showed a decline of 26,700 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis, suggesting that the BLS data accurately picked up the loss of jobs at Yellow that month.

Production and nonsupervisory employees in truck transportation saw their average hourly compensation rise to $29.26 in August, up from $29.11 in July. That data is on a one-month lag. It’s still below the all-time high of $29.44 in May. Producer prices for individual sectors are released earlier in the month and in line with the increase in compensation, it showed the Producer Price Index for truck transportation rising in August after months of mostly declines.

The Producer Price Index for truck transportation rose slightly in August from July levels, per BLS. It was still way below last August even though the NTI.USA per mile rate in @SONAR_FW was about $2.70/mile last year and near $2.25/mile this year. #trucking pic.twitter.com/PHxZEfHoB9

— John Kingston (@JohnHKingston) September 14, 2023