Employment in the truck transportation sector in December continued recent, mostly downward trends, wrapping up a year in which total employment declined slightly.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a drop of 800 jobs in the truck transportation sector for the month. That took total employment down to 1,545,900 jobs.
After a year in which jobs totals rose in six separate months and fell in the other six, the end result is that employment in the sector declined 5,900 jobs over the course of 2024. That is three-tenths of 1%, not much more than flat.
The starker comparison comes in the two-year trend. Employment in the truck transportation sector closed out 2022 with 1,586,900 jobs, for a net two-year loss of 41,000 jobs.
That span includes the 31,600-job reduction in August 2023, when Yellow Corp. closed its doors. Employment in the truck transportation sector after that closure was 1,543,100 jobs. The December 2024 figure was only 2,800 more than that.
The decline between November and December came on top of a downward revision of the November employment numbers first reported a month ago. That revision took the November total down 2,000. On top of that, the October figure was reduced by 800 jobs.
In contrast, even though trucking jobs were slightly down for the year, warehouse jobs rose over the course of the 12 months with a boost of more than 2,100 jobs between November and December. That took December warehouse employment to 1,770,300 jobs, up from 1,768,200 jobs a month earlier and 1,766,900 jobs at the close of 2023.
“Warehousing sector employment turned positive on a year-over-year basis for the first time in two years,” economist Aaron Terrazas said in an email to FreightWaves. “It’s not that the sector has suddenly started booming again — the December job gains were modest — but more that the hemorrhaging has stopped.” Terrazas also noted the “tight range” where trucking job totals have held for the past six months.
Terrazas saw an overall strong employment report, the last one released during the Biden administration. “By every measure, this was another stellar Jobs Report, with payroll gains well above expectations, a slight dip in the unemployment rate, and slowing wage pressures,” Terrazas said. “Backward revisions to November job gains were net negative, but not by much. About 40% of job growth in December came from the three sectors that drove much of the labor market in 2024 — healthcare, government and social assistance — but that actually reflects easing industry concentration from earlier in the year.”
Terrazas added: “Closing the books on last year, it’s clear that 2024 will go down in history as the year when many economists’ greatest fears never really materialized.”
Shannon Gabriel, the vice president of the Leadership Solutions Practice at TBM Consulting, regularly studies data on LinkedIn to determine the health of the job market in individual sectors.
Gabriel told FreightWaves there are 331,000 open jobs in logistics and supply chain listed on LinkedIn at present. “That’s a significant increase from early December, which only had 83k listed,” she said in an email. “Even better – today’s listings account for fewer holiday rush positions than December.”
New model going forward
The December employment report is the final one under the model that was the basis for calculations this year. The February report will be impacted by the annual revision. That annual model revision was first discussed by BLS in August, and it showed that transportation sector
jobs were likely undercounted this year in the base model. The interim update does not break out the likely revisions further than by sector, so it is unknown how the revisions in transportation will affect the individual segments, such as truck transportation, warehousing and storage, and rail.
The stable numbers in some subsectors were noted in a comment from Mazen Danaf, the senior economist at Uber Freight.
Breakouts for such things as long-distance truckload employment and less-than-truckload employment are reported on a one-month lag. Danaf said the November report showed long-distance truckload employment rising in November while LTL declined.
In other notable features in this month’s employment report:
- Rail jobs and the push to add them have been a recurring theme in the rail industry. And yet total employment in rail for the year declined. Jobs in that sector came to 150,300 in November and December. They closed 2023 at 153,100.
- The average hourly pay rate for nonsupervisory employees in truck transportation popped above $30 an hour for one month earlier this year, the first time ever. Later revisions then put it below that cutoff. But it’s back: The average wage for nonsupervisory employees in truck transportation was $30.07 in November. (That data lags the overall employment number by a month.)
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