Updated:
4/13/2009 3:00:00 AM
Fleet Unemployment Rises
Govt. Corrects Prior Figures
By Sean McNally, Senior Reporter
This story appears in the April 13 print edition of Transport Topics.
The overall U.S. employment picture remained bleak in March, but the Labor Department’s latest report offered a slightly more positive picture for trucking’s performance during the just-completed quarter.
The industry did shed 14,900 additional jobs in March, but Labor significantly revised what had been two record months of layoffs to start 2009.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said April 3 that the layoff total for January actually was 17,500, not the previously reported 24,900. That total is still the largest one-month total, with the exception of April 1994, during the UPS-Teamsters union work stoppage.
The change in February was even more dramatic — revised to 12,900 cuts instead of 33,400 jobs.
The revisions mean trucking lost more than 45,000 jobs during the first quarter of 2009, compared with a loss of 5,800 for the January-through-March period a year earlier.
Overall, Labor said, employers slashed payrolls by 663,000 positions in March, and the U.S. unemployment rate jumped to 8.5%, the highest level in 25 years.
John Coughlin, an economist with BLS, told Transport Topics the trucking revisions were likely the result of additional data provided to the department.
“With big revisions, it’s usually that a smaller piece of the sample comes in, and as more of the sample comes in, it just becomes more of a complete picture,” he said. “It is just one of the trials of dealing with sample-based data.”
American Trucking Associations Chief Economist Bob Costello told TT that he had been “flabbergasted about how big those numbers were previously.”“I’m not surprised at the revision,” Costello said. “I was more surprised at the original numbers.”
Despite the moderate improvement in the trucking numbers, economists suggested many more jobs still might be lost.
“We expect labor market conditions to remain appalling for many months to come,” Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist at Maria Fiorini Ramirez Inc. in New York, wrote in a client note.
Donald Kohn, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve System, said in a speech in Wooster, Ohio, that the U.S. economy is “not out of the woods yet.”
Labor said in the March report that since the recession began in December 2007, the economy has shed 5.1 million jobs, including 3.3 million jobs since November.
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