By Sean McNally, Senior Reporter This story appears in the July 12 print edition of Transport Topics.
For-hire trucking companies hired 1,000 workers in June, the third consecutive month the number of industry jobs increased, the Labor Department said July 2.
The department also reported that the nation’s unemployment rate fell to 9.5% last month — the lowest it has been since July 2009 — even though the overall number of jobs fell by 125,000 during the month. Economists said the decline in rate was because of people giving up their job searches, therefore falling out of the category of unemployed.
The drop in overall jobs was led by the loss of 225,000 temporary Census workers, but the private sector added 83,000 jobs during June, more than double the previous month.
Keith Hall, commissioner of the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, pointed to transportation and warehousing, which added 15,000 jobs, as two of the stronger areas of the private sector.
Last month’s job additions in trucking brought the total employed in the industry to 1.236 million. Labor said.
Tavio Headley, an economist with American Trucking Associations, told Transport Topics he believed the actual number of jobs added is less significant than seeing any continued growth in the trucking sector.
“It’s more important that we’ve seen three consecutive monthly gains since the actual numbers are subject to revision,” he said.
Despite the increases, trucking still is not growing as fast as other parts of the transportation industry.
The number of railroad jobs grew by 2,400 to 218,800 and the number of warehousing jobs rose by 3,300 to 649,300, the report said.
Employers added workers in a number of trucking-related industries, including 6,000 new workers in mining and 9,000 new jobs in manufacturing.
However, the construction industry shed 22,000 positions, with specialty contractors accounting for most of the drop, Hall said.
Obama administration officials said the report showed the economy was continuing to recover.
“Make no mistake, we are headed in the right direction,” President Obama said. “We are not headed there fast enough for a lot of Americans. We’re not headed there fast enough for me either.”
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said the 600,000 private sector jobs added since the start of the year was “encouraging.”
However, ATA’s Headley said the report “could have been worse, but it still wasn’t positive news.”
“The unemployment rate fell in June, but only because the total labor force dropped even more than employment, a sign that some people gave up looking for work,” he said.
Headley added that even though more private sector jobs were created in June, the total of 83,000 was “still a weak number.”
“We have economic recovery, but not at the pace people had expected or hoped,” said John Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo Securities LLC. “It is neither a V-shaped recovery nor a double-dip recession. It is very frustrating to a lot of people.”
Diane Swonk, chief economist of Mesirow Financial Holdings Inc., compared the economy with “being stuck in a traffic jam.”
“We are moving forward, but at such a slow pace it is causing more frustration and tension than sense of progress,” she said.
Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
