Trucking Adds 11,200 Jobs During February, Labor Says

This story appears in the March 14 print edition of Transport Topics.

The U.S. economy added 192,000 jobs in February, including 11,200 in trucking, the largest monthly gain for the industry since 1995, the Department of Labor reported.

Labor also said March 4 the nation’s unemployment rate dipped to 8.9% from 9% in January.

“Since a recent low in February 2010, total payroll employment has grown by 1.3 million [jobs], or an average of 106,000 per month,” the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said.

The total transportation and warehousing sector gained 22,000 jobs in February, and trucking accounted for 11,200 of those jobs, BLS said.

“This was not unexpected,” Brian Davidson, BLS economist, told Transport Topics. “Trucking has been good the last couple of months, with all indicators such as freight volume moving upward, so that the businesses have been adding workers.”

Davidson said trucking gained jobs in February, even when BLS considered seasonally adjusted employment, which the sector hasn’t done since the 1990s.

Bob Costello, chief economist of American Trucking Associations, said the February report had “the largest month-to-month gain since May 2010.”

“Excluding the public sector, private-sector payrolls jumped by 222,000 in February and have increased for 12 consecutive months,” Costello said. “Over that year, private-sector employment was up 1.5 million, although we still have a long way to go to make up for the 8.8 million jobs lost during the recession.”

Without seasonal adjustment, the previous time trucking gained jobs in February occurred in 2006, when the industry created 4,700 jobs, according to BLS data.

The data show that the previous time the economy added more trucking jobs in one month occurred in October 1995, when 31,900 new positions were filled.

Job growth “will be accelerating from here,” Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at forecasting company IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Mass., told Bloomberg News on March 5. “Companies are at the point where sales keep improving and they need to hire more people.”

BLS revised upward the nationwide employment gains for December to 152,000 from 121,000 and for January to 63,000 from 36,000.

ATA’s Costello said that another good sign was that “after years of steady declines, manufacturing payrolls are rising again.”

“February marked the fourth straight gain, totaling 112,000,” he said. “Manufacturing output remains robust and, with productivity levels high, it is likely that this sector finally has to start boosting employment in order to increase output.”

BLS said the total number of unemployed “changed little in February,” staying at 13.7 million.

“The number of long-term unemployed — those jobless for 27 weeks or more — was 6 million and accounted for 43.9% of the unemployed,” BLS said.