Trucking employment ends two-year growth streak as economy cools down

April 1, 2022

Tyson Fisher

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A nearly two-year streak of trucking employment growth has come to an end, perhaps indicating the economy hitting the brakes after unprecedented consumer demand.

According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the workforce lost nearly 5,000 trucking jobs in March. This marks the first month-to-month decrease since April 2020, when the start of the pandemic wiped out nearly 80,000 trucking jobs.

However, those numbers are preliminary and will likely change in the next two months. Updated numbers for January and February reveal a much better start to the yearthan previously indicated. Trucking employment went up by nearly 7,000 jobs in January, up by 2,000 from what was initially reported. February’s revised data reveals an increase of nearly 5,000 jobs from initial reports.

Year to date, there are nearly 12,000 more trucking jobs within the United States. This time last year, more than 10,000 jobs in the trucking industry were added.

Trucking employment chart (2020-present)

Although 2022 kicked off with a surge in trucking employment, March’s numbers suggest the consistent growth may finally subside.

Aaron Terrazas, director of economic research for digital freight network company Convoy, said he believes the hiring frenzy that has occurred may come to an end.

“If the tentative signs of a softening freight market that emerged mid-March prove durable, it’s likely that logistics firms will pause their recent aggressive pace of hiring, pull the brake on wage offers, and retreat from worker training investments,” Terrazas states in his analysis.

It is difficult to extrapolate any meaning from preliminary data of a single month. On one hand, March’s trucking employment may indicate that there is no driver shortage. On the other hand, those numbers also include all types of job roles within the trucking industry, not just drivers.

Terrazas told Land Line that trucking companies have been aggressively hiring management and operations staff over the past year. With the spot market regaining some relative normality, those companies may be scaling back proportionally.

For now, the trucking employment numbers suggest companies are pumping the brakes when it comes to operations growth. The situation will become clearer in the coming months as more data comes in.

“It’s easy to forget that just a handful of weeks ago, there was lingering chatter of trucker shortages – fears that increasingly feel overstated with the benefit of hindsight,” Terrazas said. “While it is true that periodic market corrections do not erase longer-term structural labor shortages, it is equally true that periodic tight markets do not necessarily imply their existence – perhaps an important lesson of the whiplash freight market gyrations of recent months.” LL