The for-hire trucking industry added 3,300 jobs in June on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the monthly employment report released July 3 by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
April and May’s employment numbers for the industry have also been upwardly revised, with the BLS reporting 500 additional jobs gained in April than previously reported and 800 more in May.
The U.S. economy as a whole in June added 288,000 non-farm jobs, BLS reports, pushing the country’s unemployment rate down to 6.1 percent. That’s the lowest unemployment rate since September 2008, and according to the AP, the last five months of hiring are the strongest since a tech-based job growth streak in 1999-2000.
For-hire trucking now has 1.4009 million payroll jobs, according to BLS, up 26,000 jobs from June 2013 (1.8 percent) and up 180,000 jobs (14.7 percent) from March 2010, the low point in the most recent recession. However, trucking employment remains 48,400 jobs (3.3 percent) below January 2007′s peak.
Total transportation and warehousing employment grew by 16,600 jobs in June. Employment also grew in construction (6,000), manufacturing (16,000) and mining and logging (6,000). The government added 26,000 jobs in the month.
Note: The BLS numbers for trucking reflect all payroll employment in for-hire trucking, but they don’t include trucking-related jobs in other industries, such as a truck driver for a private fleet. Nor do the numbers reflect the total amount of hiring since they only reflect the number of employees paid during a specified payroll period during the month.
