Logistics Hiring Surge Outlasts Holiday Busy Season

Logistics companies ramped up hiring in January, in a sign that the sector’s push to add workers is extending beyond the busy year-end season.

Trucking, parcel-delivery and warehousing companies added a combined 42,100 jobs in January, according to seasonally adjusted preliminary employment data the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released Friday, as strong pandemic-driven demand and shifting consumer buying patterns led to greater reliance on logistics services.

The January figures show companies that stepped up hiring for the holidays held on to those seasonal workers in a tight U.S. labor market, said Nick Bunker, an economist at job-search platform Indeed. “Employers are having a harder time than they used to adding new workers,” so it makes sense to keep existing ones, he said.

January hiring is often more muted for logistics companies as seasonal workers are let go, industry experts said. This year’s payrolls were bolstered in part by the need for more people to handle delayed holiday merchandise arriving at clogged U.S. ports, as well as a large volume of post-holiday returns, said Cathy Roberson, head of research and consulting firm Logistics Trends & Insights LLC.

Retailers “started getting a good bit of this inventory towards the end of the quarter, which really helped extend the holiday season into January,” she said.

The pace of hiring in the overall U.S. economy quickened in January with the addition of 467,000 jobs following the upwardly revised 510,000 growth in payrolls in December.

The logistics market’s strong January figures come after the Omicron variant of Covid-19, which largely missed the previous jobs report, spread across the country, triggering widespread worker absences that affected operations including airfreight handling and container shipping.

The strongest growth in logistics hiring came in parcel operations, where companies that deliver packages to homes and businesses added 21,200 jobs in January after payrolls ticked down on a seasonally adjusted basis in December.

Warehousing and storage employment rose by 13,400 jobs last month, lifted by the continuing boom in construction of distribution centers driven by e-commerce demand. Warehousing companies have added more than 150,000 jobs over the past 12 months, according to BLS data.

The trucking sector added 7,500 jobs in January, lifting employment in that category by 2.5% from its pre-pandemic January 2020 level amid elevated freight demand.