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Logistics payrolls contracted in January, in an abrupt halt to the sector’s hiring boom in 2020 tied to surging e-commerce demand.
Parcel-delivery, warehousing and trucking companies lost a combined 34,000 jobs last month, according to seasonally adjusted preliminary employment figures released Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those losses came amid tepid gains in the broader labor market and during a typically slower period for distribution and transport operators.
The logistics sector was rising “as the rest of the economy had more of a hard time” recovering from the blow dealt by the pandemic, said Nick Bunker, an economist at job-search marketplace Indeed.com. “This time, you saw that the troubles were more distributed across the labor market,” he said, although industries like logistics and retail “can be sensitive to the holiday roll-off.”