Warehouse Hiring Surges on Rising E-commerce Demand

In April 2019, many warehouse operators increased hiring to meet the high e-commerce demand that drove up distribution center employment. Because of this growth, other sections of freight and transportation have slowed down.

In just a few months, there were around 5,400 new jobs added by warehouse and storage companies. This figure comes from the Labor Department as growth has risen over the course of four months.

This growth also includes fulfillment centers that process and ship thousands of orders online.
This sector alone has added close to 70,000 new jobs in the past year alone.

Among the messenger and courier services, there were an additional 1,000 new jobs added this past April 2019.

E-commerce Demand

As warehousing and delivery grow they can thank the growth of e-commerce as they too push companies to add more fulfillment centers with close proximity to population centers. This will ensure that customer delivery will be made on time. Because of this, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that online sales in 2018 had jumped as high as 14.2%.

As Amazon.com gets ready to invest $800 million, an influx of job opportunities could be seen among warehouse and storage companies due to their want to start one-day deliveries.

With Amazon’s new one-day delivery service in place, we could easily see growth in e-commerce almost immediately. This will force other retailers to speed up their own distributors in order to stay competitive. Because of this fast service, many “last-mile” delivery companies could benefit significantly such as J.B. Hunt Transport Services.

In April, 263,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy. Not only did this exceed the expectation of economists but it occurred as the employment rate reached a low of 3.6%. This decline in unemployment is the lowest ever seen in the last 50 years along with a declined amount of labor force participation.

There were 11,100 new jobs created in the Transportation and warehousing sector which also included 5,100 new jobs in ground passenger transport and transit companies.

Many sectors in the report were mixed when it came to dealing with freight and logistics because of their relation to healthcare and other administrative services that deal very little with shipping.

In the manufacturing sector, there were 4, 000 new jobs added as U.S. factory activity slowed. This caused businesses to experience uncertainty as trade tariffs continue to loom regardless of the global economy cooling.

The trucking industry seems to be refiguring itself following a huge amount of expansion. This is causing truckers to be careful not to leave a big gap between them and the freight market.

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