Together, they discuss the topic of predicting freight shipments with artificial intelligence. Dorothy explores a logistics use case for AI capabilities in predictive inventory and the impact it is having on manufacturing writ large. Still, there are many challenges, among them that truckers and freight carriers don’t have the equipment (mobile apps, GPS) that other last mile and delivery workers have. They also examine where AI can be applied to help schedule deliveries to avoid unplanned downtime.

Give the podcast episode a listen.

The post Convoy’s CTO Dorothy LI on predicting freight shipments with AI appeared first on Convoy.

December 2022 freight market summary

• Elevated consumer spending persisted as services spending continued on an upward climb. Combined with retailer inventories finally beginning to decline, demand appears headed toward more typical seasonal patterns.
• Interest rate increases are slowing automobile production and development of single-family homes. While multi-family home starts trended upward, overall materials demand associated with housing and vehicles should continue softening through Q1.
• Diesel prices dropped to lowest levels since early 2021. This eases some of the financial pressures on owner-operators and means excess capacity likely remains prevalent through the beginning of Q2.

What this means for you as 2023 begins

• The Q1 RFP cycle creates an opportunity for best-in-class shippers to review all partners for the value they add and clean their books of non-strategic partners and 3PLs accumulated during the COVID capacity grab. Reducing the number of carriers boosts efficiency (fewer carrier scorecards, updates, reviews, etc.) and helps limit potential liability associated with riskier carriers that worked their way into routing guides.
• Smart shippers are focused on strategic partners who are vested in jointly solving problems and guarding against the illusion of savings through paper rates offered up at this trough of the market. In particular, finding partners who can boost digital capabilities helps hedge against potential productivity declines if headcount reductions become necessary.
• A market tightening is likely coming at some point in Q2. That tightening may come quicker if consumer demand remains elevated and diesel costs rise due to unexpected external events (forcing capacity out of the market). A tightening may come later in the summer if demand falls and if diesel prices go lower.

Freight demand overview

Freight supply overview

More on Freight Market Trends

 Interested in additional freight market insights and trends? To get fully up to speed on macroeconomic trends and their impact on freight, hear what’s top of mind for Fortune 500 shippers, and learn the best planning tips for the peak season, view our 25-minute on-demand webinar.
Watch 2022 Freight Market Update.

View our economic commentary disclaimer here.

The post Freight Market Update: 2023 begins as a soft but more “normal” market appeared first on Convoy.

November 2022 freight market summary

• Despite perceived economic headwinds, real consumer spending remains elevated as both goods and services experienced saw upticks from previous months. Spending comes at the continued expense of savings, making it difficult to anticipate how long demand persists. 
• Single family home building fell, although multifamily appears to be relatively unchanged. Combined with a return of automotive production to more typical levels, demand is stronger than previously anticipated.
• Excess capacity (with more on the way based on recent Class 8 truck orders) is still present in the market. While rates may increase slightly during December, the ongoing soft market shows limited sign of changing heading into Q1.

Looking ahead to 2023

• Expect the gap between contracted rates and spot to narrow in early 2023 as shippers reset contracts. Balancing cost and service necessary for weathering any 2023 volatility becomes critical. Best-in-class shippers are contracting static volumes and exploring more elastic solutions for volatile or lower-volume lanes.
• The expected lull in demand cycle presents an opportunity to improve systems and processes. Leaning into data and insights to identify and address bottlenecks / performance issues now can help prevent issues during subsequent freight cycles.
• After a tumultuous past couple of years, shippers get a bit of a mulligan in 2023 for price, cost and capacity. Using this time to modernize supply chains and advance digital adoption allows shippers to enter the future tightening market from a position of strength.

Freight demand

Freight supply

More on Freight Market Trends

 Interested in additional freight market insights and trends? To get fully up to speed on macroeconomic trends and their impact on freight, hear what’s top of mind for Fortune 500 shippers for Q4, and learn the best planning tips for the peak season, view our 25-minute on-demand webinar.
Watch 2022 Freight Market Update.

View our economic commentary disclaimer here.

The post Freight Market Update: A mixed happy and humbug holiday season appeared first on Convoy.

October 2022 freight market summary

• On-going voracious consumer spending helped drive third quarter growth in GDP, with GDP increasing at an annual rate of 2.6%. However, the mix shift in purchases towards services, combined with fluctuating consumer preferences for goods, is resulting in record inventory backlogs for retailers and merchant wholesalers.
• Successive interest rate hikes rapidly depressed home buying and building. Simultaneously, slowing automotive manufacturing and plateauing of oil rig deployment is resulting in lower overall demand outside the retail sector. 
• Market softening persists with the lowest observed tender rejection rates of this freight cycle (rates slipped to 5%) alongside some of the largest spot-contract spread. While some capacity is leaving the market, the early signs point towards lower holiday demand and a continued soft market into Q1.

Freight demand by industry

Consumer retail outlook

• Consumers continue spending at record levels as service purchases reach another new high.

• Expectations on future spending decreased, in part due to (likely unsustainable) historically low savings rates.
• Despite elevated spending, inventory backlogs for retailers and merchant wholesalers set another record.

Food and beverage outlook

• Restaurants and bar spending shows slight softening, although still near historic levels as consumers continue reducing grocery purchases. 

• Interest rate increases are lowering current and future expectations on agricultural business environment.
• The unusually dry fall left two-thirds of the country in moderate or worse drought conditions, putting pressures on late season and winter crop production. 

Industrials outlook

• Current and future business perceptions are predominantly negative and generally continuing a downward trend. 
• Two decade high mortgage rates are depressing interest in housing and rapidly slowing new construction.

• Lagging automotive manufacturing compared with historic levels and slowing deployment of new active rigs for oil production suggest limited demand through end-of-year.

Freight Supply

Labor, fuel, and equipment overview

• Asset carriers now employ a record number of drivers while owner-operators are down 25% from the summer peak, suggesting a driver movement away from self-employment.

• Tractor orders jumped by 30,000 in September, leading to the highest net replacement levels since 2018.
• Trailer production substantially ramped up compared with previous year manufacturing constraints, however prices continue escalating due to inflationary pressures.

More on Freight Market Trends

 Interested in additional freight market insights and trends? To get fully up to speed on macroeconomic trends and their impact on freight, hear what’s top of mind for Fortune 500 shippers for Q4, and learn the best planning tips for the peak season, view our 25-minute on-demand webinar.
Watch Q3 2022 Freight Market Update.

View our economic commentary disclaimer here.

The post Freight Market Update: A holiday humbug begins taking shape early in Q4 appeared first on Convoy.

September 2022 freight market overview

• Overall consumer spending remains near historic highs. However, that spending comes at the expense of savings, which reached lows not seen since the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. This suggests the spending is becoming unsustainable.
• Continued rising interest rates are impacting home and automotive purchases. There is significant likelihood that softer demand from these sectors lowers demand further. It is possible oil production begins ramping up, though not enough to offset the freight impact of slowing housing and automotive. 
• Owner-operator capacity is leaving the market as elevated diesel prices persist and spot-contract pricing spread widens. With tender rejection rates sitting just below 6%, ample capacity appears present. Barring a major holiday surge, it seems likely the soft market persists through Q4.

Freight demand by industry

Consumer retail outlook

• Overall real spending is still near record levels even as the mix shift continues away from goods and more towards services.

• Elevated spending continues to come at the expense of decreased savings, with rates now near pre-financial crisis lows. 
• Merchant wholesalers and retailers are experiencing record inventory levels as a result of inflationary pressures on spending and changing consumer tastes.

Food and beverage outlook

• Consumers continue biasing spending towards restaurants and bars versus groceries. 

• A downward trend of agribusiness investments suggests interest rate hikes are creating pessimism for current and future conditions.
• Major commodity price declines moderated, although the expansion of severe or greater drought conditions may make this temporary if lower crop yields occur.

Industrials outlook

• Current and future business perceptions are predominantly negative and generally continuing a downward trend. 
• A persistently wide gap between vehicle production and sales points towards the potential for excess inventory within the automotive sector.

• Decade-high interest rates depressed both immediate and 6-month forward-looking housing interest.

Freight Supply

Labor, fuel, and equipment overview

• Owner-operators are moving more aggressively to the sidelines with a 26% decline compared to the July peak (and with a 2% increase for company drivers).

• Owner-operator capacity declines are likely influenced by elevated diesel prices (even as crude spot prices decline).
• Tractor and trailer production are trending lower with tractor orders net replacement still quite negative.

More on the Freight Market Update

 Interested in the full freight market insights and trends? Then catch our 25-minute on-demand webinar, supplemented with our source data and commentary in PDF form for easy sharing with your internal teams.
Watch Q3 2022 Freight Market Update.

View our economic commentary disclaimer here.

The post Freight Market Update: Slowing demand and falling capacity appeared first on Convoy.

August 2022 freight market overview

• Both current consumer spending and future expectations are dropping. Combined with continued lower savings, it seems consumers may be past a financial tipping point and we’ll potentially experience a decrease in holiday season demand.
• Mixed signals exist for consumer appetite on large purchases. Rising interest rates and inflationary pressures dampened both current and future expectations of home purchases. However, auto sales increased and production is back to well above historic averages.
• Tender rejection rates and the spot-contract pricing spread reached new lows. Owner-operators and company operators are leaving the market, though it is unclear if this is a temporary response. This means early signals of holiday spending become critical for understanding if the market pushes even lower.

Freight demand by industry

Consumer retail outlook

• Expected spending decreased for all income groups. Reduced expenditures drove lower total spending on goods and services, potentially signifying broader slowdown in consumer purchases.
• Savings rate has hovered near 5% over last few months, indicating lower spending is not translating into increased savings.
• Manufacturing inventories began inching downward. The decline in manufacturing inventory may be the first sign of an overall decline in goods being created in response to inflation and reduced spending.

Food and beverage outlook

• Consumers cut back even more on food and drink: Consumers appear more cautious in their spending, reducing food and beverage purchases, particularly in grocery stores.
• Commodity prices continue their precipitous decline. Despite widespread drought, commodity prices for wheat and corn fell as some global supplies (e.g., Ukraine) began re-entering the market.
• Persistent drought is affecting agricultural centers. With two-thirds of farming still under severe drought, the persistent megadrought implies some pricing pressure on the horizon due to reduced crop yields.

Industrial outlook

• Current manufacturing perceptions remain mostly negative, although some optimism exists for future conditions.
• Automotive production and sales rebounded slightly, with manufacturing capacity utilization back near historic average.
• Housing demand and interest continue their decline as interest rate hikes continue to cool demand.

Freight Supply

Labor, equipment and fuel outlook

• Market conditions finally hit owner-operator supply. Company drivers, office staff and owner-operators employment all saw declines, suggesting capacity is beginning to leave the market.
• Slowing hourly wage growth and high gas prices likely contributed towards the sidelining of some capacity. 
• Reductions in tractor orders and trailer production suggest companies are hedging against a longer deflationary period.

More on the Freight Market Update

 Interested in the full freight market insights and trends? Then catch our 25-miute on-demand webinar, supplemented with our source data and commentary in PDF form for easy sharing with your internal teams.
Watch Q3 2022 Freight Market Update.

View our economic commentary disclaimer here.

The post Freight Market Update: The summer of spending winds down appeared first on Convoy.

Beyond logistics, the U.S. jobs market remained robust through mid-April: Private payrolls increased by 428,000 jobs (slightly beating the consensus forecast of 400,000 job gains) and the unemployment rate held steady at 3.6 percent. The participation rate continues to stagnate well below pre-pandemic norms – despite suspicions a year ago that labor force participation was being artificially depressed by temporary fiscal largesse. But job cuts have also increased in recent weeks. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas, Inc. reported yesterday that job cuts increased by 14 percent in April and are now higher than a year ago. For the moment, it appears that most of these workers are finding new jobs reasonably quickly (if they so desire).

The freight labor market tends to lag the freight market, and it would be unwise to overlook signals elsewhere of widening cracks in the foundation of the freight economy. Amid a suddenly softer spot market for truck transportation services, there is also a growing chorus of reports of overcapacity in the warehousing sector (see here and here). For much of the past two years, indeed much of the past decade, the booming warehousing sector has provided a critical source of demand for workers who might have otherwise sought jobs in heavy trucking; the moment that trend shifts could see a sea change in worker availability and wage growth for truck transportation workers.

It’s a common refrain that freight leads the economy, though the empirical evidence of this relationship is – at best – mixed. Freight downturns occur about twice as often as broader macroeconomic downturns, so the correlation is noisy (and most certainly not causal). Still, the next few months will see an unprecedented pivot in monetary policy; the only historical guides we have are from a far different era.

Economic conditions as the United States emerged from the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic proved ripe for workers to gain labor market leverage, which has helped push consumer prices and wage gains to generational highs. Increasingly, though, it appears as if the tides could again be turning. Don’t panic… yet.

The post April Jobs Report appeared first on Convoy.

Clinging to traditional patterns and practices of contract freight has become an increasingly large liability in the world of volatile supply chains. So what can we do about it? Our customers are leaning into new approaches starting with their most problematic freight. You can too.

The fundamental flaw of traditional freight contracts

The RFP is a cornerstone of the freight procurement process. For high-volume shippers, it provides a foundation for annual budgeting. Its resulting contracts are meant to provide transportation teams with reliable, quality capacity, budget predictability, and operational savings.

At the same time, the RFP process takes months to complete and costs millions in operational expenses each year. Even after contracts are signed, they quickly break down. In tight markets, tender rejection forces transportation teams into their routing guides, where they spend thousands of hours manually sourcing capacity at higher rates. In soft markets, shippers renege on volume commitments, spending operational hours to find cheaper rates on the spot market, at the risk of working with unfamiliar, lower-quality carriers.

Regardless of market conditions, the RFP creates a zero-sum game that pits shippers against brokers and carriers, establishing a relationship founded on mistrust. Within six months, much of the effort that went into the RFP is moot, with half of all negotiated contract rates or tender acceptance levels no longer being honored. 

The pandemic has further highlighted the fundamental flaw of traditional freight contracts — they attempt to assert control and predictability over an unpredictable freight RFP market. And because of this, they invariably fail to deliver on their promises.

The broken promise of reliable, quality capacity

Without RFPs and contracts, every shipment would be subject to the spot market. There’d be no guarantee of coverage, and transportation teams would work with many carriers who aren’t experienced in hauling their freight.

RFPs hold the promise of providing reliable capacity, binding carriers to a shipper throughout the contract term and improving service quality through greater carrier consistency. Yet in tight markets, this promise is quickly broken. When contract rates expose carriers to sufficient financial risk, they reject tenders and gravitate toward the more profitable spot market. As a result, shippers fall back into their routing guide or spot, where they’re more likely to work with unfamiliar carriers, receive lower-quality service, and face higher risk of service failure.

An analysis of data from FTR, DAT, and FreightWaves shows a strong correlation between tender rejections and the difference between contract and spot rates. As spot rates climb further and further away from contract rates, tender rejections increase in tandem.

A look at 2019 data from one Convoy shipper shows that even in soft markets, spot surges can immediately follow RFP agreements and drive up costs as carriers fail to meet volume or rate commitments.

A new approach to sourcing primary freight

In 2019, Convoy began to pilot a program called Guaranteed Primary. It set out to deliver on the key promises of the RFP without the overhead of running a months-long procurement event. The program officially launched in September 2020 and allowed our customers to participate in a dynamically priced contract agreement that guaranteed tender acceptance.

How Guaranteed Primary works

1. No RFP overhead

When a shipper uses Guaranteed Primary for any particular lane, they completely eliminate the need for an RFP. Instead, the shipper agrees to allocate all volume on the lane to Convoy.

2. A low fixed margin rate

In contrast to traditional contracts that set a fixed rate per mile, Guaranteed Primary establishes a fixed margin over the course of the contract — this margin can be up to 50% lower than the industry average of 15% to 18%. On each load, shippers pay a dynamic rate generated by Convoy’s predictive pricing algorithm. The rate is visible prior to tendering, which delivers pricing transparency upfront and removes the need for budget reconciliation.

3. 100% tender acceptance

As the shipper tenders loads to Convoy, we guarantee acceptance by tapping our nationwide network of more than 400,000 trucks. And through the use of an automated bidding system, carriers compete to haul loads, ensuring that our customers always get capacity at competitive rates.

4. Unparalleled transparency

Throughout the process, Convoy provides pricing transparency, sharing our truck costs for every shipment. Each month, customers receive an insights report detailing the estimated savings they’ve received comparing their actual costs to what they would have spent using an RFP or the spot market.

5. Shippers can cancel at any time

If a customer is unsatisfied with the program for any reason, they can cancel at any time.

Isn’t this just a cost-plus program?

At first glance, Guaranteed Primary looks a lot like a traditional cost-plus program. Although both programs make use of a fixed margin, there is an important difference. Cost-plus programs are backward looking, whereas Guaranteed Primary is a predictive (future-looking) program. 

With cost-plus, transportation teams don’t have access to accurate carrier costs at the time of tendering. Instead, shippers just receive an invoice after delivery. This leads to operational headaches and unexpected costs because shippers are expected to reconcile the actual carrier costs for every shipment.

By contrast, Guaranteed Primary is based on Convoy’s predictive pricing models. When transportation teams tender their freight (e.g., daily, weekly), Convoy generates a rate that predicts our costs to source the truck. Our pricing is based on machine learning models that get smarter with every shipment. And we take on the liability of our predictive rates being accurate. When our rate predictions are off, we shoulder the financial burden, eliminating the need for any billing reconciliation.

Start with your most volatile freight

Customers have tested Guaranteed Primary across a wide range of scenarios, including with their most problematic freight. I’m proud to share that at the time this article was written, every customer we’ve onboarded to the program is still using it today.

When the industry tender rejection rate was hovering around 25% in Q3 2021, Convoy accepted 99.997% of Guaranteed Primary loads.

This is strong evidence that our network is resilient and reliable even during periods of extreme volatility. 

While we’re still in the early days of this monumental shift away from the win/lose dynamic of traditional RFPs, the easiest place to start evolving your contract strategy is with your most volatile freight. Instead of lumping your “problem” freight into your RFP, consider carving it out as part of an intentional move into a program like Guaranteed Primary. Here are some of the top qualifiers you can look for within your freight portfolio based on what’s been working for our customers.

1. Stockout avoidance (or anywhere you really need to guarantee service)

One of our large retail customers was struggling to keep products in stock with a typical tender acceptance of just 15% on surge freight. When they began using Guaranteed Primary, tender acceptance shot up to 100%, allowing them to realize millions of dollars in revenue by keeping shelves stocked.

2. Just-in-time manufacturing or inventory management

Some of our customers don’t have the luxury of advanced planning. Despite having an average lead time of only 24 business hours, we eliminated the need for spot and serviced more than 350 problematic lanes for a multinational auto manufacturer. They were previously experiencing rejection rates of up to 30%. But with our elastic carrier network, we have covered 100% of loads while meeting the strict OTP and OTD requirements inherent with the coordinated relays of just-in-time manufacturing.

3. Low-volume lanes or low-lead-time freight

Low-volume and low-lead-time freight typically experiences high tender rejection rates and relies more heavily on the spot market. Our customers are putting this freight into Guaranteed Primary to reduce costs while improving service. One customer’s analysis demonstrated a 16% savings on truck costs for the lanes they moved to Guaranteed Primary, and an estimated $90,000 savings on administrative costs by avoiding the spot market.

Overall, we’re seeing positive shifts in the market, indicating a collective effort to modernize contract freight. Mini-bids are more common. Technology is making traditional RFP processes less cumbersome and manual. And other freight companies are evolving their existing cost-plus programs to more closely mirror Guaranteed Primary.

Now’s the ideal time to start running your volatile freight through a dynamic pricing program. Guaranteed Primary customers will benefit from even more cost savings by riding rates down in soft market conditions. Beyond these financial benefits, our customers tell us that the improvement to service quality alone is enough reason to make the switch. Regardless of market conditions, dynamic pricing programs like Guaranteed Primary are well positioned to take substantial volume from spot and traditional contract markets in the future by creating more balanced freight portfolios that benefit both shippers and carriers.

This story originally appeared in Convoy’s “The Future of Freight,” featuring 40 thoughtfully curated pages on supply chain disruption, freight procurement, market volatility, and more.

The post Stop Wasting Your Time Putting Volatile Freight in RFPs appeared first on Convoy.

In September 2007, newly former Federal Reserve Board Chair Alan Greenspan published a memoir reflecting on his two decades at the helm of the world’s largest central bank. His transformative tenure, lasting from 1987 to 2006, bore witness to the aftershocks of the sudden end of the Cold War and the euphoria of economic globalization’s raucous adolescence. 

Greenspan titled his book “The Age of Turbulence,” a choice that, in retrospect, seems quaint: Almost a year later, turbulence would return to the global economy with the financial market crash of September 2008. The decade and a half since has seen the global economy roiled by a sovereign debt crisis, a U.S. domestic oil boom and bust, a trans-Pacific trade war, a global pandemic, worldwide semiconductor shortages, and, most recently, the first major European land conflict since the Second World War. 

In retrospect, it can feel like Greenspan’s “Age of Turbulence” was just the opening act. The world economy is in constant flux; periods of stability are rare and relative. 

Most logistics professionals are skilled at navigating their business’ transportation needs through the seemingly endless parade of economic and geopolitical shocks, but familiarity does not necessarily make the turbulence any less disruptive. 

Economists typically distinguish between shocks that are the result of risk and shocks that are the result of uncertainty. Risk events have a stable, known probability distribution — the odds of occurring at a given point in time do not change dramatically over the years. They can be managed. Uncertain events have an unknown or unstable probability distribution. There is little we can do about uncertainty. (This distinction was originally popularized by Frank Knight, a well-known economist at the University of Chicago.)

Uncertainty is sometimes equated with black swan events — outcomes that weren’t even on the radar. That’s an extreme case. More often, uncertainty is less exotic: For example, events with a probability distribution that changes over time (e.g., the risk of a market correction) or events where there is not enough data to identify a meaningful probability distribution (e.g., the risk of very high inflation). It’s not that some subjective probability does not exist, it’s that such events are so rare or so volatile that we have no concrete sense of the odds.

Every age is its own age of turbulence. Increasingly extended and complex supply chains amplify the reach of small vulnerabilities. Navigating inevitable economic shocks requires the combination of active management of risk events with some degree of acceptance of uncertainty. 

The promise of technology and data transparency is that gradually, over time, market shocks move from the uncertainty column into the risk column — moving some of the sources of volatility in freight and logistics from the realm of unknown and unstable probability distributions into the realm of known and stable.

It is not an unrealistic dream. 

Among the great economic policy achievements of the past 30 years has been the taming of the disruptive booms and busts that plagued the U.S. economy for much of the 20th century, a phenomenon known as the Great Moderation. While the boom-and-bust cycle has not been entirely defeated, cyclical fluctuations in the U.S. economy have become much less frequent. This remarkable success was the result of explicit decisions by policymakers to allow the U.S. economy a greater degree of market-based flexibility: accept smaller and more frequent micro-adjustment but fewer seismic mega-shocks.

Shifting mindsets is never easy, but amid trucking’s most recent age of turbulence, we all can aspire to our own Great Moderation in the years ahead.

This story originally appeared in Convoy’s “The Future of Freight,” featuring 40 thoughtfully curated pages on supply chain disruption, freight procurement, market volatility, and more.

The post Risk and Uncertainty in Trucking’s ‘Age of Turbulence’ appeared first on Convoy.

Nonfarm payrolls increased by 431,000 in March according to data published today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and the unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent – a tenth of a percentage point shy of its pre-pandemic low and two-tenths above the boomtime unemployment lows of the late-1960s. It is a remarkable turnaround since the Covid-19 pandemic first rattled the global economy exactly two years ago, leaving record numbers of Americans out of work.

Key logistics sectors were mixed – with trucking firms shedding 4,900 workers (though trucking payrolls for the prior two months were revised upward by a combined 8,600 jobs), parcel delivery payrolls increasing by 6,700, and warehousing and storage firms adding 4,300 to their headcounts (all seasonally adjusted). Employment in these industries is now, respectively, 2.3 percent, 28.3 percent, and 33.8 percent above where it stood on the eve of the pandemic. For truck transportation firms, March 2022 marks the first month-over-month decline in payrolls since April 2020 and — that chaotic month aside — the largest decline since September 2019 when the freight market was in the middle of a deep slump.

But according to a growing chorus of market watchers, the freight bender is coming to a screeching stop. 

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. Nominal hourly wages for non-managerial workers in the transportation industry grew 11 percent in February – setting a new all-time record going back to the early 1970s. That was probably the peak. As demand for frontline logistics workers ebbs, there will likely continue to be ample opportunities in adjacent sectors such as construction, manufacturing, and natural resource exploration/extraction. 

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. 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.

View our economic commentary disclaimer here.

The post April’s Fools appeared first on Convoy.

Freight and logistics firms posted a relatively strong hiring month in what is typically a seasonal low point for the industry. In years when the freight market is strong, logistics firms tend to get a head start on hiring in anticipation of late-spring volume surges; in soft-market years, February tends to be a continuation of January’s post-holiday hangover. Truck transportation firms added 5,400 workers to seasonally-adjusted payrolls, package delivery services added 9,400 workers, and warehousing firms added 10,700 workers – all toward the upper range of recent trend movements.

However, the bulk of these gains were due to downward revision to the January numbers. January employment for the trucking industry was revised downward by 5,500 workers, and December employment was revised down by 2,800; parcel delivery employment for January and December was revised down by a combined 7,500 workers.

Volatile consumer spending and factory output have muddied conventional statistical approaches to teasing out seasonal surges and dips from longer-term trends or true economic surprises. Amid what is arguably the tightest blue-collar labor market in a generation, broad swaths of the logistics industry hoarded labor and limited seasonal layoffs this winter. The not-seasonally-adjusted employment data showed that trucking and warehousing firms added headcount in February. The end result could be less seasonal hiring later this spring.(Package delivery firms continued to shed jobs in non-seasonally adjusted terms.)

After February’s revisions to the BLS benchmarks, it is crystal clear that employment in the trucking industry is now well above where it stood on the eve of the pandemic and – depending on the sub-sector – near all-time peaks reported in summer 2019. But the aggregate numbers hide important differences across occupational groups: While driver employment is back at or slightly above pre-pandemic levels, back-office employment in the trucking industry is at historic highs. As freight demand slows over the coming months, it’s likely that these back-office workers will be first to feel it.

The post Freight Hiring Resilient in February Despite Wall Street Wobbles appeared first on Convoy.

Still, the headline 467,000 increase in private payrolls was far better than the gloomy forecasts just a day or two ago suggested; December 2021’s job gains were also revised sharply upward, from the initially reported 199,000 payroll increase, to a gain of 510,000. The unemployment rate ticked 0.1 higher (effectively unchanged), and the labor force participation rate was up but remains low by historic norms.

However, the increase in payrolls appears to be mostly the result of the updated population controls. (Absent the new population controls, employment would have shown a 272,000 decline.) This will inevitably raise questions about what exactly we should take from the report: Bulls will see continued strength which would bolster the case for a decisive upward shift in interest rates, while bears will see a statistical sleight-of-hand and urge caution. 

Trucking industry payrolls increased by 7,500 workers, package delivery jobs jumped by 21,200, and warehousing jobs jumped by 13,400. (All numbers are seasonally adjusted.) These changes appear to be heavily distorted by the methodological updates, so we caution against reading too much into the sequential changes. However, the updated data show a decisive shift in a trend that has gradually been emerging for much of the past decade: For the first time since records began, there are now more warehousing jobs in the United States than trucking jobs.

Looking beyond the topline numbers and blurry month-over-month changes hints at a more worrisome trend: In response to supply chain chaos over the past two years, the bulk of the trucking industry appears to have invested most heavily in expanding manager and operations headcounts, rather than in front-line drivers or productivity-enhancing science and engineering roles.

Anyone with a pulse on the trucking industry will be skeptical of the surge in freight payrolls in January (at least on the scale that the BLS data suggest).

It’s easy to forget that the headline truck transportation numbers published by BLS aren’t just truckers; they include back office and support workers at trucking companies as well. Even as trucking firms have sought to add drivers over the past year, they have also been aggressively onboarding other types of workers too. 

According to our analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS), a little over one-third of trucking company employees are not drivers. These roughly 600,000 workers are composed of business operations associates (roughly one-third of the non-driver total), management or legal workers and material moving workers (roughly one-fifth each) – with the remaining quarter mostly in maintenance/repair, sales, or finance/tech roles. 

Over the past two years, management and legal roles have been growing fastest at trucking companies – up almost 40 percent (37,000 workers) between 2019-Q4 and 2021-Q4 – and business operations roles, which were up 27 percent (46,000 workers) over that two-year period. During the same period, driver headcounts at trucking companies were up by 1 percent (14,000 workers). (We aggregated the CPS data here at the quarterly period, rather than the monthly period reported in other analyses, to ensure sufficient survey sample sizes. We also seasonally adjusted and smoothed the data using a Hodrick-Prescott Filter.)

During the decade from 2009 to 2019, there were on average 11.3 drivers for every office manager at trucking firms; in 2021, that ratio fell to 8.2 drivers per manager. Presumably, the growth in management and operational support payrolls at trucking companies reflects – at least in part – supply chain disruptions associated with the pandemic and the broad-based market failure of annual freight contracts, which leads to more back office scrambling to meet service requirements. 

With so much of the freight industry’s focus for 2022 squarely on improving driver productivity, this data suggest there is a clear opportunity for the trucking industry to address back office productivity at trucking companies as well.

View our economic commentary disclaimer here.

The post Look Beyond the January Data to Make Sense of the Surge in Trucking Payrolls appeared first on Convoy.

U.S. private-sector employers added 199,000 workers to their payrolls in December — the second consecutive month when job gains missed admittedly sky-high forecasts — but the unemployment rate fell by more than anticipated, declining to 3.9 percent from 4.2 percent in November according to data published this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). November job growth was revised upward from 210,000 to 249,000 and the participation rate held stubbornly constant.

Despite disappointing job gains, December capped a remarkable year for the U.S. labor market. Total nonfarm payrolls increased by nearly six million workers (the largest annual employment gain since records began in 1940) and the unemployment rate fell by 2.8 percentage points over 2021 (in line with the largest ever year-over-year declines in the unemployment rate). But hiring constraints were clearly weighing on firms’ ability to onboard workers by year’s end.

Employment in key supply chain sectors was decidedly mixed. Truck transportation firms added 300 workers, package delivery firm employment fell by 100 workers (and saw substantial downward revisions to past months due to updated seasonal adjustment factors), and warehousing and storage firms added 5,000 workers in December (all seasonally adjusted). For the trucking industry, December was the slowest month for employment gains since May 2021. However, November trucking payrolls were revised upward; absent those revisions, December would have notched an employment increase closer to 2,000 jobs. All in all, trucking companies added about 50,000 workers to their payrolls in 2021 – in line with payroll gains reported in 2014 and 2018, both recent high points for the freight market.

Of course, the report does not reflect the effects of the late-December Omicron surge. The data reported by BLS were collected for the week of December 12th. That week, the U.S. reported about 138,000 active cases with the Omicron variant accounting for about 38 percent of infections; by early January the country was reporting upward of 500,000 cases with Omicron accounting for 95 percent. 

Hiring pipelines always slow over the holidays, but the end-of-year slowdown is likely to be particularly large this year as recruiting and onboarding team capacity is limited with staff out sick. However, if the Omicron surge peaks relatively quickly – as it has in other countries – it could have only a minor longer-term effect on the labor market. 

Either way, it seems unlikely that 2022 will be able to even approach 2021’s impressive labor market gains – if nothing else, simply because so much progress has already been made.

View our economic commentary disclaimer here.

The post December to Remember, but January to Forget appeared first on Convoy.

Three key freight sub-sectors — truck transportation, package delivery, and warehousing/storage — all added jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis heading into what is traditionally peak season for the logistics industry. Trucking firms added 5,600 workers, package delivery firms added 26,800 workers, and warehousing/storage firms added 8,800 workers. 

However, it’s likely that conventional seasonal adjustment methods are overstating the holiday-related seasonal hiring surge in these sectors as the freight industry prepares earlier and earlier for long-anticipated end-of-year freight demand resulting in flatter and fatter seasonality. Historically, November is the seasonal hiring peak for warehousing and storage, and December is the seasonal hiring peak for package delivery firms. 

Growth in owner operators in recent months has been driven by older truckers. The number of Baby Boomer (born 1946 to 1963) owner-operators declined in 2019 and 2020, in part due to early retirements during the soft freight market of that era. For a brief period during late 2020 and early 2021, the number of Millennial (born 1980 to 1995) owner-operators exceeded the number of Baby Boomers, but that trend has since reverted. Among owner-operators, Baby Boomers again are more numerous than Millennials.

Beyond the headline payroll metrics, a bright spot in the report was the unemployment rate, which fell to 4.2 percent — lower than it ever got during the three decades from February 1970 to May 1999, and lower than the peak of the labor market during the early-2000s economic expansion. The labor force participation rate edged higher to 61.8 percent, but remains much lower than pre-pandemic levels.

View our economic commentary disclaimer here.

The post So much for Mo-vember appeared first on Convoy.

Driving down the highway surrounded by heavy duty trucks is an everyday occurrence for all of us. However, the staggering fact is that 35% of the time, those trucks are completely empty. That’s a really big deal for many reasons, but it’s especially significant for the environment. Think about this: each year heavy-duty trucks run 175 billion miles moving truckload freight in the US. Of these, 61 billion are empty miles – meaning trucks traveling without loads – contributing more than 87 million metric tons of carbon emissions annually.

It’s an even bigger problem when you take into account that scientists from around the world are telling us that we have a limited window to make unprecedented headway towards the biggest environmental and societal impact we can have: staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius of global temperature rise. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world would have to curb its carbon emissions by at least half by 2030 and then achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 to meet this target. That’s ambitious for any industry, let alone freight and trucking. 

At Convoy, we share the belief that action needs to be taken immediately. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, heavy-duty full truckload freight accounts for more than 252 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per year. The $800B trucking industry literally drives the health of our economy, yet new technology-based solutions to age-old problems have been slow to materialize. Convoy set out to compare two technologies for reducing carbon emissions in freight: the adoption of electric trucks and the use of automation to batch shipments together for drivers. We wanted to understand the short and long-term opportunities of both technologies, as a way to help supply chain and logistics leaders understand how to make the most sustainable choices when planning for the movement of their freight, both now and in the future.

Our Analysis: Electric Trucks vs. Automated Reloads

Research by Guidehouse Insights found that as of 2021, electric trucks represent only about 2% of U.S. new-vehicle sales, with 30% of market share expected between 2025 and 2030. Additionally, Guidehouse’s research predicts electric trucks to be the majority of heavy duty trucks on the road sometime between 2040 and 2045. 

Unfortunately, those adoption rates may not occur fast enough to meet the near-term environmental challenges the world is facing today. Convoy’s latest research, which took the assumptions from Guidehouse and forecasted those figures over the next 13 years, shows the inflection point of when electric trucks will save the equivalent carbon emission as automated shipment batching does today, is not until the year 2034. Additionally, these findings show that supply chain leaders need to be taking action today to reduce emissions as well as preparing for the eventual adoption of electric trucks to run zero emission freight.

At Convoy, our Automated Reloads program algorithmically groups multiple full-truckload shipments for carriers, which makes it easier to find more loads to keep trucks full and earning, while eliminating wasted time searching and minimizing empty miles driven in search of work. Convoy’s Automated Reloads program has already yielded a 45% decrease in CO2 emissions from trucks running empty less often. This accounts for more than 3.5 million pounds of carbon emissions saved since we introduced bundling of loads to our network in 2019. 

If the industry as a whole were to adopt these same practices and reduce empty miles at the same rate as Convoy, CO2 emissions would be reduced by 40 million metric tons – the equivalent of taking 8.6 million passenger vehicles off the road for a year. 

Next Steps for Building a Sustainable Future 

As we come to the end of 2021 and enter into 2022, the problem is going to be the same. Everybody is still going to be talking about the impact of climate change, the supply chain is going to continue to be a disruptor and supply chain leaders will continue to be tasked with achieving sustainability goals as part of their roles and responsibilities. But, what can change in 2022 is the progress that’s made. 

In 2022, supply chain leaders should take two steps to build a strong path for net zero emissions and get empty trucks off the road. First, initiate conversations with key stakeholders in your supply chain to address the topic of empty miles – it’s one of the simplest ways to make progress when it comes to sustainability efforts. Second, start having conversations about the adoption of electric trucks and work with your carriers and partners to figure out how to introduce electric trucks into the freight network over the next 20 years. Today, 20 years may sound like a lifetime away, but it is better to prepare now. 

At the heart of it, we’re all focused on solving the same problems of waste and inefficiency in the freight industry. At Convoy, we believe that by working together to reduce the 35% of the time trucks drive empty we can make the greatest immediate impact that can benefit the environment, and that’s exciting. Join us and other forward-looking shippers and carriers as we reduce carbon waste from empty miles – the time for action is now.

The post 35% of the time that truck next to you on the highway is empty – that’s a really big deal for the environment appeared first on Convoy.

Non-farm payrolls increased by 531,000 jobs — better than the consensus forecast of 450,000 (as of Thursday evening). September’s initially disappointing non-farm job gains of 194,000 were revised substantially upward to 312,000, and August payrolls were also revised higher. The unemployment rate fell 0.2 percentage points to 4.6 percent and labor force participation remained stagnant. Economists will debate precisely how much labor market slack there might still remain hidden behind the headline metrics, but the fact is: The unemployment rate is now as low as it was at any point in the 27 years from 1970 to 1997.

General freight trucking firms added 7,900 jobs (seasonally adjusted) to payrolls last month — one of the best months for the past year (just shy of August’s 8,700 gain). Trucking industry employment is about 20,000 workers short of pre-pandemic highs in the BLS data; but, accounting for growth in the owner-operator (self-employed) segment — which is not included in the headline BLS numbers — industry employment is now slightly above where it stood on the eve of the pandemic. Among available drivers, capacity has clearly shifted toward the owner-operator segment.

Beyond headline employment, other metrics suggest trucking hiring constraints are past the fever pitch pace of this past summer. While many trucking firms continue to report hiring challenges, average weekly wage growth for trucking industry workers has slowed from nearly 7 percent per year in June to under 4 percent per year in August. 

Average weekly hours are up among trucking workers in general (touching their highest levels since at least the 1990s) — but most of that gain appears to be driven by specialized drivers and office/support workers. At long-haul and local trucking firms, hours are down. For carriers that focus on long-haul trucking, average weekly hours declined from 43.5 hours in April 2021 to 42.4 hours in August (provisional data). For carriers that focus on local/regional hauls, average weekly hours declined from 42.5 in May to 40.9 in the provisional August data. 

Labor market competition is not easing. Two closely related (and fast growing) industries have seen strong growth recently: Courier and messenger (parcel delivery) firms lost 4,900 jobs in October (though that appears mostly to be driven by large upward revisions to the September numbers and potentially distortions to normal seasonality) and warehousing/storage employers added 20,200 jobs (all seasonally adjusted). 

Courier and messenger jobs are up 20 percent since the start of the pandemic and warehousing/storage jobs are up 14 percent — with combined head counts up 330,000 over that period. A decade ago, there were two trucking industry workers for every one warehousing/storage industry worker; today, the ratio is nearly one-to-one. If recent trends continue, the number of warehousing/storage workers will surpass the number of trucking industry workers by the end of 2021.

Overall, today’s data paint a portrait of continued — if easing — labor constraints as the freight market moves towards year-end peak season. Over the past year, the primary constraint to trucking capacity growth has see-sawed between labor and equipment (truck and trailer) availability. With new truck and trailer production backlogs steadily lengthening, it will be increasingly logical for trucking companies to begin to push out hiring plans further and further into the future.

View our economic commentary disclaimer here.

The post Trucking is Past Peak Hiring Constraint appeared first on Convoy.

The freight market in Southern California has emerged as the cornerstone of the U.S. economy. Yet, in recent months, container ships have faced record volume and record delays at the San Pedro Bay ports. So have truck drivers. 

Just how much is the port congestion affecting truckload freight in Southern California?

The Los Angeles metro is one of Convoy’s strongest markets. So Convoy’s director of economic research, Aaron Terrazas, dug into our proprietary truckload freight data, along with publicly available transportation and economic data and research, to find out. 

The result: our Southern California Freight Insights Report.

Market-specific reports like this are possible because of the amount of freight data we’ve amassed across our digital freight network. Drivers in our network use the GPS-enabled Convoy app for carriers, which captures more than 1,000 unique data points throughout the life of a shipment. 

In Southern California, we have more than 80,000 app-connected drivers, serving more than 5,000 facilities that belong to shippers across the Fortune 500. 

Read our Southern California Freight Insights Report to learn about:

• The driver shortage in Southern California — or is there one? 
• Tender rejection rates and where they stand compared to 2020.
• Dwell times and how they’ve been impacted by Southern California market challenges. 
• Accessorial fees — which loads are incurring fees and one way to curb those costs. 
• New regulation targeting truck emissions — how it will impact which providers you work with. 
• And more. 

Download the free report today.

View our economic commentary disclaimer.

The post Ship in Southern California? Our new Freight Insights Report is for you appeared first on Convoy.

Seasonally adjusted trucking industry payrolls increased by 2,500 to 1.50 million in September, up 3.6 percent from a year earlier, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Job gains for August were also revised up by 1,900 workers. It was the fourth consecutive month of payroll gains for the trucking industry, but the slowest month since May. On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, trucking industry payrolls declined by 1,600 workers — so the industry’s net gains last month are in some ways a statistical illusion. They are now 1.3 percent below where they stood in January 2020, just before the Covid-19 pandemic, and in line with employment levels in summer 2018 during the last freight market peak. (The timing of the data collection from Sept. 12th through Sept. 18th means that Hurricane Ida, which disrupted supply chains across the eastern seaboard early in the month, likely had little to no distortionary effect on the results.)

The BLS payroll data do not include the important owner-operator (self-employed) segment of truckers and, as we’ve previously noted, may actually undercount employment during periods of elevated labor market churn or when employment growth is being driven by newly incorporated firms. Data from a separate Census Bureau survey — the monthly Current Population Survey — suggest that trucking industry employment for company drivers, office/support workers at trucking firms, and owner-operators is now at or above pre-pandemic levels.

Forward-Looking Firms Hire for the Future, Not Just Today

Labor shortages have always been somewhat of a rorschach test for the priorities of the perceptor: Those seeking to hire see shortages around every corner and those seeking work inevitably see sufficient available labor for the right (usually higher) wage. Whatever one believes about the depth and longevity of the trucking industry’s recent hiring woes, it’s clear that the worst hiring constraints are past. It’s plausible that structural labor shortages may loom on the far horizon as a generation of older truckers ages toward retirement, but the most comprehensive views of trucker employment suggests that the number of active drivers is now near historic highs. While that employment level may not be sufficient to service the current extraordinary level of demand, it’s unlikely that demand will persist at current levels in the coming years — meaning that it’s entirely rational for trucking firms to hire to a level in line with their expectations of long-term business needs, not just today’s. 

Package Delivery Firm Hiring Increasingly Skewed by Gig Business Models

Employment at package delivery firms also increased (by 12,500 workers to 1.05 million seasonally adjusted) in September as the sector got an early start on holiday shopping prep. However, the share of package delivery drivers who are self-employed surged earlier this year and now stands at 5x its average for the past decade (around 20 percent as of August 2021, up from an average of 4 percent over the prior decade). As the last-mile/package delivery sector pivots more and more toward a gig economy model of employment, the BLS data will become less and less useful for assessing shifts in the industry’s underlying capacity. 

View our economic commentary disclaimer here.

The post Trucking Hiring Slows, Package Delivery Jobs Surge as Economy Approaches Full Employment appeared first on Convoy.

In a recent Convoy survey of 165 small and medium-sized trucking companies, we found that:

• Half (50%) of respondents generally try to avoid areas directly affected by wildfire activity;
• Upward of 40 percent try to avoid areas under winter watch/warning and areas under flood watch/warning; 
• About one-third of trucking companies try to avoid hauling into areas experiencing hurricane activity; and 
• About one-fifth try to avoid areas experiencing extreme heat.

Of course, “generally try to avoid” does not necessarily mean that they do so under absolutely no circumstances, but does provide an approximate indication of the magnitude of truckers’ perceived risk for various categories of natural disasters. 

In an especially fragile and volatile freight market, such as the present, these ostensibly localized disruptions have the potential to reverberate throughout the country. Historically, truck costs have surged anywhere from 5% to 50% inbound to markets that are experiencing (or are expected to experience) major natural disasters — with substantial variation depending on the type, severity and timing of the weather event.

The market response is the result of two competing forces.

Demand typically surges during the days immediately leading up to anticipated weather events — for instance, hurricanes or winter storms which are usually predicted several days in advance — or during them for slower-moving phenomena such as wildfires as residents prepare (e.g., stock essentials, protect their homes). In the aftermath of particularly destructive natural disasters, inbound truckload demand also tends to remain elevated for several weeks (sometimes several months) as local economies recover and rebuild. 

But demand changes are not the only shock to the freight system, supply also contracts during the more intense phases of natural disasters. Some individual truckers and trucking companies are, quite understandably, reluctant to put their lives and livelihoods at risk by hauling freight into potentially dangerous areas. (Of course, there are always a handful of risk-forward individuals who relish such opportunities.) 

View our economic commentary disclaimer here.

The post Dodging Disasters appeared first on Convoy.

Trucking firms added 5,400 workers to their payrolls in August (seasonally adjusted) according to the BLS data, building upon July’s 4,800 job gain and June’s 6,300 job gains after stagnating head counts for much of the first half of 2021. Though hiring has been strong through the summer, trucking industry employment is still down 1.6 percent relative to January 2020, before the start of the pandemic. Not-seasonally adjusted trucking payrolls are now 1.5 percent above pre-pandemic levels. Courier and messenger services (known as “last-mile delivery” in the freight industry) added a seasonally adjusted 20,000 workers — though this likely reflected earlier than normal hiring for what is anticipated to be a busy online holiday shopping season.

For an industry that has faced record demand over the past year and that has been aggressively increasing wages, head counts have been stubbornly slow to rebound in the BLS data despite recent signs of progress.

There are many familiar explanations for this conundrum — most convincingly, robust competition for workers from other industries and regulatory/educational barriers to entry. These challenges are very real and have been extensively documented. But it’s also possible that the data could simply be painting an incomplete picture of the trucking labor market. There is some emerging evidence to support this idea too.

As we have noted previously, the monthly BLS employment report is composed of two data sets: A survey of employers commonly known as the “Establishment Survey”, and a general population survey known as the “Household Survey”.

The Establishment Survey is generally viewed as the more authoritative pulse on the labor market, but for assessing the state of the trucking industry, it is particularly problematic. It excludes important trucker subgroups such as self-employed Owner Operators and many private fleet drivers (i.e., truckers who work for companies whose core business is not trucking or transportation) and it includes back office and support workers at trucking companies. The Household Survey data tends to be more volatile since it is based on a relatively small population sample, but allows us to more narrowly analyze workers who spend their day driving a truck.

After controlling for these conceptual differences and seasonally adjusting, the Establishment Survey data show head counts at trucking firms are still below pre-pandemic levels, while the Household Survey data suggest that trucking industry employment has fully recovered and is now essentially on par with where it was in January 2020. This is true for self-employed Owner Operators, company drivers, and for back office/support workers at trucking companies. 

What explains the discrepancy? Most likely it has to do with technical differences in how the two surveys are sampled, and how each defines “employment”.

First, the Establishment Survey assesses changes in employment at existing firms. The sample frame of companies surveyed is updated once per year, which means that new firms are underrepresented in the survey. Census Bureau research has documented how the Establishment Survey can undercount payroll growth when that growth is dominated by newly incorporated firms.

I suspect that this is the single most important reason for the trucking industry employment gap between the Establishment and Household Surveys. Data from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), which requires that trucking companies operating commercial vehicles across state lines register, confirm growth in the number of new trucking companies in recent months.

Second, the Establishment Survey counts “jobs” while the Household Survey counts “workers”; individuals with multiple jobs are counted multiple times and individuals between jobs (e.g., who have left a prior job and have their next job lined up) are excluded from the Establishment Survey. In a period of elevated labor market churn, multiple job holding declines and employment gaps increase — both of which should skew the Establishment Survey numbers lower.

All this is to say, in volatile economic periods like the present, the Household Survey probably provides a more complete and timely window into the state of the trucking labor market (despite the fact that Household Survey data are released several weeks after the Establishment Survey data). These technical details are deep in the data weeds, but can have conclusion-shifting consequences for our read on the state of the trucking labor market. 

View our economic commentary disclaimer here.

The post Data Deep Dive: Trucking Employment is Probably Back at Pre-Crisis Levels appeared first on Convoy.