HIGHLIGHTS
- Payroll for courier companies has cut more than 40,000 jobs since the peak shipping season in October 2022
- The number of warehouse jobs as of June 2023 has decreased for 8 consecutive months, with 6,900 employees being laid off
FULL ARTICLE
From massive recruitment…
During the Covid-19 epidemic, social distancing has caused the demand for goods delivery to escalate. Hundreds of millions were confined to their homes and their only connection to the outside world is through… ordering. In addition, there existed the need to transport essential items for the fierce fight against the epidemic.
These two factors make transportation and warehousing craved for jobs during the pandemic, facilitating massive recruitment waves.
According to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), while most other major industries have had to cut staff since pre-pandemic, the transportation and warehousing sectors have added more than 600,000 jobs between February 2020 and March 2022. Although at first, these two industries were not immune to the job crises, the amount of works created in these two still increased by 10.5% during the epidemic season.
… to massive lay-off
However, post Covid-19, this “necessary” workforce quickly became “redundant” as society moved towards the “new normal”.
It is estimated that payroll for courier companies has cut more than 40,000 jobs since the peak shipping season in October 2022. Most recently, in just one month from May to June, US freight and parcel carriers cut more than 14,000 jobs. According to the BLS, the number of jobs in the trucking industry, which increased by 180,000 positions during the pandemic, also decreased slightly and remained almost unchanged since March of this year.
In addition, the number of warehouse jobs as of June 2023 has decreased for 8 consecutive months, with 6,900 employees being laid off. At the same time, the number of recruitments has also decreased by 55,600 since June 2022. This is the latest drop in a string of layoffs that follows a massive hiring spree during the pandemic, as the rise of e-commerce has triggered a wave of supply chain expansion from the dock to the mall. distribution.
Who to blame?
There are many reasons leading to the current lay-off trend.
Firstly, consumer demand is shifting from goods to services. As noted, most of the recruitment growth in the first half of 2023 came from the service industries. Specifically, private service firms added 120,000 jobs in June, led by 73,000 additions in the private health and education sectors.
Secondly, retailers are offering in-store pickup or drop-in pickup. “Retailers are working to reduce shipping costs by moving away from having to deliver orders,” said Cathy Roberson, president of supply chain research firm Logistics Trends & Insights. The form of receiving goods at an intermediary point, also known as “contactless delivery”, is being widely used in China. Online orders will be tracked on a mobile application linked to shipping units and e-commerce platforms. Each area will have a place to gather goods for customers to pick up based on the information displayed on the application. This form helps to reduce labor for transporting goods directly to customers.
Thirdly, the development of automation helps machines take over the work of humans. According to Cathy Roberson, companies like United Parcel Service (UPS) and FedEx have been increasing automation in their facilities, so they don’t need as many employees to sort orders anymore. In FedEx automated facilities, goods moving within the facility require only human contact at two points: unloading and loading. First, they are taken out of the truck by the employee on the unloading side. Then, they will be taken by the conveyor belt to go through an automatic sorting system. By the end of the belt, these goods only need to be loaded onto the trailer by another worker.
Thao Trinh
