Freight Jobs Join October Employment Gain

Employment rose moderately within key U.S. freight industries in October, the Labor Department said, as private employers overall put 159,000 more people to work last month for a gain of 1.1 million jobs in the private sector since last December.

The job gains, adjusted for normal seasonal trends, included mild increases for warehousing and storage, trucking, non-transit rail and water transportation, Labor said. Air transport jobs, primarily among passenger airlines, edged downward.

With losses among government jobs bringing the net gain down to 151,000 jobs, the overall U.S. jobless rate was unchanged at 9.6 percent, where it has remained since it was 9.5 percent in June and July. Before that, the rate was 9.7 percent or higher since July 2009.

By The Numbers: Cass Freight Index.

However, October’s hiring was stronger than economists had expected, and Labor also revised its September and August private employment figures higher. President Obama said “we’ve now seen four months of private-sector job growth above 100,000, which is the first time we’ve seen this kind of increase in over four years.”

Obama cautioned “the unemployment rate is still unacceptably high” and said “we need to accelerate our economic growth so that we are producing jobs at a faster pace.” Still, he called the latest employment report “encouraging news.”

-- Contact John D. Boyd at jboyd@joc.com.