International demand in the warehousing sector continues to curve upwards on the back of strong and sustainable e-commerce sales, resulting in an uptick in human resource requirements.
According to the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) in the US, employment in warehousing surged by 9% year-on-year in December as online trade crested a wave of festive season spending strengthened by Covid-19 distancing dynamics.
The marked increase in hiring human help as opposed to relying on automated assistance flies in the face of pre-Covid predictions of severe job-shedding in the sector because of an increasingly robotics-driven environment.
Not only did spiking online shipping and storage demand drive low-level job opportunities in warehousing, but employees also worked longer hours, according to the BLS.
Supply-chain writer Matt Leonard also reported that warehousing performance was reflected in America’s Producer Price Index (PPI) which showed that the storage sector had reached the highest point in a decade.
Warehousing’s PPI position stood in stark contrast to the sector’s performance at the onset of the pandemic at the beginning of 2020 as consumers, fearing that remote spending costs would be passed onto them, withdrew from online shopping.
But that trend was short-lived, especially because of the effect of lockdown demands on consumer-related mobility.
Unfortunately labour buoyancy in the warehousing market is also expected to be short-lived.
This is because low-pay compensation generally drove high staff turnover rates, Hamid Moghadam, the CEO of logistics facilities investment company Prologis, told Leonard.
