Impact of Yellow Corp. Closure on U.S. Job Market

If you have looked through the national newspapers this past week, you may have seen stories about the trucking company, Yellow (formerly YRC Worldwide). The Nashville-based company, which has a fleet of over 12,000 trucks, recently announced that they are ceasing all operations, and will likely soon file for bankruptcy protection. Yellow going out of business means losses of anywhere between 22,000 and 30,000 jobs.

As we discussed in Part One of our Jobs 101 series, the national JOLTS report (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) looks at monthly nonfarm job openings, hires, and total separations (quits and layoffs/discharges) across the US economy.

In any given month, a massive layseries of layoffs from a company (or a collection of companies) can noticeably contribute to the layoffs number of the monthly JOLTS report. The dissolution of Yellow and the resulting unloading of jobs at the company will be reflected in future JOLTS reports this year. A past example of large layoffs appearing in the JOLTS reports was observable at Tech companies earlier this year. In January, both Alphabet and Amazon let thousands of employees go (12,000 and 18,000, respectively). Along with some other sizable tech layoffs in the month, like those at Microsoft and PayPal (10,000 and 2,000, respectively), these firings contributed to January’s jump in layoffs numbers, to 1.72 million, up from 1.48 million in December 2022.

As the website, layoffs.fyi, shows, there have been nearly 60,000 more tech layoffs at this point in 2023 than there were in all of 2022. However, despite the large amount of firings at large tech companies this year, overall nonfarm hirings in the US have remained consistently above six million per month, in line with what the monthly hiring pace has been since March 2021.

With LinkUp’s extensive, timely, and superior job market data, we are able to consistently make reliable predictions of the overall JOLTS numbers. With a solid understanding of the trajectory of the labor market’s turnover and hiring conditions, it is easier to gauge the broader trends of the economy. Such insight combined with our sector-by-sector and regional job market data can provide a clearer and more graspable picture of what is driving the economy and where the economy is headed.