Clutching their coffee cups like talismans - as if a hot cup of coffee might bring them luck, or at least a day's work - the stevedores who unload the region's commerce from cargo ships on the Delaware River amble into their union's no-frills hiring hall in the shadow of the Walt Whitman Bridge.

As they do every morning starting at 6 o'clock, they grab their green seniority cards and wait to see whether they'll be dealt a job.

On one recent Wednesday? Eight jobs, 50 waiting workers.

"That's the way it is," said Ray O'Shields, who waited, in vain, for his number to be called. "Ain't no work."

A year ago, companies had 4.5 million jobs nationally for people moving plywood, steel, pineapples, automobiles, paper, scrap metal, and the millions of other products that contribute to the economy.

Now more than 303,000 of those jobs are gone. In Philadelphia and its seven surrounding counties, the number of truck drivers, warehouse jockeys, and railroad workers collecting unemployment in transport and warehousing nearly doubled to 4,276 in two years.

Particularly hard hit? Kingsessing and Hunting Park in the city; Pottstown, Coatesville, and Lansdowne in the suburbs.

Why the drop in these jobs?

Because if merchandise is barely moving off the shelves, there's a lot less need for people to make it - or move it.

Transportation and warehousing together are not the hardest-hit sector, locally or nationally. That honor belongs to manufacturing, professional and business services, construction, and retailing.

But employment in the freight business is "a reflection of the general economy," said John "Jack" Worrall, an economics professor at Rutgers University-Camden.

"If you have a market, one of the things that makes it efficient is the movement of goods from A to B."

Truck, boat, train, or plane - all move raw materials to manufacturers or building sites, and finished products from factories to warehouses and stores.

When times are good, freight stats are up - and so is employment.

Otherwise, you can pick a form of transport and see the devastation.

In May, for example, the number of rail-freight carloads was down 24.6 percent from a year earlier, when more than 1.4 million packed railcars moved across the nation.

Here is a snapshot: Coal is by far the single biggest commodity shipped by rail, with close to half a million carloads moving in any given month. Coal shipments alone were down 89,000 carloads, or about 16 percent, in May compared with a year earlier. Carloads of motor vehicles dropped 52 percent.

Employment at the biggest rail companies dropped 8 percent in that same period, nationally.

"It's an absolute picture," Worrall said.

If a college professor isn't handy, an on-the-ground lesson is available from the people who move the economy - truck drivers, pilots, warehouse workers, railroad clerks, and longshoremen like Brian Jones, 58, of South Philadelphia.