Conn. companies look to lure holiday workers with ‘super-season’ pay
With the holidays looming, Ellen Story and Raya Ward have the same need — lining up enough help to get Christmas trees and decorations from their stores to customer homes — but on a vastly different scale.
Ward would like to hire one more person in Darien, while Story is looking to land a few hundred more across three states.
They both express confidence they will find those folks — but at a higher pay rate than they might have been offering a year ago.
Since enhanced unemployment benefits ended in September, Stew Leonard’s has received more than 5,000 applications for its grocery and wine stores in Norwalk, Danbury, Newington, New York and New Jersey, according to Story, who heads the chain’s human resources.
Heading into October,
Stew Leonard’s increased its base hourly wage to $15 in what Story described as “super-season” pay for new hires helping out through the holidays. Story said the company has hired 450 and is still looking to fill about 200 slots, with the potential for permanent work after the holidays for those looking to latch on.
“We definitely saw an increase in our applications — but that’s also when we implemented our superseason pay,” Story said. “It’s hard to say which really drove the application count.”
Either way, the increase was welcome as trucks dropped off big boxes of holiday garlands on Thursday at the Norwalk store, with lines of Christmas trees as a backdrop. Story said Christmas tree employees typically are working the lot the day they are hired, with cashiers getting a three-day crash course on the registers before handling a checkout lane on their own, Story said.
At Nielsen’s Florist & Garden Shop in Darien, Ward said there is one common refrain she is hearing from job applicants these days: The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a reckoning for the work environment people want, whether for seasonal employment or permanently.
“People are looking for jobs that they will find more fulfilling,” said Ward, general manager for the Darien business. “People are trying to find a new direction.”
‘Constantly looking’
The CEO of the Connecticut Business & Industry Association agrees, and says the state Department of Labor should consider a survey of workers to better understand what they are seeking.
“It’s not money, it’s not compensation — it’s a lot of personal choice right now,” CBIA CEO Chris DiPentima said. “Let’s go ask these people, ‘Why haven’t you been able to find a job? Where are you looking? Why are you sitting on the sidelines?”
In Indeed’s most recent job search survey, the company said the number of people who were actively looking for work in September was “stagnant” at just 12 percent of some 5,000 adults nationally who were surveyed.
Many have come off the sidelines since early September, when unemployment filings dropped 27 percent in a single week in Connecticut. But the state has seen narrower declines over five succeeding weeks. In its national survey, Indeed said income from an employed spouse was the biggest single reason cited by job seekers who lacked urgency in their search.
As of mid-October, just under 47,000 people were receiving jobless aid through the Connecticut Department of Labor, down
from 102,000 the last week of August prior to the resumption of school and Congress ending pandemic aid programs such as a $300 boost in weekly benefits.
In September, The Conference Board tallied more than 94,000 online job ads, which was nearly two positions for every person receiving unemployment assistance that month in Connecticut. Nurses were most in demand, followed by retail workers and freight fulfillment jobs.
Amazon’s chief financial officer said two weeks ago that the company is looking to fill 150,000 positions nationally in November and December to meet holiday demand. That equates to 1.4 percent of all the job openings as of August in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
“Our average starting wage is now over $18 per hour — with an additional $3 per hour depending on shifts in many locations —
and sign-on bonuses that can be up to $3,000,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said during a conference call in late October. “For the foreseeable future, our capacity constraint is actually labor — which is new, and not welcome.”
For some sectors, temporary staffing in the fall and winter months extends beyond the gift-giving season. The head of human resources for Ring’s End said the building supplies company has been struggling to hire drivers mainly because heating oil suppliers have been aggressive with perks to put people behind the wheel for the winter delivery season.
“Commercial truck drivers haven’t been the easiest thing — getting them, holding onto them,” said John Giardino, human resources director for Ring’s End. “We are constantly looking.”