Understaffing may drive holiday delays
Firms scramble in tight market
Facing the tightest labor market in 50 years, many delivery and warehouse companies fell short of their hiring goals this holiday season, staffing firms say, at least raising the prospect of some shipping delays.
“Understaffing is absolutely a problem going into the holidays,” says Mathieu Stevenson, CEO of Snagajob, an online job site. One package delivery company he would not name still needs about 10,000 drivers, he says.
Meanwhile, most major retailers are wellstaffed, and some may even have too many employees because they brought on lots of workers early to get ahead of a feverish scramble for seasonal labor, says Bart Sichel, an independent retail consultant.
To cope with such imbalances and persistent worker shortages, a growing number of companies
providing flexible scheduling software and sharing workers through networks so they can compete more effectively with gig economy giants such as Uber and Lyft.
In October, retailers added 137,000 workers on a non-seasonally adjusted basis, up 18% from the 116,000 jobs added last year, according to the Labor Department and outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. Meanwhile, payrolls in transportation and warehousing fell 17% to 43,700.
That’s not because warehouses and freight companies didn’t need shelfstockers and drivers, says Andrew Challenger, vice president of the Challenger firm. IHS Markit predicts holiday sales will rise a solid 4.6% this year, though that’s after a poor performance in 2018. Rather, he says, with unemployment at 3.6%, near the lowest mark since 1969, businesses simply can’t find enough workers.
In September, there were 7 million job openings, compared with just 5.5 million unemployed workers. And just 35% of 16- to 19-year-olds were working or looking for jobs in September, down from about 52% in 1999.
The November jobs report is exsonal pected to show whether employers added enough temporary workers during the biggest holiday hiring month.
Large companies on average raised seasonal workers’ pay about 30% from the same period a year ago, Stevenson says. They also rolled out an array of incentives. UPS let students earn $1,300 toward college expenses. Kohl’s offered a free onsite health center, paid breaks and 15% store discounts. Chipotle is doling out quarterly bonuses.
Yet employers are increasingly adopting non-financial strategies to attract and keep workers:
Hiring early
Most large retailers brought on seaare workers in August and September to get an early jump, says Jim McCoy, general manager of Scout Exchange, a job recruiting site. Ads for seasonal jobs in August have shot up 68% over the past four years, according to staffing giant Manpower.
Making temps permanent workers
Employers are converting more seasonal workers to staffers, both as an incentive to attract them at a crucial time and to bulk up for long-term labor needs, says Amy Glaser, senior vice president of Adecco staffing. About 15% to 20% of holiday workers are being hired permanently, she says.
Scheduling software, sharing workers
Walmart has an app that lets employees swap shifts with other workers and pick up unfilled shifts. Managers say the system saves up to eight hours a week in scheduling hassles. It also fills empty shifts and helps draw and keep workers.
Other employers are joining networks that let them share workers. At Ala Moana shopping center in Honolulu, 65 retailers can tap each others’ hourly employees through software that lets a worker log a shift at one shop one day and another shift at a different store the next day.