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- The National Retail Federation anticipates holiday sales will grow between 8.5 to 10.5 percent over 2020 and that retailers will hire around 500,000 seasonal workers.
- Walmart said it would hire around 150,000 new workers and is offering to pay 100 percent of its associates’ college tuition and book fees.
- The retail trade industry lost around 459,000 jobs in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
As the holiday season quickly approaches, retailers are desperate to entice workers to come work for them. Some are offering a range of incentives from increased pay, signing bonuses, referral bonuses and even paid college tuition.
The National Retail Federation (NRF) announced in late October that it anticipated holiday sales during November and December to grow between 8.5 to 10.5 percent over 2020, an average increase of 4.4 percent over the past five years.
The NRF also anticipated that retailers would hire between 500,000 to 665,000 seasonal workers this year, compared to 486,000 seasonal hires in 2020. That tracks with the Labor Department’s latest jobs report, which found the retail trade industry had around 1.1 million job openings as of August 2021.
Companies have begun attempting to lure in workers and staff up in anticipation for record holiday shopping this year. In September, one of the world’s largest package delivery companies, UPS announced it would hire more than 100,000 seasonal employees. UPS also promoted eligible seasonal employees who are students to its Earn and Learn program, giving up to $1,300 towards college expenses in addition to their hourly pay for three months of continuous employment.
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Walmart made a similar announcement in September, saying it was planning to hire 150,000 new store associates across the country. The retail giant detailed the numerous benefits it was offering, from a $16.40 hourly wage that can go as high as $34 an hour to also paying 100 percent of associates’ college tuition and books.
Retailer Macy’s also announced plans to hire 76,000 full-time and part-time employees, over which 48,000 would be for the holiday season. Macy’s is offering a referral bonus up to $500 for every friend and family member current employees recruit.
Retail workers have been put in a uniquely tough position since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, being in public-facing roles that require face-to-face interaction with hundreds of customers every single day. They also bore the brunt of masking tensions, having to enforce masks in stores and juggle changing mandates in localities across the country.
Those struggles were reflected in federal jobs statistics, with the retail trade losing 459,000 jobs in 2020 due to the pandemic.
However, as more and more Americans got vaccinated and the state of the pandemic shifted, the Labor Dept. announced a rise in employment by 531,000 jobs in October, with unemployment also down to 4.6 percent. But that still left hundreds of thousands of jobs left unfilled.
Macy’s CEO, Jeff Gennette, told The New York Times, “Everyone’s experiencing this — there’s a war for talent at the front lines. My sense is we all have to raise our game.”
Retailers are fighting for the same pool of workers, which is further complicated by President Biden’s nation-wide vaccine mandate for employers that staff over 100 workers to be vaccinated by Jan. 4. The president’s mandate was temporarily blocked this weekend by a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Louisiana.
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