Retailers May Face Worker Shortage In 5 Years
Last updated Friday, August 4, 2006 10:19 PM CDT in Business
By Anita French
The MOrning News
Wal-Mart Canada is taking the unusual step of offering English as a second-language course to store employees later this year. It’s part of a hiring program aimed at attracting more immigrants to its shrinking work force, a Wal-Mart executive told the Retail Council of Canada at a recent conference.
That’s not a problem facing Wal-Mart stores in the United States, said company spokesman John Simley. At least, not yet.
“We recently had 400 job positions filled in Chicago for which we had 12,000 applicants,” Simley said. “We are having little difficulty finding good people to staff our stores.”
Wal-Mart said earlier this year it planned to spend approximately $17.5 billion in capital expenditures for fiscal 2007, most of which will go for store expansion. As usual, a lot of hiring goes hand-in-hand with this kind of growth.
Simley said he couldn’t provide any figures on how many people Wal-Mart would be taking on this year, although he added that Wal-Mart has created about 240,000 positions in the last three years.
Wal-Mart spokeswoman Sarah Clark told The Morning News in 2004 that the company would hire around 83,000 people for the $12 billion store expansion Wal-Mart announced for that fiscal year.
Wal-Mart Canada, which employs 75,000 people, hires an average of 30,000 new people a year both to fill positions in new and expanded stores and replace departing staff in existing stores, the Toronto Star reported.
The newspaper article said a constant turnover and a “looming” labor shortage have prompted Wal-Mart and other Canadian retailers to replace up to 50 percent of their work force every year.
Some two million Canadians work in retailing, which is the third-largest employer in the country in terms of jobs, Andrew Siegwart, the retail council's director of education, told the Toronto Star.
Wal-Mart and other retailers in the United States may be facing a labor shortage in a few years. Dan Butler, a spokesman for the National Retail Federation, said it has forecast there will be 500,000 more jobs in retail than people to work them by 2011.
At present, however, the U.S. retail industry doesn’t seem to have a problem finding people, Butler said.
“Typically, within any company, you might find a market area where there is a shortage, but no retailer is reporting an across-the-board shortage,” he said.
The Wal-Mart Canada executive told the retail conference that about 75 percent of retail jobs in Canada will be filled by immigrants by 2011.
George Whalin, president of a retail consulting agency in California, seemed to contradict the National Retail Federation findings when he said there is “absolutely” a retail labor shortage in the United States and there has been for years. In fact, retailers list it among the top three or four problems they face, he said.
“It’s not exactly a glamour job. I think (retailers) recruit everyone they can. There’s just not a lot of people out there for jobs,” Whalin said.
In Canada, retailers are zeroing in on hiring immigrants while others are hiring older workers, according to the Toronto Star. Home Depot in Canada said it is targeting older workers and that as much as one-fifth of its work force is over age 50.
The National Retail Federation says its research shows that the average employee turnover rate in retail is 60 percent for full-time employees and 110 percent for part-time employees.
Wal-Mart no longer releases its turnover rate, although Clark told The Morning News in 2004 that the company had an employee turnover rate of 46 percent. She said two-thirds of new hires by Wal-Mart at that time were either senior citizens, students or second-income providers.
Clark also said three-fourths of Wal-Mart’s employees were full time — which is 34-plus hours at Wal-Mart. That figure may have changed after the company began a new shift policy earlier this year in which it now tailors working hours for both full- and part-time employees to those times when there is the most customer traffic.
“All retailers struggle with getting the correct number of people during the right times,” Simley said.
HELP WANTED
SOURCE: National Retail Federation and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
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