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Retailers adding jobs, few careers
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Photo
In this March 4, 2011 photo, representatives from Walmart speak to job seekers at the 32nd Annual Spring Career Fair at Cleveland State University. Over 120 organizations were on hand to talk to prospective candidates about employment and internships.
Associated Press
Erin Abell left a job in finance to volunteer for John McCain’s presidential campaign in early 2008. She had hoped to return to the industry after the election, but by then Wall Street was on life support, and Abell had to live off credit cards until joining a friend’s startup.
So she started working part time at Banana Republic to help cut her debts. Yet Abell was paid less at age 30 than she made in a retail job in her early 20s. She also says she had to promote high-interest credit cards and sometimes work until 1 a.m.
“Management made it very clear they could replace you tomorrow,” Abell says.
As the economic recovery gains steam, the retail industry is expected to be one of the strongest for job growth this decade. But the quality of jobs selling clothes, computers and other goods has declined in recent years to the point where few can be classified as careers.
Erratic part-time hours often make a second job impossible and complicate the work-life juggle. Pay has shrunk. And the recession created hordes of overqualified job seekers, leaving existing staff with little power to demand better conditions.
With unemployment still high at 8.8 percent, many people feel fortunate to land any job. But not all jobs contribute the same to economic growth. Employers may be hiring more, but they are hiring disproportionately in retail and other service- sector positions with low wages and few benefits.
High-paying fields such as real estate and finance accounted for 40 percent of the 8.8 million jobs lost from January 2008 to February 2010 but only 14 percent of the jobs created in the year that followed. Lower- paying industries such as retail constituted 23 percent of jobs lost but almost half of the recent growth.
This shift “could make it much harder for workers to find family- supporting jobs,” says Annette Bernhardt of the National Employment Law Project, who analyzed the data. Even in the “jobless recovery” after the 2001 recession, high-paying industries accounted for nearly one-third of new jobs in the year after the recession ended.
Elizabeth Murphy, a recruiting manager for Crate & Barrel, says she’s receiving three times as many applications as she did a year-and-a-half ago. The increase reflects, in part, a surge in applications from unemployed real-estate agents, accountants and other professionals.
Stores are under pressure to trim their expenses, and labor, the biggest expense after inventory, is one of the few costs they can control. In 2006, the median hourly wage for retail salespeople was $9.50, the government says. In 2009, the most recent year for which figures are available, that figure was $9.74 — a 4 percent drop after adjusting for inflation and more than $5 less than the U.S. median for all occupations. For full-time retail workers, the median annual wage was $20,510 — half made more, half less. That’s well below the federal poverty line for a family of four.