Holiday hiring no source of ho ho hos
It’s been 20 years since retailers were this Scrooge-y. Jobs expert John Challenger took a peek in the details of today’s unemployment numbers and found that retailers added only 217,200 seasonal workers in November. That’s 53 percent of the number of seasonal hires they made later year. But that’s not the half of it: November 2008 experienced the weakest job-gain since November 1988. That year, a meager 194,000 workers were added, according to global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., in Chicago.
“If seasonal hiring continues at the current pace, the number of additional holiday jobs may reach only 350,000, which would be the lowest figure since 1982, when only 260,000 workers were added to retail payrolls between October and December,” Challenger wrote in an email message released to the media today.
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