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With the economy continuing to improve and port activity up, 2016 looks like it will be a good year for anyone looking for a temporary job during the Christmas shopping season. UPS and Target have already announced they will at least match the number of hires they made one year ago.
If Sarah Cullins is correct, the 2016 holiday season could provide a major boost to the Inland Empire job market.
Cullins is an account manager with First Rate Staffing in Ontario, which places people in temporary and part-time jobs in the logistics industry. Last year, First Rate Staffing placed about 500 people in temporary jobs during the Christmas season, usually filling orders, packing boxes or driving forklift trucks.
This year, Cullins believes First Rate may double that figure.
“We think 2016 is going to be a big year,” said Cullins, who has been finding people temporary employment in the Inland Empire – mostly in San Bernardino County – for more than 20 years. “Retail is doing well, and all of the indicators are good.
“I would say 2016 is going to be a good market for employees,”
Cullins does have several reasons to be optimistic.
The economy, on the mend 12 months ago, is stronger today. Unemployment is down, gas prices are stable and interest rates remain unchanged, although the latter could change by year’s end, according to a recent Federal Reserve announcement.
The growth of e-commerce, in which items are ordered online and shipped directly from a warehouse-distribution center, should also increase the need for extra hires at logistics operations.
Any growth in e-commerce is good news for the Inland Empire, which is home to multiple fulfillment centers. Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer and a threat to brick-and-mortar retail everywhere, operates five fulfillment centers in the region.
Perhaps best of all, activity at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles is solid, which means most of the warehouses in San Bernardino and Riverside counties should remain busy for at least the next few months.
Most workers who get hired as holiday extras will start work within the next two weeks and will work 40 hours a week, or more, into early next year. Their pay scale will range from $10 to $14 an hour, and a few of them will be kept on permanently after the Christmas shopping season passes, according to Cullins.
Some U.S. retailers have announced their plans for holiday hiring, and their projected numbers are much like they were one year ago: solid, if not spectacular.
Just as it did in 2015, United Parcel Service says it expects to hire about 95,000 seasonal employees, starting in November and continuing through January 2017.
That’s good news if you’re Cullins, or anyone else in the job placement business, because it means one of the nation’s largest private delivery services expects the upcoming holiday season to be busy, though perhaps not record-breaking.
Most of those full and part-time positions will be package handlers, drivers and driver’s assistants, and those hired stand a good chance of landing permanent employment: between 2012 and 2014, more than 37 percent of the people UPS hired to fill holiday jobs were later hired for a permanent position, according to a statement issued by the Atlanta-based company earlier this month.
Kohl’s, the Wisconsin-based department store chain, announced this month 69,000 seasonal employees this year, about the same number as it hired last year. The company, which has more than 1,100 stores in 49 states, will place some of its seasonal workers in stores, but most of them will be put to work in distribution operations, e-commerce centers and credit operations, according to a company statement.
Kohl’s plans for holiday hiring are essentially identical to Target’s, which will hire approximately 70,000 seasonal in-store workers for this year’s Christmas season, the same number it has hired the last four years.
However, the Minneapolis-based retailer also said it will hire about 7,500 temporary workers for its warehouses and fulfillment centers, about 1,000 more than it hired last year.
JCPenney, which is upgrading much of its operation in attempt to remain competitive, has said it plans to hire 40,000 temporary workers this year, about 10,000 more than it hired in 2015.
About 38,000 of those hires will work in the company’s retail stores. The remaining 2,000 workers will fill online orders placed on the company website, according to a company statement.
Nationwide, more than 700,000 retail jobs are expected to be added this holiday season, essentially unchanged from last year, said Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. in Chicago, one of the oldest outplacement services in the United States.
JCPenney figures to give Inland Center mall a boost during the holiday season: next month, the retailer is scheduled to open a two-level, 138,000-square-foot store that will employ about 150 people when it opens.
But even without a new anchor tenant, 2016 figured to be a good year for seasonal hiring, said Terri Relf, Inland Center’s senior marketing manager.
“I think everyone is expecting a pretty solid year,” Relf said of the mall, which employs about 1,000 people during regular times. “We’ve had a couple of other smaller store openings that should help us. The [merchants] I talk to say they expect to hire extra people, although they might start little later than normal this year.”
Local retailers should hire at least as many temporary workers this year as they did last year, said Jay Prag, professor of economics and finance at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University.
“Online should do fine, and traditional retail should also do well,” Prag said. “The economy is shrinking a little bit, but it’s still pretty strong. There are still issues out there – the election, what’s going on in China – but we still should see a lot of [temporary] hiring this year, nationally and in the Inland Empire.”
