Young women stayed away from low-paying retail work in high numbers in November, the latest Canadian employment data shows, leaving a growing number of unfilled vacancies ahead of the peak holiday shopping season.
Some 45,000 young women under the age of 15 to 24 were employed in retail in November compared with a year earlier, a drop of 11.7 percent due almost entirely to losses in August and September, Statistics Canada said in your November employment report.
The drop in hiring despite worker shortages is an echo of other female-dominated service industries, where wages have been slower to rise in reaction to rising 2022 inflation.
“Between stagnant wages and retention issues across the industry, young women have moved away from traditional retail employment,” said Akosua Alagaratnam, executive director of the First Work youth employment network.
The overall employment rate for young women dipped 2.5 percentage points to 57.8 percent in November, StatCan said.
In the labor force, 10,000 more jobs were created in November after a jump of 108,000 in October, with gains in finance, insurance, real estate and manufacturing, among others, and losses in construction and the wholesale and retail sectors.
Alagaratnam said that retailers, which are reporting a higher than usual volume of job vacancies, need to do more to retain workers.
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Women’s wages in retail are typically lower than their male counterparts, with an overall median hourly wage of $21.99 in November consisting of women receiving $20.73 and men $23 ,fifty.
While $21.99 an hour is a solid 5.4 percent more than what retail workers were paid a year ago, it’s still below the 5.6 percent average across all industries (which is also highest, $32.11).
Meanwhile, inflation, or the rate at which the prices of food, gasoline and other living costs rise, was 6.9 percent in October.
Young women stayed away from low-paying retail work in high numbers in November, the latest Canadian employment data shows, leaving a growing number of unfilled vacancies ahead of the peak holiday shopping season.
“Wage growth has accelerated substantially, but still lags inflation,” RBC Economics wrote in a note on the employment figures, adding that a faster increase in temporary employee wages indicated a rise of hiring during the Christmas season.
However, as recently as September, payroll employment at clothing and clothing accessories stores was 13.7 percent below its pre-pandemic level. Meanwhile, non-store retail work (including jobs in e-shopping) increased by 33 percent.
Working parents with a child under the age of six were much more likely to take time off to care for them in the past month, StatCan said, with 3.5 percent doing so compared with an average of 2.2 percent. in the same month from 2017 to 2019.
Morgan Sharp / Local Journalism Initiative / National Observer of Canada