The Outlook for Holiday Employment Improvement

CBS The Outlook for Holiday Employment Improvement Maurice DuBois: To business news now. Stores and malls are soon going to be filled with how they shop as yeah we said it at least that’s the hope of retailers we’ve begun hiring for hundreds of thousands of temporary workers. Mary Calvi: And Joining us now is Jill Schlesinger Editor-At-Large at CBS MoneyWatch.com so we have Cole’s, Macy’s, ToysRUs saying they’re hiring thousands of people but anything more we said it temporary. Jill Schlesinger: Yeah these are temporary jobs but temporary is better than no job so here’s the deal, it looks like we’re on pace to have about 600,000 temp workers hired during the holidays. It’s up from last year. Last year was around 500,000 but last year was a horrible year so although there’s improvement. You kind of have to look at the longer trend; we’re still stuck at a pretty low level of employment and also should point out for those folks in retailing. If you look at full time jobs they’re down almost 5% from last year so people who work in retail had struggled and I think this holiday season is not going to be so great for them either. Maurice: So going forward I mean this is a semi positive side. What’s the expectation after this? Jill: Well I think that this is like a real critical turning point because what we’ve had seen is the economy has slowed down this year and that’s why most of the retailers don’t have to hire a lot of people but what we’re also seeing is that retail sales, people are spending money a little bit more, a little bit more openly and willingly that’s we’re expecting retail sales pop up during the holidays by 2.3%, that’s a little lower than the 10-year average but you know what positive is good. 2 years ago is negative almost 4% so we’re making progress. Maurice: Baby steps, alright. Jill, thank you so much. Mary: Great to be here.