Hourly Workers Aren’t So Hard to Find Anymore
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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How has hiring for hourly roles like cooks and cleaners changed recently?
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Here's your Money Briefing for Thursday, August 15th. I'm Arianna Espuru for The Wall Street Journal, filling in for J.R. Whelan. Employers once scrambled to find hourly workers like cooks, cleaners, retail workers. But now companies are pulling back on hiring. And it's thrown some job seekers for a loop.
A lot of them just gotten used to this really strong job market we've seen over the past couple of years where it was really a candidate's job market where there were lots of open roles. We saw employers really having to act quickly. And right now we're starting to see that pendulum swing back to employers where the companies have the upper hand once again.
We'll talk to Wall Street Journal reporter Chip Cutter after the break.
The job market is slowing down for roles that were once in high demand. WSJ reporter Chip Cutter joins me. So Chip, break down this shift for me. How has the job market for some of these labor jobs changed?
For months and months, we've heard repeatedly companies tell us we can't find enough cooks, we can't find enough maintenance workers, truck drivers, cleaners, all of these hourly roles that have been a real bright spot in the economy. So even as companies started to pull back on corporate recruiting, so hiring fewer white-collar professionals in tech and banking and other fields, there was still tons of strength in the hourly job market. And we're starting to see that change now. And a number of employers are saying that it's gotten a lot easier to fill these roles. They maybe are posting fewer openings. And we're seeing the job market start to slow here, and we're starting to see weakness in hourly roles too.
So that's significant and could have effects for millions of workers.
In your story, you start with something really interesting, which is you physically saw a sign of this. Run me through that.
Yeah. So I was in the bowels of Boston's Logan Airport. It was a delay. I was walking. I was changing terminals. And I saw a sign outside the door of ABM Industries. And this is a company that employs cleaners to clean the airport terminals there. And the sign actually said something really interesting.
Why are employers now saying filling hourly jobs has become easier?
And it was, we are currently not hiring, in all caps lettering. Please keep checking. And And to me, that was just such a significant signal of how things had shifted. For years, these have been exactly the type of role that companies couldn't find. And here we have an example of a company saying, we are just not hiring. Come back later. And when I reached out to the company, they told me they had recently had a successful job fair. They got plenty of applicants for that. They still have open hiring. But again, it's a signal of sort of how employers are approaching this moment in the job market.
Tell me about some of the other types of jobs that are being affected by this.
We're seeing everything from, if you think about it in aviation, Spirit Airlines recently said it was going to stop flight attendant hiring for the moment. And it was going to give some people the option to have unpaid leaves of absence. So that was a move to sort of cut costs. We've seen John Deere cut hourly manufacturing roles. And we've also just heard from a number of employers, like the home builder D.R. Horton, for example, has said it has enough workers to build houses. And Bright Horizons, the child care provider, says it's having an easier time staffing its facilities. So you just look across the economy, and it's not always that we're seeing lots of layoffs in these hourly rolls. Like, we're not really seeing that yet.
The job market still remains fairly strong, really, if you look historically.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:25
2
How has hiring for hourly roles like cooks and cleaners changed recently?
0:25–3:02
3
Why are employers now saying filling hourly jobs has become easier?
3:02–4:17
4
What real-world sign at an airport signaled the shift in hourly hiring?
4:17–5:34
5
Which specific industries and companies are cutting or pausing hourly hiring?
5:34–6:40
6
What is a 'silent layoff' and how does it affect hourly workers?
6:40–8:09
7
What are job-seeker experiences when searching for hospitality or retail work now?
8:09–8:40
Speakers
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