Retail Jobs Reality Likely Isn't as Grim as It Appears
January 05 2018 - 5:04PM
Dow Jones News
By Eric Morath and Josh Mitchell
In a year when U.S. employers added more than 2 million jobs,
one dark spot in 2017 appeared to be the retail industry.
Employment in the sector fell a seasonally adjusted 67,000 jobs
last year in December from a year earlier, according to Labor
Department data released Friday.
But those dire numbers, the worst among major industry
categories, likely overstate job losses in the retail sector more
broadly. National chains such as Macy's Inc., Sears Holdings and
J.C. Penney Co. have closed stores in recent years, while online
retailers such as Amazon.com Inc. added workers. But the Labor
Department doesn't count brick-and-mortar retail jobs the same way
as it counts online jobs.
Industry determination of workers is largely based on the
function performed at different company sites, according to a Labor
Department economist. That means workers at warehouses, or
fulfillment centers, for online retailers can be counted under
warehouse industry employment, not retail. And workers at shipping
centers for the online retailers can go in the shipping category
rather than retail, the economist said.
Employment in the transportation and warehousing sector rose by
74,000 last year, according to the Labor Department, more than
offsetting retail-industry losses.
"The government statisticians have still not caught up to
e-commerce, so there's not yet any coherent standards about how to
classify e-commerce workers," said Michael Mandel, chief economic
strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute, a left-leaning
think tank.
He believes the federal government will develop uniform
guidelines for e-commerce workers over time.
The Labor Department won't comment on how individual companies,
such as Amazon, or locations are counted, or even if they are
surveyed.
That muddle over retail employment doesn't mean overall
employment is undercounted. The Labor Department annually
benchmarks its monthly jobs reports to tax records, which captures
the vast majority of U.S. workers. For the year ended in March
2017, the department estimated it undercounted overall employment
by 95,000, a small number when measured against total payroll
employment of 147 million.
Write to Eric Morath at eric.morath@wsj.com and Josh Mitchell at
joshua.mitchell@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 05, 2018 16:49 ET (21:49 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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