, like so many American companies, had a problem last year. Its business, fulfilling orders of goods sold online, faced surging demand. But, wages were rising and staff turnover was high. So DCL made two changes. It bought new robots to pick items off shelves and place them in boxes. And it reduced its reliance on part-time workers and hired more full-time staff. “What we save in having temp employees, we lose in productivity,” says Dave Tu, DCL’s president.
The current jobs market looks extraordinary by historical standards. There were 10.6m job openings in November, up by nearly 50% from January 2020. In the last months of 2021 just seven workers were available for every ten open jobs . Predictably, employees seem unusually comfortable abandoning their old positions and seeking better ones. This is evident among those who clean bedsheets and stock shelves, as well as those building spreadsheets and selling stocks. In November 4.
But base pay is rising, too. Bank of America says it will raise its minimum wage to $25 by 2025. In September Walmart, America’s largest private employer, set its minimum wage at $12 an hour, below many states’ requirement of $13-14 an hour but well above the federal minimum wage of $7.25. Amazon has lifted average wages in its warehouses to $18. The average hourly wage for production and nonsupervisory employees in December was 5.8% above the level a year earlier; compared with a 4.