The Workplace : Needy Retailers Look for Santa’s Helpers

An annual ritual--the recruiting of platoons of part-time retail workers to accommodate Christmas crowds--is drawing near.

‘Tis the season when stores start scrambling to find temporary help, a scramble made all the more difficult in Orange County by a shortage of workers.

And with the unemployment rate at a low 3.3% at last count, state Employment Development Department (EDD) offices around Orange County have donned their helper’s hats and begun mailing thousands of cards to county residents in an effort to round up temporary workers for the multitude of retailers for whom the Christmas season represents the bulk of the year’s profits.

“Interested in temporary or part-time work?” the postcards inquire. “If so, we may have a job for you!”

This is the first year the local job service departments of the EDD have blanketed the county’s heavily populated areas with postcards in what EDD officials are calling “a Christmas blitz.”

State job service officials are worried that this Christmas may be especially difficult for retailers looking for part-time help. The county’s unemployment rate has dropped each year since the last recession ended in 1982. And dropping with it has been the number of workers available for new jobs, particularly at the minimum-wage rate common to part-time department-store employees.

“The last year or two, employers have been having a much more difficult time of it,” said Dan Johnson, a labor market analyst at the EDD office on South Grand Avenue in Santa Ana. “It’s particularly hard to find somebody at the minimum wage, because the cost of living is so high here.”

As far as Johnson knows, few--if any--of the other EDD offices in the state mail postcards to potential employees.

The cards--which began hitting the mail last week and will continue turning up in mailboxes for the next week or so--ask applicants for their names and phone numbers and to list the times they are available for work and their work experience. By the time the mailing is finished, 170,000 postcards will have been sent out.

“A big department store might hire from 100 to 200 people at Christmas,” said Ann Marshall, a supervisor at the EDD office in Santa Ana. “With a rate of unemployment this low, finding them could be a real struggle.”

It’s the newer stores in particular, Marshall said, that may have a difficult time finding help.

Several stores in a new shopping center in Santa Ana, she said, have scarcely finished hiring their normal complement of workers.

But some store managers say they haven’t had all that many problems finding Christmas help in the past and don’t anticipate any hassles this year. Those stores often depend on the same workers--usually high school or college students--year after year.

“We’ve already had a lot of calls from college kids, and we haven’t even put anything out yet,” said Donna Ruiz, who works in the personnel office at the Broadway store in Anaheim. And at a Boston Store in Mission Viejo, manager Nancy Severson finds that “the same college kids come back year after year” each December, when the store hires its additional 15 employees.