Retail hiring ticks up as Walmart formats add April jobs

Walmart’s supercenters and Sam’s Club stores landed in one of April’s clearer labor-market bright spots: 18,000 new jobs in warehouse clubs, supercenters and other general merchandise retailers. For hourly workers, that means stores had a little more room to recruit, but not enough to call it an easy hiring market.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said total nonfarm payrolls rose by 115,000 in April and the unemployment rate held at 4.3 percent. Retail trade added 22,000 jobs overall, and the gain in general merchandise formats mattered most for Walmart because the BLS classifies retail trade as covering store and nonstore retailers, with general merchandise stores including department stores and other general merchandise stores. That is the closest public read on the labor pool Walmart and Sam’s Club are drawing from.

The bigger message for associates is leverage, but only in a narrow sense. A retail market that is adding jobs can give workers more options if they want to transfer stores, chase a better schedule, or test whether another employer will pay more for the same hours. It can also force managers to work harder to keep experienced people from walking when the schedule gets choppy or the pay does not keep up. The BLS also said retail trade employment had shown little net change over the prior 12 months, which suggests April was more of a rebound than the start of a broad retail boom.

Underemployment remains part of the story. The number of people working part time for economic reasons rose to 4.9 million in April, up 445,000. Those workers wanted full-time jobs but were stuck with reduced hours or could not find full-time work. For Walmart associates trying to move from a 20-hour week to something steadier, that is the pressure point that matters most. A store can be hiring and still leave workers fighting for enough hours to make the paycheck work.

The labor market was also uneven by group. Adult men’s unemployment rate was 4.0 percent, adult women’s 3.9 percent, teenagers’ 14.4 percent, White workers’ 3.7 percent, Black workers’ 7.3 percent, Asian workers’ 3.3 percent and Hispanic workers’ 5.0 percent. The labor force participation rate was 61.8 percent and the employment-population ratio was 59.1 percent. Transportation and warehousing also gained jobs in April, while federal government employment declined, another sign that job growth was concentrated in a few sectors rather than spread evenly across the economy.

For Walmart workers, the short answer is that the April report modestly improved the job outlook. It did not create a worker-friendly boom, but it did strengthen the case that associates with options may have more room to negotiate hours, mobility and, in some markets, pay.