Half of hourly employees plan to leave within the next year: survey

Plenty of frontline retail workers punched in on Labor Day recently, but when the holiday rolls around next year, half of them expect to be working somewhere else.

Asked when they are most likely to look for a new job, 10% of hourly employees said they planned to start their job search immediately, 23% in three to six months, and 17% within the next 12 months. To put it more glass half full, 50% of hourly workers don’t plan to leave in the next year.

Younger workers are even more likely to sing along with a certain Johnny Paycheck earworm, with more than three in four (76%) of those 18–24 planning to leave their jobs in the next 12 months.

The findings are from the latest annual report on the hourly workforce from workforce management platform Legion. It polled 1,569 hourly workers and 557 managers in North America. Among respondents, 62.2% work in non-grocery retail and 26.3% work in food and beverage, which includes supermarkets and liquor stores.

Union jacked: One option to quitting is seeking to improve working conditions with union efforts, which have been keeping some hourly workers busy recently:

• Workers at the first Apple Store to unionize—in 2022 in Towson, Maryland—ratified its first labor contract in August, securing most workers raises of 10% over the next three years and benefits that Apple had previously extended only to non-union workers.
• After workers at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island voted to unionize in 2022, Amazon challenged the vote, but the National Labor Relations Board recently dismissed the challenge, which officially certifies the election.
• C&S Wholesale Grocers, which is expected to purchase 579 Kroger and Albertsons stores if the supermarket chains’ proposed merger succeeds, recently assured workers at those stores that they’d honor all union contracts if the deal goes through.

Only 10% of respondents in the Legion survey reported being at a workplace that underwent a union organizing effort in the previous year, and 37% reported they wouldn’t have been interested if there had been. But 27% said they wish there had been a unionization effort.

Among factors hourly employees thought were inspiring unionization efforts, 68% agreed that low wages were a factor, followed by poor employee benefits (56%), poor work-life balance (51%), and lack of schedule flexibility (46%).

As for managers of those workers, they thought the biggest challenges to retaining employees was not offering competitive pay (52%), followed by an inability to offer scheduling flexibility (50%), lack of employee benefits (34%), and an inability to offer early access to earned wages (26%).

Same as it ever was: While smiling employees may be a staple of companies’ advertising and annual reports, the data from the report suggests they may not have much to smile about.

Asked what, besides increasing wages, their employers have done to make their workplaces better places to work, the statement more people surveyed (41%) agreed with than any other was their employers had “not done anything to make my workplace better.”

About the statement, “My employer cares about creating a good work experience for me and my coworkers,” only 50% agreed, while 14% disagreed and 36% were neutral.

AI beg your pardon: When it comes to AI, 37% of hourly employees agreed it could reduce administrative tasks and 31% agreed it could reduce mistakes. But, more ominously, 24% thought AI would replace them.

As for the adjectives that they agreed described their feeling toward AI in their workplaces, 26% were “indifferent,” followed by “suspicious” (22%), “curious” (18%), “optimistic” (11%), “afraid” (9%), and “confused” (6%).

Only 5% of hourly workers reported feeling “excited” about AI and fewer still felt “empowered,” just 3%.

“Hourly employees do not have the same confidence as managers that AI will improve the work experience,” the report concluded, “but most have not formed concrete opinions at this point.”