Latest news with #understaffing
Daily Mail
26-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Report: Target staff fear job losses amid sales slump
Published: | Updated: Another wrote: 'All we can do is ride it out and hope for the best. If it comes down to it, prepare a resume just in case.' Several workers have also posted TikTok videos showing backrooms overwhelmed with merchandise that hasn't made it to the sales floor — alleging that understaffing is leaving them buried. 'I hope these go viral so the corporate people might rethink how they unstaffed their stores and expect spotless departments,' one employee commented on a video showing mounds of backroom clothing. Target hasn't responded to request for comment on the employee predictions and complaints. But two days ago, the company released its quarterly earnings, which badly missed Wall Street's expectations. 'Target has found itself in a challenging position,' Neil Saunders, a retail expert at GlobalData, told 'The business is not terrible, but it is under pressure and that is causing nervousness among associates.' Fewer shoppers went into Target stores during the last quarter, and when they did, they spent less money. The company reported $23.85 billion in sales during the last quarter, a 2.8 percent drop from the previous three-month period. Analysts predicted the store would make $24.23 billion. So far this year, Target's share price has shed over 31 percent. 'I want to be clear, we're not satisfied with these results, so we're moving with urgency to navigate through this period of volatility,' Target CEO Brian Cornell said. 'We've got to drive traffic back into our stores or visits to our site.' The company also announced that it was paring back its financial outlook for 2025, signaling it believes a recovery might take a while. Target isn't in dire financial shape. The company made $5 billion in profit last year, and is still raking in money. But it's wobbles are in stark contrast to its biggest competitor, Walmart, which has reported gigantic sales figures. 'Underlying profit at Target is squeezed and that makes it more likely the company will be cautious in hiring and tight in the labor hours it allocates,' Saunders added. 'That makes staff worry for their own jobs. All of this is exacerbated because communication from management has, generally, been poor.' Target is dealing with other non-employment headwinds, too. Cornell joined Walmart and Home Depot's CEOs in a private White House meeting, warning President Donald Trump that his tariff regime threatened to deplete product availability and increase prices on consumers . The company has publicly warned that tariffs will slash billions from profits, making it harder to continue business investments. 'They have cancelled some remodels,' one Target employee claimed on Reddit. Another added: 'Sales are so low I would be shocked if it doesn't close sooner rather than later.' Plus, the brand is facing customer anger from both right- and left-leaning shoppers. Target walked back diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in a pitch to appease the Trump administration. Conservatives have been boycotting the brand over Pride Month collections that included bathing suits for trans swimmers . Meanwhile, Target has already silently started increasing prices on products made in other countries. It's a particularly difficult time to balance higher prices in the US economy. Consumer confidence has slumped for five consecutive months , with shoppers reporting fears over continued inflation. American shoppers have been smacked with increasingly lofty grocery prices after the inflation rate peaked over 9 percent in 2022. Still, the overall economy has remained resilient despite the price hikes. American jobs have remained surprisingly steady and the average wage has continued with slow growth.
National Post
16-05-2025
- Politics
- National Post
Ontario Budget Fails Workers and Students -- OSBCU Calls for Adequate Funding for Public Education and Urgent Action
Article content TORONTO — After a disappointing budget announcement that skimmed over public education, the Ontario School Board Council of Unions (OSBCU) is calling for an immediate surge in funding to address the understaffing crisis in schools across the province. This budget does nothing to address the severe understaffing crisis plaguing Ontario schools. Article content Article content Despite a reported $2.6 billion increase to Ministry of Education funding, the actual support for school boards, students, and frontline workers remains dangerously insufficient. Funding projections include a meager increase of $100,000 (0.24 percent) in 2026-2027 and $200,000 (0.49 percent) in 2027-2028 — both far below the anticipated 2 percent inflation rate. Article content While $55.8 million has been earmarked over two years to train 2,600 new teachers, there is nothing allocated to address the severe understaffing crisis impacting education workers. The Ford government also announced $30 billion over 10 years for new schools and childcare spaces — yet provided no plan or funding for the staff needed to support students in those spaces. Article content 'There is a clear crisis in Ontario's public education system, and it's students and education workers who are paying the price,' says Joe Tigani, President of the OSBCU. 'We're seeing violent incidents disrupting classrooms, exhausted educational assistants, shuttered libraries, and custodial services stretched beyond the limit. This is the cost of chronic underfunding and systemic neglect, and it's obvious the Ford government isn't taking this seriously.' Article content The scale of defunding is staggering. According to OSBCU research, school boards were shortchanged by $2.3 billion in 2024-2025 alone due to funding that hasn't kept pace with inflation and enrolment since 2012-2013, the year that real per-pupil cuts became a recurring feature of education funding. Since the Ford government took office, public education has seen a cumulative funding shortfall of $10.66 billion — a number that grows to $14.44 billion since 2012-2013. Article content Public education in Ontario is at a breaking point. Article content 'Students deserve the supports they need, communities deserve strong, well-funded schools, and education workers deserve respect and fair working conditions — and we won't stop fighting until they get it,' says Tigani. Article content Article content Article content Article content Article content Contacts Article content Article content Article content
Forbes
12-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How Underinvestment Is Starving Grocery Stores And Feeding Wall Street
A new report on Kroger and Albertsons reveals the stunning impacts of continued underinvestment and understaffing in retail stores, all while stock buybacks and Ecommerce losses have skyrocketed. Commissioned by a group of retail and wholesale unions currently in contract negotiations, Bullies At The Table surveys employees across stores in three states and underscores how customers and retail workers are paying the price for the misguided priorities of two of America's largest grocery chains. Kroger and Albertsons are, respectively, the second and third largest U.S. grocery chains (after Walmart) and employ 28 percent of U.S. grocery workers. Both grocers rank in the top three in market share across dozens of metro areas where they operate, including significant dominance in Seattle, Chicago and much of California. A federal judge recently blocked a two year long, billion dollar attempt by the two chains to merge. Kroger's longtime CEO resigned in March and the CEO of Albertsons retired in early May. Both companies face significant headwinds in the grocery industry, including impending tariffs, competitive pressures from non-union discounters and specialty chains, and a slowdown in consumption driven by years of price increases. Albertsons management in particular has disclosed to investors concerns about the company's longterm fiscal health and retail readiness. Grocery workers surveyed in Bullies At The Table cited understaffing and pay that was not commensurate to their work as major concerns at the chains, while the amount of work they have to complete during their shift has continued to increase. Their stores are also unable to provide good customer service, with tasks such as the regular cleaning and maintenance of equipment also going uncompleted. Surveyed workers also said that product sits in their stores' backrooms because there are not enough staff to stock store shelves. Marshay Clark, a bakery clerk at a Safeway in South Auburn, Washington stated, "They've been cutting hours, and they've been expecting us to fit eight hours' worth of work into these shorter, five and half or six-hour shifts. As the only person in my household who earns an income, I'm struggling to get by and I'm more stressed at work." The 2003-2004 Southern California grocery strike and lockout was a turning point in the fortunes for such Kroger and Albertsons workers. Since that time, scheduled hours dropped by eleven percent, actual buying power of hourly wages decreased five percent, weekly earnings declined by fifteen percent and the pay gap between the earnings of grocery workers and their counterparts in all other industries jumped from thirty two percent in 2003 to fifty percent in 2024. The result is that fifteen percent of nonsupervisory workers at the two chains receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. More than four-fifths of surveyed workers are unable to pay basic living costs and more than two-thirds do not have secure housing, while more than nine out of ten workers reported price gouging at their stores, that their company is raising prices higher than production costs. As a consequence, customers cannot afford to buy the healthy foods they used to. Such pricing moves have helped drive profitability and record shareholder payouts across the food industry over the last four years. While employee real wages and spending power dropped off, Kroger and Albertsons' sales and profits skyrocketed. Between 2019 and 2024, Kroger's net income and operating income grew by over 92 percent and 99 percent, and Albertsons' net income and operating income grew by over 108 percent and 122 percent. And from 2018 and 2022, Kroger and Albertsons took a combined $15.8 billion in cash out of their businesses and sent it to shareholders in the form of stock dividends and buybacks. The report documents that as a result, 'capital expenditures for stores have declined as a share of sales and reduced the capacity of these companies to sustain operations into the future… Kroger and Albertsons have sought to fund payments to Wall Street by lowering labor costs and underinvesting in infrastructure.' The two companies also announced over $10 billion in additional buybacks in 2024 after their failed merger. Ecommerce, including the Kroger-Ocado partnership, has been a loss leader for both chains and drag on profitability. The report estimates that Kroger's profits would have been 43 percent higher and Albertsons profits would have been 31 percent higher without the losses from Ecommerce. In order to fund Wall Street payouts and compensate for these Ecommerce losses, both Kroger and Albertsons reduced staffing levels in stores. In 2023, Kroger reported 14.1 percent fewer labor hours per store than in 2019 and Albertsons' reported 13 percent lower staffing levels. and this potent combination of market dominance and cost cutting has been well-received by investors. In that timeframe, the value of Kroger and Albertsons' stock increased at a faster rate than the U.S. stock market as a whole. "I juggle multiple roles—opening check stands, managing self-checkout, unloading pallets—while the front end falls apart. We're working with a skeleton crew, yet CEOs give billions to shareholders instead of investing in our stores," said Paszion Horner-Smith, a front-end supervisor at Vons in Granada Hills. "Customers wait in 35-minute lines, endure frustrating self-checkouts, and even abandon full carts out of sheer frustration," she added. Bullies At The Table was partly underwritten by trade unions representing 65,000 grocery workers whose current contract expired on March 2, 2025 and are fighting for 'living wages, affordable healthcare benefits, a reliable pension, and more staffing and better working conditions for a better customer experience'. The report picks up where a previous study of Kroger's business model left off. This 2022 survey commissioned by UFCW found that over three quarters of Kroger workers were food insecure and fourteen percent were housing insecure. A 2018 leaked internal Kroger report showed that hundreds of thousands of company workers relied on food stamps and other public benefits in order to make ends meet. The 2018 report also coincided with that year's launch of the Kroger Zero Hunger Zero Waste. The source who leaked the 2018 report noted that the company leveraged such initiatives while suppressing wages in order to deliver higher returns for Wall Street, reinforcing the inequality that causes hunger. A recent survey by Food Chain Workers Alliance illustrated that the crisis of food insecurity and poverty among food workers is widespread and severe. Frontline food workers were 93% more likely to be food insecure than non-food workers, with nearly one in five frontline food workers being insecure and food workers 60% more likely to rely on SNAP. For grocery clerks, whose workdays revolve around food and whose livelihoods are dependent on how much food their customers can afford, Bullies At The Table documents a case both of insult to injury and Robin Hood in reverse: grocers cutting hours, underinvesting in stores, suppressing wages, and raising prices to boost earnings and shareholder payouts, while taxpayers pick up the tab of increased food insecurity and medical needs. These two powerhouse retailers' business models and priorities have gone far afield of what they ostensibly should be doing: providing well-staffed stores and affordable, healthy food to their customers, with living wages and fulfilling jobs to their staff. While executives and investors have done quite well, retail workers and store customers alike deserve so much better. The author did not receive responses to requests from comments from Kroger and Albertsons.
Washington Post
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Cash-strapped Bureau of Prisons freezes some hiring to 'avoid more extreme measures,' director says
The Trump administration is halting some hiring at the federal Bureau of Prisons, the crisis-plagued agency where chronic understaffing has led to long overtime shifts and the use of prison nurses, teachers, cooks and other workers to guard inmates. The move, which coincides with President Donald Trump's aggressive campaign to cut the cost and size of the federal government, was announced Thursday by the agency's newly appointed director, William K. Marshall III. Some union officials characterized the move as a 'hiring freeze,' though the agency denied that, saying some positions would continue to be filled.
