U.S. labor force ‘lost over 1 million women’ since 2020, Deputy CEO says

Deputy CEO Silvija Martincevic joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss hiring, talent retention, labor trends, helping women re-enter the workforce following a pre-pandemic departure, and growing cities leading the economic recovery.

Video Transcript

- Well, let's get to the jobs part of that equation. And to shift workers in particular, our Australia-based employee management platform deputy provides companies with employee scheduling, labor compliance, tools and other workforce management services. It's set to release a report with insights from us shift workers across the retail industry.

Deputy CEO Silvija Martincevic. Joins us now to discuss some of those findings. Silvija, thank you for being here. As we look at shift workers and how they fit into the overall workforce, we've watched workers generally really gain power over the course of the pandemic as we've had this tight labor force. Has that been equally true of shift workers? And what does the dynamic look like now?

SILVIJA MARTINCEVIC: Good morning, and thank you for having me. You know, what we have seen is that over the last decade, Julie, knowledge workers like you and I, they have seen massive improvements in productivity. We have tools like Slack, and Zoom, and Asana, and many others. And shift workers don't have access necessarily to those tools because they're on the move.

And so what Deputy is trying to do is to solve this problem for shift workers with productivity tools at their fingertips. And so what we're seeing is that shift workers, especially women, really need that flexibility. And some of the tools that we provide is-- automates that scheduling, where you could swap your shifts if you need to, if you have childcare problems. We also have seen that the engagement of shift workers, just like engagement for all of the workers, has declined. And so for a shift workers who are always on the move, we provide daily engagement scores, so that at the end of their shifts, employers can know how their workers are feeling to make sure that they retain them.

- [INAUDIBLE] here. And you have a retail report or a data analysis that you'll be releasing about the retail industry. So can you give us a little bit of insight as to what you're seeing in that industry?

SILVIJA MARTINCEVIC: Absolutely so we collect billions of rows of data on shift work, on engagement. And that allows us really to see workforce trends before they even materialize. And so there were three things, really, that stood out in this year's shift report related to older workers, related to younger growth cities, and related to women.

So first on the older workers, we're seeing that older workers, baby boomers, they're increasingly re-entering the workforce. Some of them wanted early retirement during the pandemic. And given the current financial climate, they're reentering the workforce. We saw that percentage of baby boomers in the shift workforce grow from 20 to 23%.

We have also seen this emergence of young growth cities, like Austin, Nashville, Vegas. And they're truly leading the retail employment. And we expect that these young growth cities are going to lead in economic recovery across most sectors. And three, and a very important topic, is women.

We have seen that we have lost over one million women since February of 2020 in US labor force. And we think that pandemic exposed many difficulties that Labor Secretary spoke about, which is for women, which is accessing childcare. And so we certainly hope that through software as well as through some of the movements that have started in some states, like Fair Work Week, we hope that that's a catalyst for helping women re-enter the workforce.

- And Silvija, you mentioned baby boomers re-entering the workforce. I mean, if you just take a look at today's jobs report for February, an increase of 311,000 jobs. You have the unemployment that ticked up to 3.6%. You have wages that increased, not as much as expected.

And the thesis that some have is that people are holding to jobs. Perhaps, people are getting two jobs because of inflation. Are you seeing that in your data?

SILVIJA MARTINCEVIC: We absolutely are. In fact, we are also seeing that shift workers are changing jobs. On average, we're seeing that a shift worker holds a job for about eight months-- for about eight months or so.

And so for employers out there of these workers, it's unbelievably important that we improve conditions, that we provide flexibility, that we have some of these engagement tools, that we communicate much better. In tight labor markets, it is incredibly important to create happier workplaces for the most vulnerable workers, which are 2/3 of the world's workforce, which are shift workers.

- Silvija really interesting stuff and a sector of the labor market that we don't talk enough about. So we appreciate your insight. Deputy CEO Sylvia Martincevic, thank you so much.