Reply #2: Bad news in California...a glimpse of things to come: [View All]

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

Want a Wal-Mart job? Join the crowd
11,000 apply for 400 openings at retailer's new Oakland store

Pia Sarkar, Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/08/17/MNGDPE91AH1.DTL

For all the criticism that Wal-Mart receives for its low wages and minimal health benefits, the retail giant says more than 11,000 people in the Bay Area are clamoring to get a job at its new Oakland store. The country's largest employer plans to welcome customers into its 148, 000-square-foot store on Edgewater Drive next Wednesday, and it says it already has filled 350 of its 400 openings.

Wal-Mart has accepted more than 11,000 applications from Bay Area job seekers, marking the largest volume of interest it has received at any of its Northern California stores, said Wal-Mart spokeswoman Cynthia Lin. "I needed a job ASAP, and they had their doors open," said Virginia Ford, 19, of Oakland, who had applied for 25 jobs in three months before she landed one as a cashier at Wal-Mart in Oakland on Tuesday.

Stephen Levy, an economist for the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, said the pent-up demand for work reflects the Bay Area's slow recovery from the dot-com crash. "There's still a lot of people who were put out of work in the last four years who still don't have a job," Levy said. The unemployment rate in Alameda and Contra Costa counties climbed to 5.1 percent in June, up from 4.6 percent the month before but still below the state's unemployment rate of 5.4 percent, according to the latest statistics from the California Employment Development Department.

But some economists say those numbers do not tell the full story about the job market. To be counted as unemployed, a person must have sought a job within the past four weeks and must be completely out of work. Wanting a job but not looking for one takes a person out of the labor force and out of the unemployment-rate calculation. The Bay Area also has lost hundreds of jobs to outsourcing and offshoring, compounded by all the jobs that never came back after the local economy collapsed.