Lady Business: Labor pains, Amazon returns, and Wawa celebrities

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 129th issue, published June 13, 2021.
 

Many Happy Returns

 

After a year-plus of stories about people losing work and leaving the labor market, it feels like a switch has flipped: Suddenly, there aren’t enough workers for all the jobs that employers have to fill. Which is great! Right? Masks off, pandemic’s over, let’s all get ready to party.
 
Of course, it’s not that simple. There are still 1.8 million women—and nearly 1.8 million men—who have dropped out of the labor force since February 2020, meaning they’re not even looking for work. And, sure, you could blame the government’s pandemic unemployment assistance for keeping people from going back to poorly-paid jobs for a few more months. Or—here’s a crazy idea—you could blame the low wages and broken working conditions that drove people out of the labor force in the first place.
 
The pay problem shouldn’t be hard to fix, but it is. Some employers are raising wages; but it’s worth pointing out that the federal minimum wage remains $7.25—or $2.13 for tipped restaurant workers—and that many of the same politicians who want to end pandemic-era unemployment assistance also don’t support big increases in what employers pay those who do go back to work.
 
The broken working conditions are an even thornier problem—especially when it comes to our nation’s failed caregiving infrastructure. That’s the primary reason why so many women, across income levels, had to stop working during the pandemic and still haven't been able to go back to work. And while President Biden as well as private employers have put forth various proposals to address the nation’s childcare crisis, it’s still not solved.
 
I broke some news earlier this month about one of those employer proposals: Amazon is committing to hiring up to 1,000 women who have left the workforce for a year or more, in an unprecedented commitment to the “return-to-work” internships that I’ve previously covered. (Amazon’s returnships are also open to men, but the company says that 93% of its current returnship participants are women, most of whom stopped working to take care of young children or other relatives. As we all know by now, women are far more likely to be forced into unpaid caregiving roles and to stop working as a result.)
 

“It should become more standard for employers that are in a position like Amazon’s to offer returnships,” says Alex Mooney, senior diversity talent acquisition program manager at Amazon. “Women are the primary caretakers in our society, and this program will be predominantly for them.”

He declined to be more specific about Amazon’s deadline for making its 1,000 hires, or about how many returnship graduates the company expects to hire each year. Even with those caveats, Amazon is now creating “a much bigger program than anything we’ve seen,” says Tami Forman, executive director of the nonprofit Path Forward, which is working with Amazon on its returnships.

1,000 sounds like a large number—and it is, when compared to the roughly 30 returnships that Amazon has previously offered since 2019, or the few thousand across all employers that experts estimate are offered every year. But it’s a tiny percentage of Amazon’s total workforce of 1.3 million—and so it’s a pretty safe bet for a talent-starved big company to make.

It’s even safer when you consider that employers have consistently hired about 80% of all people who go through returnships. Clearly these women are a vast and untapped pool of experienced talent—exactly what we’re told so many employers are desperate for right now.

It’s increasingly evident that the broken labor market, and its many childcare failures, can’t be fixed without sweeping government policy. But as we’ve seen with worker pay, individual employer actions can also start to make incremental change—for the companies themselves, for the larger economy, and for all the workers who these employers could hire, if they’re willing to think a little more expansively about where to look.
 

Lady Bits

—I haven’t been able to watch anything very dark or death-focused in recent weeks and so missed the Mare of Easttown moment. But I’ve been glad to see Kate Winslet and her breathlessly-covered Delco accent give my hometown—and, of course, its Wawa lifeblood—their time in the pop-culture sun. (As I reported in my 2018 Wawa profile for Inc., this convenience-store chain has somehow managed to hold onto its “cult” Philly identity despite bringing in more than $10 billion in annual sales and stretching its 850 locations all the way to Florida.)
 
—On the other hand, the tissue-light Girls5Eva manages to be funny and well-acted, and sharp about how the music business preys on young women until it deems them too old to care about. (It's also occasionally sharp about other things; my favorite joke in the entire series is a sly takedown of The Americans.) And it is so delightful to see the amazing Renée Elise Goldsberry, aka Angelica from Hamilton, having a breakout at age 50.
 
—A photo essay on Covid hair and the women embracing their greys: “You know when botanists bisect a tree, and can tell by the thickness of rings what the conditions were like that year? This feels like we had that year, and this is what happened.”
 
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com