According to the June 2023 Workforce Activity Report published by UKG, a leading provider of HR, payroll, and workforce management solutions for all people, strong workforce activity coupled with continued tightness in the labor market may prompt a renewed surge in wages, especially for hourly and frontline employees.
UKG will discuss important and emerging trends from June 2023 shaping the frontline economy on Wednesday, July 5, at 10:00 a.m. ET, including:
- Back-to-back months of increased workforce activity1 at U.S. businesses, with June gaining another 0.4% following May’s 1.0% growth;
- Strength across all industries, including retail, foodservice, and hospitality (1.5%); healthcare (0.7%); and manufacturing (0.4%);
- Why recent continuing gains in shift work for hourly employees may lead to another surge in wages, and why that would be a challenge to smaller businesses, who continue to struggle with hiring and staffing; and
New analysis of workforce activity on Juneteenth, which indicates that more businesses are not adopting the observance.
Register to attend the UKG live labor market briefing.
Commentary: Dave Gilbertson, vice president and labor economist, UKG
“Workforce activity remains strong. In a normal market, back-to-back months of growth is great news, but this market is anything but normal. It’s a jack-in-the-box labor market, where new challenges pop out when we least expect them. Looking ahead to summer, we do believe strong workforce activity, coupled with low unemployment and a tight labor market, could lead to another surge in wages. When you factor in that businesses with 100 or fewer employees have struggled in 11 of the past 12 months, this could further increase the delta between smaller and larger businesses.”Importance: The UKG Workforce Activity Report is a high-frequency index analyzing shift work trends across 4.2 million people at 35,000 U.S. businesses to understand the economy. Reports are published and briefings are held each Tuesday (except on U.S. holidays) prior to the publication of the BLS Employment Situation Report. Upcoming schedule:
- July 2023 Workforce Activity Report: August 1, 2023
- August 2023 Workforce Activity Report: August 29, 2023
- September 2023 Workforce Activity Report: October 3, 2023
About UKG
At UKG, our purpose is people. As strong believers in the power of culture and belonging as the secret to success, we champion great workplaces and build lifelong partnerships with our customers to show what’s possible when businesses invest in their people. One of the world’s leading HCM cloud companies today, UKG and our Life-work Technology approach to HR, payroll, and workforce management solutions for all people helps more than 75,000 organizations around the globe and across every industry anticipate and adapt to their employees’ needs beyond just work. To learn more, visit ukg.com.
Footnote 1: “Shifts worked” is a total derived from aggregated employee time and attendance data and reflects the number of times that employees, especially those who are paid hourly or must be physically present at a workplace to perform their jobs, “clock in” and “clock out” via a timeclock, mobile app, computer, or other device at the beginning and end of each shift.
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