In a rare bit of good news for restaurant employers, turnover rates may be stabilizing or even ebbing, the labor research firm People Report said Thursday in releasing a variety of labor gauges for April.
But the TDn2K firm advised against turning cartwheels just yet. Though the churn rate appears to have peaked, “Turnover falling a few percentage points does not necessarily mean we’ve reached an inflection point,” said Victor Fernandez, VP of insights and knowledge for TDn2K.
“As with sales growth, these drops in the turnover rate have to be taken in context,” he said. “Turnover rates for both management and nonmanagement employees are still the highest we’ve seen in well over a decade. We expect turnover rates to remain extremely high in today’s low-unemployment environment.”
TDn2K’s sales and labor gauges for April were released days after the federal government announced that the unemployment rate has dipped below 4%, to 3.9%, for the first time since 2000.
People Report noted that vacancy rates, or the percentage of jobs that remain unfilled because of difficulties in finding employees at an affordable rate, remain at a historical high.