Long Island businesses to hire fewer seasonal workers for holidays amid economic, tariff worries

Lia Di Angelo, who owns a florist shop on Post Avenue in Westbury, starts preparing for the busy holiday season in November. She places orders for flowers to create holiday wreaths and poinsettias and decides how many additional staff to hire.

Di Angelo, 53, typically hires about 20 temporary staff to help her design arrangements and deliver orders to customers of her 13-year-old store, Westbury Floral Designs. But this year, she said, she’s planning to hire “three to four people less than last year since the business is down.”

“I may bring it down a notch and [hire] six delivery drivers instead of seven, and maybe 11 shop employees instead of 13,” she said.

The holiday season is when Di Angelo usually doubles her monthly revenue, but she said customer sales have been down by about 15% since January, due to rising costs from tariffs and inflation. The cost of goods has increased in three of the last four months and inflation is slightly higher than it was a year ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

While Di Angelo and several other small-business owners on Long Island — they make up 90% of businesses on the Island — are concerned about economic headwinds as they contemplate hiring temporary staff for the months between October and December, local staffing agency owners also said some of their client employers plan to hire fewer seasonal workers.

“I have heard a few of our clients may not need as many people as last year,” said Jim Morris, owner of Farmingdale Express Employment Professionals, a franchised staffing firm.

Morris anticipates seasonal hiring will be “flat to down” this year.

Local experts, though, said they are more optimistic despite national projections that show seasonal hiring could be down to Great Recession levels.

“We are optimistic that our retailers will adapt and contribute to another banner year,” Matthew Cohen, president and CEO of the Long Island Association, said in a statement to Newsday.

Seasonal employment provides a vital opportunity for Long Islanders to earn extra income to help make ends meet, especially at a time of higher consumer costs, which benefits the larger regional economy, local experts say.

Seasonal hiring by the numbers

On Long Island, employers typically hired an average of 10,000 seasonal workers between October and December before the pandemic, according to data from the state Department of Labor. The state does not produce seasonal hiring projections.

But retailers nationally are projected to add fewer than 500,000 seasonal jobs in the final three months of the year, the lowest since 2009, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in a report last month.

Local experts and economists are more optimistic despite national projections, and said Long Island’s economy is more resilient than the nation's because of the diversity of industries locally, which means slowdowns in one sector of jobs doesn’t hurt the overall economy as much.

Steven Kent, chief economist with the Long Island Association, said the region’s economy remains robust and any declines in hiring locally might be due to changing trends in how businesses handle the holiday rush.

Employers likely will opt to use their existing employees to fill staffing needs instead of relying on temporary workers, said Kent, who teaches economics at Molloy University in Rockville Centre.

Temp hires and the economy

Kent said that while seasonal hiring jobs typically pay close to minimum wage — $16.50 per hour on Long Island — the jobs are a source of extra income for workers who are trying to make ends meet and pay off debts amid a time of higher prices.

Because seasonal wages supplement other income, they’re often spent on paying off debt or discretionary spending, he said. “It’s extra income that goes into the community,” he said.

Overall, seasonal hiring from October through December has trended lower by around 4,000 jobs the past two years, Shital Patel, labor market analyst with the state's Hicksville office, said in an email.

During the 10 years before the pandemic, the Island gained an average of 10,000 holiday seasonal jobs, Patel said. In the past two years, the region has averaged less than 7,000 new seasonal jobs.

Two factors might be at play, she said.

“First, overall retail has been shrinking on Long Island and elsewhere due to competition with e-commerce and a move away from brick-and-mortar stores,” she said. Additionally, “retailers also tend to hire fewer seasonal workers if they anticipate weaker consumer spending.”

Optimistic outlook

At Simon Property Group’s three malls on Long Island — Roosevelt Field, Walt Whitman Shops and Smith Haven Mall — seasonal hiring is expected to be in line with previous years, a company spokesperson said.

Between new and established stores, retailers at local Simon malls are expected to hire a “significant number of seasonal employees," the company said.

For some smaller-business owners, the holidays represent an opportunity to grow their business' profile, assuming they can find the seasonal workers.

Naldoven Seizeme, 23, owner of Yule Love Lights, an Amityville-based Christmas light design and installation business, said he wants to add 13 seasonal workers to his staff of four.

Seizeme’s company designs and installs Christmas light layouts for residential and commercial clients.

He started the lighting business in 2022. In his first year, he made $30,000 in revenue and last year, he brought in over $290,000 in sales, he said. Seizeme said he was able to increase his sales by significantly growing his customer base, but that requires extra hands, he said.

This year, Seizeme said, if he can find the work for his seasonal hires, he hopes to double sales, to $750,000.

His only limitation on hiring is how many customers he can pick up, he said.

“I can’t control what the people are going to do,” he said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the last name of the owner of Westbury Floral Designs.