At Oxford Valley Mall holiday-job fair, hopes rise

Everything keeps piling on.

Mary Zackowski is on her seventh stent for heart problems - luckily, covered by disability insurance. Her husband, Richard, also has health problems. He works as a cashier at a gasoline station, earning just above minimum wage with no benefits.

At the moment, they are falling behind on the mortgage they refinanced to cover his medical bills.

Sometimes a visit to a nearby food pantry helps her feed her nephew, 15, who lives with the couple in their Levittown home.

"I'm on the razor's edge," she said. "My nephew cries and worries about us being homeless."

Not a pretty picture, and so much different from the cheery atmosphere Thursday at the Oxford Valley Mall, where the center's management held a job fair. It attracted about 200 job-seekers soliciting work from nearly two dozen retailers.

By coincidence, mall managers scheduled the fair for the same night President Obama delivered his speech on job creation to Congress.

"We have to look beyond the immediate crisis and start building an economy that lasts into the future - an economy that creates good, middle-class jobs that pay well and offer security," the president said.

The crisis is immediate for the Zackowskis. That's why the couple went to the job fair at the Oxford Valley Mall.

She hoped to find a few hours work to supplement her disability check, and her husband is seeking a second, and perhaps a third, job at the mall.

National experts - the National Retail Federation, a trade association, and Snagajob, a Richmond, Va., online job board for hourly positions - say it's too soon to predict how many workers the retail industry will hire for the holiday season. But their early guess: not much more than last year.

"It's not like 1999 where anyone who wanted a job could have one," said Snagajob vice president Amanda Richardson. "But it's also not like 2008 and 2009, when nobody was hiring and everyone was searching for a job."

In 2007, when the recession officially began, retailers hired 618,000 holiday workers. The next year, that fell to 231,000. In 2010, they hired 483,500, according to the National Retail Federation.

Sears operations manager Amy Fickert figured she'd be bringing in 25 holiday part-timers to supplement her crew of 125 at the Oxford mall store. "Business is up," she said.

Hiring can't happen too soon for Kim Tighe of Bristol. She lost her job at PetSmart in February.

The labor market "stinks," Tighe said. "There's nothing I'm qualified for because I don't have a college education, because I can't afford a college education."

Contact staff writer Jane M. Von Bergen at 215-854-2679, jvonbergen@phillynews.com, or @JaneVonBergen on Twitter.