Alberta's retail sector is struggling to deal with the problems it's facing due to the severe labour shortage.

At least six significant national retailers have put expansion plans for Alberta on hold, says the Retail Council of Canada (RCC), which won't name the stores.

And it's becoming a quality-of-life issue that could slow down the province's growth as retailers put off plans to open needed stores and services in growing communities, says Kevin Evans, RCC's vice-president for Western Canada.

"Retail growth in Alberta is forecast to be in the 13- to 14-per-cent range, which is nearly double that of the next closest province (in growth), which is British Columbia," says Evans. "We've never seen retail sales like we're seeing in Alberta at the present time, it's like a house on fire.

"The irony ... is that at a time when retailers could be expanding and really capitalizing on the demand out there, they can't. They're constrained because of the labour supply issue."

To deal with the issue, RCC members in Alberta have unveiled a sub-sector job strategy called the Retail Labour Supply Task Force, part of the province's overall 10-year plan to build and educate tomorrow's workforce.

Additional sub-sector responses from other industries are expected to be released over the next few months.

But there appears to be no single solution to the retailers' plight.

"There is not going to be a single silver bullet," says Evans. "There is not going to be any big ideas that just break this thing wide open.

"It's going to be the cumulative effect of a lot of good ideas. So it's going to be incremental and that's the approach that we're taking."

Those incremental solutions, unveiled at a recent press conference held in Edmonton, include:

* Repositioning the image of retail as a career.

* Lobbying on immigration.

* Finding ways to utilize under-employed segments of the workforce, such as Aboriginals or persons with disabilities.

* Expanding the retail curriculum in the education system.

Industry experts say retail can no longer be viewed as the "accidental career" or the job you get before you get a real job - and say the sector has done a poor job of communicating the possibilities of a career in retail.

Not only do retailers need to better understand how to remove barriers for people with disabilities, they have to find ways to make it worthwhile for mature workers to enter the sector once they've retired - taking into account pension and income tax provisions that discourage individuals from continuing to work after retirement.

Retail accounts for five per cent of Alberta's gross domestic product and is the province's largest employer with 211,900 people, or 12 per cent of all employed Albertans.

Evans says the task force exercise has brought 50 retailers together to work as an industry.

"That's never happened before in the retail sector, certainly not in Alberta," he adds.

Until the strategy bears fruit, companies will have to be creative in finding employees.

But the task force is hopeful that retailers will be buoyed by the industry taking the matter seriously and moving to position itself as employer of choice.

However, that doesn't help the Edmonton-based Running Room chain or Canada Safeway, both of whom were part of the press conference and say they need employees if their expansion plans are to move forward.

Kevin Higa, the Running Room's chief financial officer and co-chair of the task force, says his company has slowed down its growth plans because it's not sure it will be able to staff the new stores.

Canada Safeway is in the process of converting its store to a new lifestyle format, updating and rebranding its supermarkets.

That, however, requires an additional 40 to 50 workers per store, says Bill Campbell, the company's director of human resources, and it has another few years to go as Safeway is not quite halfway through the process.

They're also looking at expanding into markets they don't currently serve.

But Campbell appears to like what he sees so far about the new RCC labour strategy.

"It certainly brings retailers together," he says.

"Historically, retail is a very competitive business and the neat thing about this is retail is coming together to bring up strategies jointly and solve our issues."

But the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL), an umbrella group for organized labour across the province, isn't buying what the retailers are selling with their latest announcement.

"To tell you the truth, we in the labour movement have only a tiny bit of sympathy for the retail sector," says AFL president Gil McGowan, who attended the press conference.

"It's a no-brainer for most people when asked why the retail sector is having a hard time attracting or retaining people," notes McGowan.

The reason is because they pay lousy wages. That's the bottom line."

All the platitudes about careers in retail and best practices ignore the essential fact that most retail companies pay poorly, McGowan adds.

"That's the reason they're having problems attracting and retaining people in a tight labour market."

(Laura Severs can be reached at laura@businessedge.ca)