ILPC 2026

 Increasing research attention has been focussed on the management of absence and workplace attendance within the context of  increasingly ‘lean’ organisations (Taylor et al 2010, Edwards and Scullion, 1982).  However, to date limited research has examined the management of absence within the grocery retail industry. This paper reports on the findings of qualitative research conducted in four food-retail organizations in UK and Cyprus. It explores the manifestations and the management of absence in the ‘lean’ regime of grocery retailing and discusses how workplace attendance and absence are part of the contested and antagonistic employment relations on the supermarket shop floor.

The escalating power and domination of the supermarkets in the contemporary service economy has been subject to increasing public policy and academic attention.  The associated low-road employment strategies of low-paid, low skilled and part-time work have been documented in current research (Appelbaum et al., 2005; Carré and Tilly, 2009). Within this context the strong competitive pressures evidenced in the industry make the management of labour costs, including absence of crucial importance (Patton and Johns, 2012). As Taylor et al (2010) argue as organizations are pressured to keep  labour costs low, attendance becomes critical especially because staffing levels become more leaner. Nevertheless, limited research has examined the food-retail shop floor as a contested terrain. This paper will explore the impact of “Wal-Martization” on the labour process of the retail shop-floor and will reveal how workplace attendance and absence can be viewed as an expression of resistance within new workplace regimes

This paper draws on qualitative research evidence from four case-study grocery retail organizations in UK and Cyprus. It reports on 91 semi-structured interviews with HR managers, line managers and shop-floor employees. The evidence highlights that the working regime in both countries follows a neo-Tayloristic model of a tightly controlled labour process, coupled with an authoritarian working regime with the close supervision.  The implementation of cost reduction strategies in all of the case-study organizations was evidenced through an intensification of work, coupled with the increasing use electronic surveillance of the labour process. . The paper will focus on the impact of these cost reduction strategies on workplace attendance and absence management. Participants in all cases across the two regions have discussed the non-genuineness of absence behaviour suggesting that employees were often [non-genuinely] absent to avoid the repetitive, monotonous and daunting nature of the food-retail work. Nevertheless, the research evidence highlighted a  drop of absence in all the case study organizations. The paper will explore the multiple explanations that were identified to explain this drop in the absence levels. Firstly, participants commented that the economic crisis and the increasing unemployment in both regions were major drivers for employees’ decision to attend at work regularly due to feelings of job insecurity. Although this was a somehow expected finding, the research suggested that a labour process analysis which recognizes the contested nature of workplace attendance must be adopted to provide further insights into the changing nature of absence in these retail organizations. This approach highlights that the way the organizations managed absence impacted on employees’ attendance decisions. Briefly, a conflicting approach was evident in all cases, with [line] managers swinging between the penalization of absence and flexibility. In this way, employees were discouraged to go absent due to feelings of insecurity and feelings of obligation towards their line managers. Overall, the organizations introduced controls, which prevented and discouraged the utilization of absence as a resistance tactic. However, this is not to suggest that industrial conflict was absent from the shop-floor. Indeed, the data illustrated a latent behaviour by workers across the four organizations. Employees were utilizing silent and individual actions to battle over attendance, and to manipulate their presence on the shop-floor, expressing in this way their discontent towards the working regime and the organization of food-retail work. Particularly, the manipulation of the working time, the lower identification, and emotional investment in the job were the most common tactics utilized by workers in all cases.

At a conceptual level, the paper wishes to contribute to our understanding of the reconfiguration of working time and pressure on workplace attendance against the backdrop of the global crisis and the subsequent imposition of austerity measures.  It aims to reveal that despite these pressures, working time remains contested terrain, an outcome of the re-casting of the wage-effort bargain.