ILPC 2027

The retail sector is one of the largest low-wage industries, both in the US and Europe, involving the weakest components of the labor force - women, young people, immigrants and low educated people - and providing jobs that are often very precarious. Working conditions, level of precariousness and also the dimensions of it (in terms of number of working hours, unpredictability of working schedules and risk of losing the job) do vary by country in a significant way. The paper aims at comparing the job quality in the retail trade in the US and in Italy, by taking into consideration both objective dimensions of that quality, namely the employment conditions and the characteristics of the job contents, and its subjective dimensions, i.e. reasons of satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the job.

The Italy/US comparison is very useful to highlight how the different institutional contexts (labor legislation, unionization) do have an impact on the objective dimensions of job quality (working conditions, precariousness, wages) while the subjective dimensions (satisfaction) might be affected by the different expectations that workers have about their job in the retail sector. In particular, the local labor market conditions and the characteristics of the labor force employed in the sector are likely to influence the workers’ expectations. Interactions with customers are also an important source of satisfaction/dissatisfaction that has been taken into consideration and seems less affected by the specificities of the national context.

The paper aims at combining two different literature’s streams that are usually separated: on the one hand, the studies on job quality pay little attention to the worker-customer interactions, even if they are likely to have a strong influence on workers’ satisfaction in most of the service jobs. On the other hand, emotional labor literature, mainly focused on worker-customer interactions, devoted very scarce attention to the characteristics of the labor force employed in low wage front line service jobs and to their working conditions, which strongly vary by country.

The research is based on both quantitative and qualitative methods. The literature on the retail sector, together with interviews with representatives of unions and labor movements concerning retail workers, were used to analyze the institutional frameworks, working conditions and general trends in the retail sector in the two countries. Statistical data were essential to describe the characteristics of the labor force employed in the retail sector and the conditions of the labor market in the two national contexts. For the US retail industry also specific surveys provided data and useful information that, unfortunately, were not available for the Italian case.

To analyze the subjective aspects of the job quality, more than 50 semi-structured interviews with front-line service workers with different roles (sale assistants, supervisors, cashiers) were collected in chain clothing stores of medium/low price level in two large cities: Milan and New York. To improve the comparison some stores belonging to multinational chains present in both Milan and NY were selected.