Low-Wage Work in Denmark

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 4 Working in Danish Retailing: Transitional Workers Going Elsewhere, Core Employees Going Nowhere, and Career-Seekers Striving to Go Somewhere Lars Esbjerg, Klaus G. Grunert, Nuka Buck, and Anne-Mette Sonne Andersen Working in retailing is a low-status occupation in Denmark. Politicians and various members of the media routinely use supermarket checkout operators when illustrating how economic policies will affect “common people.” Irregular working hours and mediocre pay are among the retail-related issues that crop up in the media regularly. Danish retailers are acutely aware that retail establishments have a negative image as places to work and that this image has an impact on their ability to recruit and retain the workers they need now and will need in the future. But what is it actually like to work in Danish retailing? In this chapter, we explore this question from the perspective of both managers and store workers. In eight Danish retailers, we investigated job quality, work organization, industrial relations, pay, training, and career prospects. We studied frontline workers who have a high degree of customer interaction: checkout operators and sales assistants in food retailing; and salespeople in electrical goods retailing. One of our findings is that the stereotypical supermarket checkout operator is perhaps not so typical after all. Overall, it is possible to distinguish between three types of employees in Danish retailing: (1) transitional workers who are working in retailing either before or while they study; (2) core employees who have no career ambitions; and (3) career-seekers who want to make a career in retailing. The relative importance of the employee types differs between food retail140 ers and specialty electrical goods retailers, which employ relatively fewer transitional workers and offer fewer opportunities for careerseekers than food retailers. Retailers thus face the challenge of making retail work attractive and interesting for three types of employees with divergent interests and ambitions. So far they appear to have been successful. Despite (or because of?) very different goals and career plans, job satisfaction is high across the three employee types. In this chapter, we begin by describing the overall design of our study and the methodology we used for the qualitative case studies . Next, a brief overview of Danish retailing describes the context of the case studies. Then, we present the findings of the qualitative case studies. We end with a conclusion and discussion of our findings. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY The rationale for including retailing in a study of low-wage work in Denmark is straightforward: compared to other industries, a relatively high proportion of workers in retailing are classified as lowwage workers. We designed the study based on the assumption that retail subsectors would differ with regard to human resource management strategies , employment structure, job quality, and job satisfaction. We thus studied two retail subsectors that we expected to differ, namely, electrical goods and food retailing. One important difference between these two retail subsectors is that the proportion of low-wage workers is almost twice as high in food retailing (28 percent) as in electrical goods retailing (15 percent). The target occupations we were primarily interested in were checkout operators (the archetypical low-status retail job) and sales assistants (in the consumer electronics departments of supermarkets and hypermarkets) in food retailing and salespeople in consumer electronics specialty retailers. These are occupations with a large degree of direct customer interaction, but the content of these interactions differs significantly. We conducted case studies of eight retail companies: five food retailers and three specialty electrical goods retailers. Three of the food retailers we studied also sell consumer electronics. In these three cases, we studied both checkout operators and sales assistants in the Working in Danish Retailing 141 electronics departments. A brief summary of the cases is provided in the appendix. We visited two or three stores per chain to gain a broader understanding of each chain. In all cases, we interviewed informants at several organizational levels. Typically, we interviewed human resource managers at the retail chain level, store managers, department managers , employee representatives, and checkout operators, sales assistants , or salespeople at the retail store level. In total, we conducted more than 110 interviews. We recorded most of the interviews, but in a few cases where this was not possible —because the informant refused or because of technical difficulties —we took extensive notes, either during the interview or immediately afterwards. After transcribing and coding the interviews, we wrote up...