Alone at work: Isolation,competition and co-dependency in flexibilised retail

Employer-controlled flexible scheduling

Most OECD countries have seen a rise in labour flexibility and so-called non-standard employment in recent decades (Kalleberg, 2000). The perceived need for more labour flexibility has been accredited to a multitude of ongoing trends, including global competition, digitalisation, new consumption patterns, and an increasing focus on shareholder value through reduction of labour costs (EMCC, 2007; Fleming, 2017; Kalleberg, 2011; Rubery, 2015). One important reason behind the decrease in ‘standard employment’ (i.e. full-time work) in the service industries is corporations’ perceived need to respond to fluctuations in customer and consumer demand (Lambert, 2008) and minimise the number of labour hours when customer demand is low. For companies aiming to reduce costs, there is thus pressure on managers and HR to introduce work flexibilisation in order to reduce the number of hours worked (Cappelli and Neumark, 2004). These employer-controlled labour flexibility practices shift risk from the employer to the workers by increasing instability and insecurity (Kalleberg, 2009; Lambert, 2008).

One integral mechanism of work flexibilisation concerns the practice of flexible scheduling, i.e. the use of schedules that give the company temporal flexibility – meaning that workers work during hours when demand is high (Wood, 2016). The present study deals with what has been denoted as ‘employer-controlled flexible scheduling’ where managers impose unpredictable and irregular work hours on the workers (Henly et al., 2006; Lambert, 2008; Wood, 2016). Flexible scheduling has been categorised as introducing three interrelated but distinct aspects of variation (Lambert, 2008): (1) varying the number of hours employees work each week, (2) varying the distribution of hours across a week, and (3) varying the number of workers scheduled.

The consequences of these practices of employer-controlled flexible scheduling are that workers have difficulties predicting when and how much they will work each week, forcing them to ‘stand by’ for work at all times (Hyman et al., 2005). Studies of hourly work in the service and retail industries also show how these scheduling practices lead to inter-employee competition for work hours, as there are many workers but relatively few work hours available (Lambert et al., 2012; Wood, 2016). For hourly workers in these studies, there is thus a constant hustling for hours in order to make sufficient money each month, creating in-group competition between the workers.

Several studies have described and discussed the negative effects on work–life balance for workers subjected to flexible scheduling (Henly et al., 2006; Hsueh and Yoshikawa, 2007; Hyman et al., 2005; Pocock and Clarke, 2005). Besides the detrimental effects on family and social life, there are more general effects on the wellbeing and health of individuals working in this mode (Martens et al., 1999: 35; Zeytinoglu et al., 2004). Fenwick and Tausig (2001) show how the lack of control over one’s work schedule has strong negative effects on aspects such as stress levels, burnout and satisfaction. Based on a study of Canadian retail work, Zeytinoglu et al. (2004) conclude that schedule-induced stress results in a wide range of psychological and physical health problems. In the same vein, Blom et al. (2018) also highlight the connection between job insecurity and health outcomes such as burnout and depressive symptoms. Consequently, several scholars emphasise that employer-controlled schedule flexibility is an important factor when understanding what negatively impacts job quality (Findlay et al., 2013; Holman, 2013).

Flexibilisation and employee isolation

Employer-controlled flexibility and non-standard employment is not only achieved through scheduling. Another important mechanism is deciding the location of work: telework is a clear example. Practices of telework, defined as a variety of practices that concern working away from the employer’s main site (Morganson et al., 2010), is common in contemporary work. Research dealing with such work, also referred to as ‘telecommuting’ or ‘virtual work’ (Whittle and Mueller, 2009), has shown how, when engaged in such work practices, workers tend to experience isolation, both professionally – as in lacking collaboration and networks with colleagues for the sharing of knowledge – and psychologically – as feelings of loneliness and isolation (Gajendran and Harrison, 2007; Kurland and Cooper, 2002). Isolation has been defined as a fundamental feeling of being ‘cut off from others’: something that happens when a person’s need of social and emotional aspects of interaction are denied (Golden et al., 2008: 1412). A large drawback of telework is thus the social isolation that comes from not seeing and interacting with one’s colleagues, thus hampering the individual’s need for affiliation (Gajendran and Harrison, 2007).

A vital aspect in the literature on telework is the ‘relationship quality’ (Gajendran and Harrison, 2007: 1525) between both co-workers and the co-worker and supervisor. As face-to-face interaction is reduced, communication between the worker and her co-workers as well as supervisor becomes both less frequent and less rich (Golden et al., 2008). Telework thus means that all those naturally occurring interactions such as ‘water cooler’ chats (or the Swedish equivalent – ‘fika’ ), lunchroom talk and unofficial grapevine communication that research has shown to be pivotal both for workplace communication and effectiveness (Siha and Monroe, 2006), as well as for employees’ feelings of social connectedness (Cooper and Kurland, 2002), are reduced.

There are thus many studies that show the effects of work outside the workplace on employees’ feelings of isolation and sense of social inclusion. However, there is also a budding stream of literature that investigates isolation at work, when workers who are present in the workplace experience isolation and loneliness. The ongoing changes of flexibilisation driven by the shift into a globalised post-industrial, 24/7-economy, in tandem with a neoliberal drive towards deregulation and de-collectivisation (Rubery, 2015) and increased financialisation at the expense of working conditions (Kalleberg, 2011), have led to more employees being ‘spread thin’ in the service industries, in order to save on labour costs. One example is the study of cleaning work (McBride and Martínez Lucio, 2016), where staff reductions have led to cleaners in various sectors working mainly alone at inconvenient hours, with very little interaction both between co-workers and with managers. Paradoxically, this means that as processes of globalisation and digitalisation offers opportunities for increased interactions and communication, there are simultaneous flexibilisation processes that seem to increase the isolation experienced by workers in very different jobs.

Flexibilisation and union opposition in Swedish retail

Traditionally, trade unions have been able to exert influence over how working hours are being scheduled and organised. The idea of full-time employment and a standard working week were established after being championed by unions (Wood, 2016), which in Sweden and the rest of Europe continue to resist part-time work, as it is an exception to this norm. However, the degree to which unions have been successful in resisting flexibilisation practices, such as manager-controlled flexible scheduling, has to a large extent depended on the national setting and the labour market institutions in the specific country (Rubery et al., 2005). For example, research has shown how the share of low-wage work in Europe and the US depends on the extent of ‘inclusiveness’ of the national labour market institutions – meaning the extent of collective bargaining, national law and social norms consisting of voluntary mechanisms that govern firms’ behaviour (Appelbaum and Schmitt, 2009). The power and weight of trade unions and other efforts to organise workers (Coulter, 2013) will thus play a role.

Sweden has historically been considered a role-model country in terms of workers’ rights and social welfare, with its labour market system being popularised as the ‘Swedish model’ (Blyth, 2001). The historical basis for this is a labour market that has been characterised by high levels of permanent employment, advanced notice and union involvement during layoffs, the seniority principle being protected by law, a high degree of full-time contracts and relatively high levels of pay guaranteed by collective agreements (Bergström and Diedrich, 2008; Kjellberg, 2000). One important historical key to the ‘Swedish model’ has been the strong position of the unions, which have developed in tandem with the so-called ‘Rehn–Meidner model’ where solidarity wages through collective agreements forced inefficient companies and low-productivity sectors out of business by not being able to compete on low wages. This was then paired with an active labour market policy aimed at transferring laid off workers from low-productivity industries into other, more high-productive sectors.

However, with the rise of the labour-intensive service industries, where efficiency increases are hard to achieve (see e.g. the discussion of the so-called ‘Baumol’s cost disease’ in Heilbrun, 2003), and the globalisation of the economy in combination with a general neoliberal shift in labour policy, the image of Sweden as a role model for workers’ rights has increasingly been questioned (Blyth, 2001). Especially in low-skill sectors where there is labour market slackness, such as retailing, the level of ‘structural economic power’ on the part of the unions is diminishing (Carré and Tilly, 2008; Hyman et al., 2005). In the retail industry in Sweden, there is an additional challenge due to the lack of local union representatives, as stores are often too small to have local union representation to act as a conduit to mobilise collective voice (Wood, 2016). Studies have also shown how differences between sub-sectors of an industry, for example in retail (Askenazy et al., 2012), have effects on levels of pay, job characteristics and job quality.

The Swedish retail workers’ union (Handelsanställdas förbund) has been working in various ways to resist and moderate the trend of flexibilisation, especially flexible scheduling and what is known as ‘shaving’. This is the practice in which hours are ‘shaved’ off a full-time (or near full-time) employment, turning it into a part-time employment, thus reducing the level of security and ‘prognosable’ pay for the workers. The union has demanded the right to full-time employment (Haataja et al., 2012) in negotiations with the two employers’ associations for retail, as well as tried to raise public awareness for retail workers’ conditions with a special focus on part-time work (see e.g. Berggren, 2016; Boman and Berge, 2013; Boman and Strömbäck, 2014; Carlén, 2007). Despite this, in recent years there has been a noted increase in flexible scheduling (Nandorf, 2016). The retail union has on several occasions brought ‘shaving’ disputes before the Swedish Labour Court in attempts to use the legal system to stop the converting of full-time employment into part-time employment (see e.g. Swedish Labour Court, 2016).

However, despite the union’s efforts, paired with a national political discourse of a full-time employment norm, the union has consistently lost the legal conflicts in the court and employers’ arguments for part-time employment have been supported (Nandorf, 2016). Swedish labour law allows employers to reorganise at will, which is how the employers explain their cutting of hours off employees’ work contracts. The requirement to follow the seniority principle during layoffs, which is usually what gives the union leverage during negotiations, carries little weight in the case of ‘shaving’. The failure of the labour courts to stop such practices, which are now spreading in the service, retail and care industries in Sweden, has made the unions change strategy, and instead pursue two avenues simultaneously: (1) to negotiate collective agreements and local agreements with employers in order to minimise ‘shaving’ as well as give workers subject to ‘shaving’ the same rights as given to employees whose contracts are terminated, and (2) to lobby the government to change the labour laws to protect the working hours in an employment (which is not the case today) (Handels, 2018). Whether these efforts will be successful remains to be seen.

As the above review shows, the literature on flexibilisation has shown the negative consequences for workers’ economic security and wellbeing. It has also explored the effects of flexible working practices on workers’ isolation, mainly for telework but also with an increasing focus on flexibilisation of ‘on-site’ work and its consequences in feelings of isolation. However, there is still a need for more studies on the workplace aspects of flexible scheduling and its effects on workplace interaction and relationships, as well as on how these processes coincide with workers’ ability for collective voice and action. In the present study, we are therefore interested both in how flexibilisation impacts the interaction and social relations among workers and in how it simultaneously coincides with possibilities for workers’ collective voice and action.

Research setting – Swedish retail

Despite the relatively high level of union membership in the Swedish retail sector, changes in ownership and opening hours have led to an increased use of flexible scheduling (Rämme et al., 2010). The Swedish retail industry has seen a shift from relatively high levels of full-time and permanent employment to a higher proportion of part-time employment among retail workers: from 1990 to 2016, the proportion of ‘standard employment’ contracts in Swedish retail slowly dropped from 43% to 33% (Berggren, 2016). Also, there has been a growing share of zero-hour and temporary contracts (28% in 2016). Part-time employment has replaced full-time, in many cases. While the part-time contracts have increased among workers, the number of full-time employed workers has decreased by almost the same amount (Berggren and Carlén, 2016).

Retail in Sweden also has a high proportion of low-skilled female employees (employees without post-secondary education and specific job skills) (65% in 2010) and persons aged 15–24 (about 20%) (Giaccone and Di Nunzio, 2012; Rämme et al., 2010). For a long time, there has been a higher percentage of part-time employment among women and young workers than men. In more recent years, the prevalence of part-time work has increased to higher levels among men also ¹ (Berggren and Carlén, 2016). However, the pattern is the opposite for managers and administrators, with a significantly decreasing proportion of part-time employment and an increase in full-time contracts (Berggren and Carlén, 2016).

Data collection

The data collection was carried out in two sequential steps. First, in order to study and analyse the context of employment in the Swedish retail sector, we interviewed local and national union representatives as well as representatives from the two retail employers’ organisations, who provide legal support to their member organisations and negotiate collective agreements with the unions. We also interviewed job transition coaches working for the job security council for the sector, as well as representatives from several companies who had been involved in recent layoffs and flexibilisation (mainly managers and HR staff). Secondly, we conducted extended case studies of two retail chains that had restructured their operations by relocating staff and/or cutting hours from their contracts.

Interviewees were selected from a database of all retail companies with recorded layoffs of workers (not of managers or other white-collar workers) in the last two years. A total of 1600 stores and distributors were included in the database, ‘shaving’ was also included. In the first step of the data collection, we stratified a selection of 15 companies from the retail stores. They were chosen to represent different parts of the retail sector: larger and smaller companies/chains with different types of products, and differing locations (major cities, smaller towns and rural areas). In this first step, only managers and regional union representatives were interviewed. A preliminary analysis of the 15 companies focused on the companies’ (i.e. management) discourses regarding the reorganisations and layoffs (Arman and Bergström, 2013). The preliminary analysis showed that reorganisations were common and the companies often implemented new employment conditions for all or many employees with shaving off of hours.

Following this first analysis, more interviews were carried out in two of the companies, including workers and lower-level managers (store managers). For this second, extended part of the data collection we chose one company in the perishable and one in the non-perishable product sectors respectively, as employment changes were carried out in partly different ways and with different consequences.

Altogether, in both steps, a total of 60 interviews were carried out (see Table 1).

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Table 1.

Type of interviewees, by gender and role.

	Total	Women	Men
Company employees	37	16	21
Union representatives and blue-collar union experts	12	4	8
Union representatives and white-collar union experts	2	2	−
Employers’ association representatives	4	−	4
Job transition coaches	5	1	4
Total	60	23	37

Table 2 gives a summary of only the subset of 22 interviewees selected for the two extended case studies, i.e. one hobby store chain and one grocery chain.

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Table 2.

Interviewees in the two extended case studies.

Position	Hobby chain	Grocery chain	(Women/men)Total
Top managers	1	−	(0/1) 1
Region manager	2	2	(0/4) 4
Store manager	4	2	(2/4) 6
Employees	4	2	(4/2) 6
Union representative	2	1	(1/2) 3
Job transition coach	1	1	(0/2) 2
Total	14	8	(7/15) 22

Each interview lasted 0.5–1.5 hours and was recorded and transcribed verbatim by a professional transcriber. The interviewees were asked about what led to layoff decisions and changes in employment contracts and about the reorganisation process, the roles of different actors, and reactions to the reorganisations and changes in employment contracts. As complementary data we also carried out a participant observation of a negotiation between a manager and a union representative regarding the closing of a retail store and of the subsequent information meeting with the staff and read internal documents which were used during the restructuring of some of the companies.

Data analysis

The material collected in both steps was analysed through thematic analysis, i.e. by searching for common patterns or themes in the material. The interview excerpts were first coded based on their basic empirical content (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). In a next step, interview excerpts from the individual interview transcripts were separated into empirical categories, mainly following the chronology of the changes and restructuring programmes carried out in the case studies from the perspective of different actors (reported in Swedish in Arman et al., 2015). In the third round of coding, the empirical categories were structured into larger ‘second-order’ themes (i.e. theoretical categories; see Van Maanen, 1979) using the theoretical framework to interpret the empirical categories (see e.g. Spradley, 1979: Ch. 8). The themes were identified by the authors first reading and re-reading the material individually and then extracting meaning units, sorting them into themes, and discussing the identified themes with each other.

As we were interested in flexibilisation practices and their impact on the workers’ interactions, competition and sense of isolation in the workplace as well as related collective voice and action, this was the focus in our second-order analysis. In this analysis, we found that the competition for hours was a recurring theme in one of the cases while the opposite occurred in the other case, a kind of co-dependency had developed among the workers. In both cases, isolation and lack of contact or communication between co-workers was a common theme. Collective voice and action were also discussed by the interviewees, mainly in relation to the unions. Our presentation of empirical findings in the next section is based on these four themes: competition, co-dependency, communicating and collective voice and action.

The cases

Two large national chains were chosen for the case study, here called Grocery and Hobby. The companies had used two different methods for restructuring and changing employment contracts in the last two years: (1) closing stores and moving employees versus (2) reorganising in order to decrease the number of work hours in all employees’ contracts across the whole chain. Our interviews with representatives of the employer association and the retail union showed that both of these practices were common at the time of the study.

Grocery is a major Swedish chain with stores for groceries and perishable products. It is owned by one of Northern Europe’s largest listed companies. In Grocery, the employment contracts consisted mostly of part-time, before the studied changes were made. We studied the process when a store was closed and the existing employees were moved to other stores in the chain and offered new contracts where hours had been ‘shaved’ off. The chain used a shared seniority list of employees for all stores in the same city area. Changes in employment contracts in one store hence had consequences for employees in other stores on the same list: the most senior employees were moved from one store to another in order for them to keep the best possible contract. For some workers this resulted in reduced work hours. As the contracts were reduced extra work hours became central for making ends meet for the workers.

The second case organisation, Hobby, was a smaller chain of department stores selling discretionary non-perishable products. The changes in this chain were initiated when it was acquired by a venture capital firm and reorganised in order to increase profits. Before this, many employees still had full-time contracts and had been employed long term for many years in the company. Many also had specialised higher-level training in the area of the products sold. As in the case of several other organisations that had been taken to court by the union, this chain chose to reorganise and perform part-time layoffs for the majority of their workers by offering new contracts with less work time for all, i.e. ‘shaving’. Prior to the changes, the human resources department and the regional managers had analysed the basic staffing levels with the aim of lowering the staffing costs and better adjusting the staff hours to the customer flow. Based on this, top management decided that new contracts were needed – a process the company called ‘staffing optimisation’. This case is thus an example of how retail jobs in the non-perishable sector of the industry are becoming increasingly similar to jobs in perishable grocery stores, and more flexible for the employers.

Competition

In the grocery chain, reorganising and staffing strategies resulted in increased competition among workers. The restructuring of work hours, from a full-time schedule of around 38 hours per week to a part-time contract of 20–25 scheduled hours per week, with the possibility of working more hours on short notice, caused internal competition between employees over work hours. By contrast, in the non-perishable goods chain the situation instead resulted in competition for freedom from additional work created by the need to cover for one another when the staff optimisation programme brought the staff to a minimum level.

Competition at Grocery

In the grocery chain, the decrease in the contracted hours created a constant battle for extra hours among the workers:

I think it has got worse than it used to be because, back then, those who wanted hours got them. I mean you almost got an unlimited amount. But that is not the case today. Today you have to fight; everyone has to fight to be able to get what they want. And it is very rare that you get it. (Fiona, worker)

While there was a tendency for managers to downplay the scope and negative implications for workers of part-time contracts, a regional manager acknowledged that making it work could be a struggle for some workers:

Today those who have worked for a long time more or less have full-time, give or take some hours, but there are still those with 20 hours in their contract, and that is tough, I mean that is a battle to manage to get additional hours and such things. (Will, regional manager)

The increased competition affected the relationships between workers in negative ways, causing friction between colleagues and organising them along various lines. The competition played out geographically between workers belonging to stores on the same seniority list, between extra workers with very few hours in their contracts and workers for whom the hours constituted their main source of income and who generally had at least half-time in their contracts, and between temporary and permanent workers. While the general idea expressed by both the management and the union was to give workers with contracts first claim on extra hours, fluctuations in customer volumes often made this principle non-viable. Contracted workers argued that the management preferred to call in workers without contracted hours as they were seen as more ‘flexible’ for short-notice work:

Before, it wasn’t so hard to get hours when you wanted them, and now it is tightened all the time and there aren’t any, there really aren’t any. But still you notice that people are slipped in anyway. So, I mean I am one of those who would want some more hours. We don’t get hours because they say that there are no hours, but there are still hours given to these extra workers, they are like called in the same day, if you know what I mean. (Fiona, worker)

The workers without contracted hours were often young people without families, children, or even rent to pay, which may explain the assumed perception of these workers as more flexible and less demanding. When it came to geographically based tensions, the shared seniority list brought about a specific element of competition, as workers wanting additional work hours were regularly shifted across stores within the same chain to accommodate the need for extra staff at other locations:

If we’re struggling in a store with revenue and we see that we have an excessive number of hours, we’ve also gone in and moved between stores, so that other surrounding stores get to help out instead of someone who is asking for more hours. (Will, regional manager)

The mobility across stores had negative effects on staff relationships as workers doing extra hours in stores other than their regular ones were seen as ‘intruders’ taking the opportunities for extra work hours in those stores. This was one of the types of competition that was described by interviewees at Grocery who had undergone schedule and employment contract flexibilisation.

Competition at Hobby

The shaving off of hours for several hundred workers in this chain led to negotiations with the union, who wanted the seniority principle to decide who should lose the most hours. During the negotiations between management and the union, in some stores there were exceptions made so that people who had been employed for shorter periods of time than their colleagues could still get a near full-time contract (due to management requests for certain skills and competence). Occasional related conflicts between workers were present in these stores. Yet even where the changes in contracts were distributed evenly, which was the case in most stores in this chain, sometimes those who had been employed longer felt that it was unfair that they were given no advantage:

Many have thought that it has been unfair, I have been employed for such a long time in the company and John who just started and has only been here a year, shouldn’t I have some advantage from having been employed for so long? (Caroline, HR)

An example was given of a manager favouring one employee over another in offering a schedule with less inconvenient hours. However, this was accepted by the disadvantaged colleague, due to the favoured employee’s personal situation of being a single part-time parent:

She would probably like to work more in the mornings, I think she would. … But she also understands that I have my son and sometimes we swap, in order to well, cooperate a little too. (Moira, worker)

In other words, expressions of competition for more hours between employees in the stores at Hobby were missing in the interviewees’ stories. At Hobby, the competition was about getting the best schedule with not too many inconvenient or unpredictable hours. However, cooperation and cohesion between the employees was the most common solution to handling the new schedules, which created a situation of co-dependency, that will be discussed more below.

Co-dependency and loss of cohesion

The flexibilisation of work increased cohesion and even co-dependency in one of the two cases. In the Hobby case, the loyalty to and co-dependency between colleagues prevented workers from turning down requests to work extra hours (i.e. cover for a colleague to allow him/her time off). This was a contrast to the Grocery case, where the moving around and sheer number of colleagues with a low level of hours in their contracts made this kind of cohesion difficult.

Loss of cohesion at Grocery

Several interviewed workers and store managers in the grocery chain depicted their workplace before the reorganising as characterised by a sense of community and belongingness. Many of the workers had worked together for a long time and knew each other well. The camaraderie within the work group was put forward as an important reason for liking their job: ‘Yes, we were like one big wonderful family’ (Liza, store manager).

This depiction of community in the past was contrasted by several workers and store managers with the present situation, where reorganising and staffing arrangements brought about by economic cuts were said to have resulted in the loss of cohesion and unity. Having their work groups divided and scattered across a number of stores was described by some store managers and workers as a source of grief:

The worst thing perhaps for this group was to not get to continue to work together, that they came alone to a new work [placement] without the security they had with each other and they had worked together for a long time before. I guess that was the worst thing, that they had to be divided. (Suzie, store manager)

Colleagues and managers are not always interchangeable and the importance of collegial relationships made moving from one store to another difficult; it takes time to build a sense of being part of a work group:

It was hard on everyone, I mean changing workplace entails dividing the group of colleagues up and we, well, every manager is different, and so are co-workers. (Liza, store manager)

The closure of a store sometimes meant that workers were transferred and repositioned several times, either because the first placement was temporary or because of workplace conflicts that arose when workers were moved to other stores. One store manager called this procedure ‘waltzing around, back and forth’ (Liza). Conflict arose since the moved workers were seen as competitors for work hours by the incumbent workers, or met with hostility as they, due to the seniority principle, were perceived by incumbent workers as taking a cherished colleague’s place.

Cohesion and co-dependency at Hobby

Following the changes in contracts and scheduling, the workers at Hobby, in contrast to the employees at Grocery, experienced an increase in the cohesion and dependency between workers. The employees with part-time contracts were expected to work more during high season, but get by during low season with their baseline contract:

Ordinary employees that want to increase their hours are allowed this [during high season]. … On average we have 4–5 employees per store. … We cut (‘shave’) back the contracts in the base-weeks for the employees, in order to be able to raise it back up during the high season. (Caroline, HR)

In addition to this kind of voluntary variation of working time, many workers had contracts that allowed the employer to adjust their weekly number of hours to match short-term fluctuations in customer demand.

The employees were described as specialised in the knowledge needed for this type of store, which was also the reason why they stayed with the company since it is difficult to make use of this competence in other jobs. The cutback in hours, combined with the need for specialised employees also made the company and managers more dependent on them:

Before, if someone got ill for two days we reasoned ‘Yes, let’s suck it up and just get on with it.’ We didn’t have to replace them. But now it’s so tight that we have to replace them. … Sure, we are more flexible, but also more vulnerable. (Tim, regional manager)

Thus, irregular hours and changes in schedules were an expected part of everyday life for these workers. Management reported that the employees were loyal and helped to make the schedules work when extra hands were needed due to fluctuations in sales:

But there is an incredible, gee now I can’t find the word for it, loyalty. The union rep said in a negotiation, he said that you have ‘disgustingly loyal employees’. (Gary, store manager)

The workers’ need for additional hours or less irregular hours also created a situation where workers could not turn down a request to work extra hours out of loyalty to their colleagues and manager. Since the reduction of workers ‘on the list’ made it difficult to schedule holidays, the workers had to contribute and work long hours in order for all to get a few weeks’ vacation during the summer months.

A deputy manager described that workers during the summer holiday season were expected to work more than full-time, six days a week (the stores were closed on Sundays during the summer season), to earn their own vacation weeks:

If you have the privilege to get maybe three weeks off then there are two weeks where you should be working. Then you’ll have to expect these weeks to be tough, you’ll have to be here 09.00–18.00 daily, plain and simple. … We take that for granted actually, and here I really speak for all of us. (Marcus, deputy store manager)

Since most workers realised that the feasibility of taking sick leave or going on vacation depended on other people covering for them, returning such favours was seen as necessary:

At the same time, they feel some pressure. Then they have to come in and work extra to cover for illnesses and vacations and so on, so if you have a 75% position and you are happy with that, you will rarely have 75% in reality, since there is some pressure from the rest that you should help out. (John, job coach)

The demand-based scheduling thus served to make workers more dependent on one another. This cooperation gave a limited control over the schedule, improving their situation at the margins. Even when there was a conflict of interest and one colleague was favoured over others, the cohesion or co-dependency in some cases caused the favoured employees to say no to their benefits out of loyalty to their colleagues. One worker talked about an occasion where the person who was offered exemption from having hours ‘shaved’ off her contract still wanted to get a new contract, just like the other colleagues, in order to avoid conflicts:

Everyone else was going to get to work 75%. … Then she said ‘I want us all to have the same time, if this is the way it’s going to be.’ … She didn’t accept the full-time position. (Ellie, worker)

At another store an older employee volunteered to decrease his hours more, as he was nearing retirement, out of sympathy for the younger workers who had lower wages.

The store managers also became more dependent on their co-workers, as they described how they had to work more overtime to compensate for the lack of contracted hours in the stores, setting administrative tasks aside: ‘I am needed in the store almost as much as the others. But I still have to try to make some time to be in the office’ (Gary, store manager). The need for coordination carried out by the (full-time) store managers was related to the irregular workweek schedules which made it difficult to know who would be working when. All of the interviewed store managers worked considerable amounts of overtime which was not compensated for:

Last year I had between 80 and 100 hours scheduled overtime, plus perhaps as much on top of that without recording it anywhere. (Nick, store manager)

The cohesion in the stores can thus be explained by the employees’ increased dependency on each other. For the managers this was explained by their struggle to fill the schedules within the limits of their budgets. For the workers this came about since it was in their interest to support each other to have a schedule that they could control when it came to the number of hours and when they wanted to take a vacation or time off.

Communicating and meeting

Communicating and meeting here refers to the social conditions that the workers experienced as a result of the flexibilisation changes, e.g. to what extent the workers had the opportunity to meet their colleagues and under what conditions. At Hobby, the number of workers was cut to a minimum resulting in the staff being so spread out that it impaired the opportunities for workers to see their colleagues. For the same reasons few or no meetings were held, adding to the difficulty for collective sense-making to occur. At Grocery, the opportunities for collective sense-making were impaired too but for different reasons. Here, the stores in the chain relied on having a large number of part-time workers in order to be able to cover the schedule and allow for the generous opening times. The workers were spread out in time and scheduled in a way that made it difficult to have shared meetings or share information both professionally and socially.

Communicating and meeting at Grocery

In addition to variation in working time in the form of a decrease in the number of work hours in workers’ contracts, many workers in the study had contracts that allowed the employer to adjust their weekly number of hours to match short-term fluctuations in customer demand. Three-week schedules were used within which the employer was entitled to portion out the number of hours, provided that the total number of hours was kept the same. The irregular workweek schedules along with the need for workers to supplement a loss of income with additional work hours, made it difficult for workers to know who would be working when. The opportunities for meetings or even seeing your colleagues were diminished, and added to a need for coordination carried out by the (full-time) store managers.

Several interviewees depicted the retail sector as characterised by a high level of mobility, manifested in workers on short-term contracts, sick-leave related temporary positions, and spatial mobility of workers across stores on the same seniority list. For the employer, collaboration across the spatial boundaries of stores was used as a tool in the process of creating flexibility related to the customer flows while at the same time satisfying employees’ demand for extra work hours. The need for this kind of mobility was explained by some interviewees by pointing to an overpopulation of stores in many locations. One male regional manager (Will) offered the image of ‘cannibalism’ to describe retail in Sweden: the big chains compete with their own stores by establishing new ones close to the old ones. Using another metaphor, one store manager described each store as a ‘nursery’ that allowed for mobility between stores as well as making room for new employees:

The sector is more mobile, it is as if all stores are like little nurseries where you also grow the employees. … New stores are created and they are planted out and then it is more mobile. Then you have to take in new people and grow them like in a nursery again. A whole new level of mobility is the result. (Liza, store manager)

The grocery chain was said to rely on having access to a large number of workers to enable the right amount of staffing in a sector with very long opening hours and customer flows that fluctuate considerably even within the span of a day. This made it difficult to arrange meetings and created barriers for communication between workers. This phenomenon was commented upon by one of the union representatives:

I have a shop that I visited, now it’s a year ago. They hadn’t had a staff meeting in 13 years, that’s not exactly what I call an open attitude where you get your staff involved. (Lindsey, union rep.)

Thus, in the case of Grocery the mobility and large quantities of workers, combined with competition between them, made communicating and meeting both difficult and less desired.

Communicating and meeting at Hobby

At Hobby, the new scheduling practices also minimised the opportunities for meetings and social interaction between workers. Workers described how this led to isolation from colleagues, who they now saw less often:

And then the fact that you don’t see your colleagues as much as you used to. Sometimes it can take several weeks before you see a particular person because the schedules are so different. Sometimes you feel that you are not in touch with all co-workers. (Ellie, worker)

The importance of at least minimal amounts of meetings and communication was noted by one of the regional managers, who explained why they wanted to avoid employment contracts with less than 45% of full-time:

I mean this part about information is really difficult. If you work Saturday-Sunday and then you work one afternoon maybe and then you try to come to at least one meeting a month, then it is hard to make it work. You get there and then you just go and stand at the check-out counter, and that isn’t meaningful either. (Tim, regional manager)

Communication between employees was described as particularly important in times of changes, such as the cutbacks in the contracts:

Of course, people discuss with each other, and then I’m not there all the time. But that’s the way it is, you know, you stand there talking and talking about what’s going to happen and things like that. (Ali, store manager)

The regional manager also gave an example of the importance of communication for handling workplace relationships. The regional manager and a union representative had been forced to mediate a conflict between an employee and a store manager. The employee said that the store manager had not informed the staff enough about the changes, and that the store manager had been unpleasant:

It was about not having enough time, a little bit as a consequence of these changes. ‘I have to do so much and don’t have enough time, and you don’t inform me, and you act nasty.’ And the store manager thought that the person should catch up, was snapping and, they had communication problems. (Tim, regional manager)

Communication was also described as having a functional aspect, as the transfer of information was important for colleagues to be able to do their job. One reason given by the interviewees, why communication was difficult, was the lack of face-to-face meeting time between co-workers. One worker described communicating with post-it notes and calling a colleague after her shifts to discuss mutual areas of responsibility in the store:

I mean the communication is super important, since we hardly see each other. We rarely work all three of us. [Researcher: How do you go about it?] Post-it notes! (laughing) At worst we actually call each other, in our free time too, if you feel like, damn it, I forgot to do this thing, I have to do this. (Moira, worker)

Before introducing the ‘staffing optimisation programme’, HR and the store managers conducted a risk assessment, according to which one of the risks of cutting hours in the contracts was that employees would have to work alone in the stores. Working alone was seen as a risk both in the case of robbery or theft and as a work environment issue in general. However, the perceived need to reduce labour costs was seen as taking precedence:

Then of course it gets tougher when there are fewer people. Someone is busy driving a truck on the back of the building and loading and someone might be at lunch and then someone is on their own by the checkout counter. That’s what it’s like sometimes. That you can’t get away from. (Ali, store manager)

The employees described that with the new schedules, even if no one ever worked completely alone, the minimisation of employees on certain days and at certain times led to workers being isolated from each other since the few workers were spread out in large physical spaces.

Collective voice and action

So far, we have described and treated the two cases Hobby and Grocery separately, in order to show how the new staffing practices played out in the two different contexts. Now we will turn to how the retail union tried, and often failed, to counteract these changes and the employer’s perspective in the collective sense-making process.

Inter-employee competition vs inter-employee co-dependency

Previous literature on employer-controlled flexible scheduling (Lambert, 2008; Woods, 2016) has shown how such staffing practices as keeping many employees ‘on the lists’ on contracts with few hours enforce competition between co-workers who become competitors for additional work hours. This is indeed what happened at the perishable goods chain Grocery. Here, flexible scheduling resulted in a sense of individualised responsibility for working time through having to either hunt for or fend against extra (un)wanted work hours. The relationships between workers were strained by competition for extra hours, or the opposite, for ‘good’ regular schedules with few irregular hours.

Interestingly however, as our case study of the discretionary store chain, Hobby, shows, here another mechanism was found to be at play which was rather the opposite to enforced competition. As the staffing strategy in this chain was to keep the number of employees on the lists low, in order to try to ensure each employee as many hours as possible at the same time as reducing labour costs by ‘spreading employees thin’, this introduced a sort of ‘enforced co-dependency’ amongst employees – both between co-workers and between co-workers and store managers. This finding shows that flexible scheduling does not necessarily lead to inter-employee competition, as long as the management strategy is to avoid keeping many employees on the lists but instead aim to ensure the individual worker as many hours as this ‘slim scheduling’ permits.

The Hobby case shows that there is indeed some leeway when it comes to managerial strategy in terms of how one goes about reducing labour costs and implementing flexible scheduling, which in turn has consequences for the workers (Henly and Lambert, 2014). However, even though the enforced co-dependency experienced by the workers at Hobby arguably seems to be the lesser evil in terms of the workers’ wellbeing compared to the forced inter-employee competition experienced at Grocery, Hobby workers still experienced problems due to the vulnerability of operations this strategy created. What one manager denoted as the ‘disgusting loyalty’ shown by the Hobby employees should, at least in part, be seen as a survival technique. Workers knew that they had to be willing to cover for each other.

However, it should be noted that in the Hobby case, also the nature of the goods sold played a role. Since discretionary goods, such as specialised hobby equipment, are often argued to demand a higher skill level among the staff than in other (non-discretionary) retail sectors (Giaccone and Di Nunzio, 2012), an underlying assumption amongst both staff and management representatives was that good discretionary store staff were more difficult to find and replace than other (non-discretionary) store staff. This also had an impact on top management’s choice to keep staff numbers relatively low.

Interestingly, even though our study of Hobby and Grocery showed quite opposite results in terms of competition and co-dependency amongst the workers, there was one aspect in which the cases were indeed similar: the relationship between co-workers and managers, and the consequences of flexibilisation on the role of store managers. At both store chains, in place of both formal and ad hoc meetings during work hours, most of the communication and coordination of work had to go through the store manager, who was given a more important role in the internal communication, e.g. in passing information on from one work shift to the next. In this aspect, the present study adds to the growing number of recent studies of temporally flexible labour that show how the core–periphery model/flexible firm model (Cappelli and Neumark, 2004; Wood, 2016) is becoming outdated as temporal flexibility is increasingly making almost all workers ‘peripheral’. Just as other studies have shown (Lambert, 2008; Lambert et al., 2012; Wood, 2016), our study illustrates how only the managers are left constituting the ‘core’ of a store, indicating that these individuals become even more important for the functioning of the firm. This would help to explain the changes in Swedish retail employment statistics, where managers and administrators comprise the only employee group that has had an increase in full-time contracts in Swedish retail (Berggren and Carlén, 2016).

Alone (together) at work

Our study illustrates what a budding stream of literature on the consequences of flexibilisation shows: the phenomenon of workers being alone at work, even when they are at their work site (as compared to telework or in-the-home work). As previously discussed, isolation occurs when a person’s need of social and emotional aspects of interaction are denied (Golden et al., 2008). Instead of community and workplace interaction with colleagues as well as customers (as flexibilisation reduces time for ‘sales-interactions’ with customers), the workers become individualised as they to a large degree lose their sense of social identity (Sennett, 1999). This study hence demonstrates similar findings as previous studies (e.g. Lambert, 2008; Martens et al., 1999; Wood, 2016) showing how flexible scheduling severely decreases job quality. However, our findings add to these and other related studies by suggesting that the decreased job quality is not only due to the irregularity and unpredictability that flexible scheduling imposes on the workers’ time, work–life balance, and financial situation. Importantly, flexible scheduling also reduces workers’ sense of belonging and community in the workplace (caused by the lack of communication and meeting each other), factors that are known to be of great importance for job satisfaction (Porter et al., 1974; Spector, 1997).

At the same time, the case study of Hobby reveals an interesting isolation paradox: as flexibilisation makes workers see less of each other, they are simultaneously made more dependent on each other, as we discussed above. As the reduced staffing levels made workers co-dependent, it creates through necessity a social bond between co-workers who seldom have time to communicate in person. Indeed, the workers at Hobby are forced to depend on the kindness of (at least semi-) strangers in order to have a decent working life. This isolation, both physical and psychological, also adds additional barriers to collective voice and action described in previous studies of workers at the lower end of the labour hierarchy (Carré and Tilly, 2008; Coulter, 2013; Hyman et al., 2005).

Barriers to collective voice and action

As the lack of face-to-face interaction reduced workers’ possibilities for spontaneous chats and interaction, something that has been described as vital for the quality of both communication and sense-making (Siha and Monroe, 2006), both physical and psychological isolation amongst the retail workers became evident. In the Grocery case, the imposed inter-employee competition and the ‘moving around’ of workers added to these experiences. For researchers interested in union work and collective voice, it is vital to understand how workers’ sense of community and social identification can decline, and what factors may contribute to it (Alberti, 2016). Our study points to flexibilisation, and flexible scheduling in particular, as an important cause of the decline of community and identification with the collective, something which was especially prominent in the Grocery case. What we find in this study echoes what labour sociologist Standing (2011: 53) describes as precaritisation at a macro level, a process partly driven by labour flexibility, with isolated employees being the consequence:

This is precaritisation, isolating employees and limiting their space and opportunity for collective action. … The psychological effect is of interest, since the increased instrumentality of the workplace will reduce a sense of attachment both to the firm or organisation and to the workforce as an entity to be defended.

Hence, a ‘sense of attachment’ is an important prerequisite for collective voice and collective action. However, even though our findings at Grocery show that employees’ sense of unity and cohesion had been reduced during the process of flexibilisation, the Hobby case could possibly point in a different direction. Here, the fact that employees became co-dependent heightened their sense of attachment within the employee group, which led to the formation of a strong collective identity – something that in turn could be a source for collective voice and action. However, this was not something we could observe during the course of this study.

Additionally, this study shows how flexibilisation and the practice of ‘shaving’ amplifies an already ongoing trend in the service and retail industries, in which this type of work is becoming ‘stepping stone’ work that individuals do on their way to (hopefully) more permanent work in other industries (Berggren and Carlén, 2016). As the literature on retail work shows how this is the case especially in non-discretionary retail work, this development was indeed most evident in our Grocery case. The transformation of retail workers into a workforce of mostly young people ‘in transit’, on their way to something better and who do not identify with the role of ‘retail worker’, is a contributing factor to the difficulties of the retail unions to oppose worsened working conditions. This, added to the retail union’s previous failures to combat ‘shaving’ and other harmful changes, contributed to the defeatist attitude shown by most retail workers, as well as indeed many of the union representatives in our study.

Taken together, this study’s findings do not paint an optimistic picture for the potential of Swedish retail workers and their union to maintain and build further collective voice and action, unless the worker collective finds new and other spaces for voice and action. Previous studies have shown how peripheral and contingent workers are less likely to be union members (Atkinson and Gregory, 1986; Christopherson and Storper, 1989). Our contribution to this previous research on unionisation processes regards the formation of a collective identity of workers as a prerequisite for collective voice (Kelly, 2012) – a process that seemed to be reversed in our retail cases. This aspect, paired with the trend of the majority of workers becoming ‘peripheral’ workers, as discussed previously, could create further impediments to workers’ engaging in collective action and union work.