Female Workforce in the Retail Sector: Welfare Policies and Collective Bargaining Perspective

Retail women's' workforce is characterized by high level of turnover rate, higher percentage of part-time contracts, low-skilled workforce and increased level of connectivity/availability due to the spread of digitalization. especially in countries – such as Italy – where public policies and welfare systems are not sufficient to let women working full-time, making women's needs to cope with work-life balances issues crucial. Collective bargaining should meet this evolution, in order to define the new tasks that are rising and to improve workers' conditions, gaining equal treatment and higher transparency vis-à-vis employers' decisions. The aim of the paper is then to disentangle whether the social actors strategically negotiate over the changes that women workforce are facing or whether the regulation of women in the GDO (Great Organized Distribution) is regulated by the state, through policies that protect their needs. Thus, the question that this paper addresses is whether women's retail workforce is regulated by social actors, looking at the content of collective agreement. The methodology utilized is the inductive content analysis of the Italian sector collective agreement, run through ad-hoc codebook. The content analysis allows to verify whether the issue of work-life balance, harassment and training are regulated through collective agreements, specifically for women during digital transition, and/or whether the state, through specific welfare policies, is sustaining women.