Negotiating insecurity? : a comparative study of collective bargaining in retail food in Canada, Germany, Sweden and the United States
Risk refers to the economic uncertainties encountered by workers. These include how forms of wage instability, scheduling uncertainty, and the erosion of traditional employee benefit structures are negatively affecting their material welfare and ability to plan for the future.  This thesis speaks to scholarly debates on the nature and causes of worker risk. It does so by exploring the evolution of risks in unionised workplaces. This is achieved in two ways. First, the study seeks to provide insights on the nature of risk trends in unionised settings over time. Second, it explores the impacts of actor strategies (unions, employers, states) on risk outcomes in collective bargaining across different organisational and institutional settings.  This thesis develops a novel theoretical framework for understanding risk, incorporating three dimensions (generosity, individualisation, and segmentation). Each dimension adds value to the exploration of risks over time in the organisations under investigation. Different literatures are also mobilised to examine how, in different contexts (organisational and institutional) and with different actors and their attributes (power), actor strategies shape outcomes across these three dimensions.  Contextualised case-studies were conducted for this study. This thesis investigates experiences in retail food – a sector and industry typically associated with work practices that drive economic insecurity. The research design entails a longitudinal (1980-2016) comparison of eight supermarket chains (cases) in two liberal market economics (Canada and the United States) and two coordinated market economies (Germany and Sweden).  The thesis is structured in three overview chapters (research question, theoretical approaches, operationalisation), three separate articles presenting different aspects of the research findings, and an analytical overview chapter discussing key results in the context of the broader literature and with regard to their implications.  Several contributions stem from these findings. First, this thesis demonstrates how risks have not only increased across the chains, but that these increases differ in their form and intensity across three dimensions. These differences have implications for how we measure risks and explain their trajectories. Second, this thesis finds that actor strategies matter to risk, yet that their outcomes can only be understood in relation to contextual variables. It also points to the importance of union power to the effectiveness of these strategies in mitigating the risks experienced by workers in these different organisational and institutional contexts.
Risk Collective bargaining Retail Comparative employment relations Precarious work