The Retail Industry

In Europe, the retail trade is the largest of the low-wage industries. People work here on the margins of the labour market and trade union attempts to organize workers frequently meet structural difficulties, not least because workers are largely employed in small establishments spread across wide geographical areas (cf. Dribbusch 2003). In 2010, the retail industry in the EU27 employed slightly less than 19.1 million people, of which about 15.2 million were wage earners. An estimated 3.9 million were self-employed though the numbers here were falling. For the European Union (EU) as a whole, the high point in retail employment occurred in 2008, when the workforce reached a total over 19.5 million (European Foundation 2012). The available statistics are not easy to interpret due to a break in the time series for at least two countries,1 but between 2008 and 2010 in both the 10 and the 13 EU countries under study, it seems likely that joint retail employment fell by about 2 per cent. In 2008, 11.5 million wage earners and self-employed were employed in the retail industry of the ten countries, accounting for 7.7 per cent of their workforces. In that year the share of retail (headcount) in national employment varied from lows of 6.3 per cent (Belgium) and 6.6 per cent (Finland) to 8.8 per cent (Netherlands, Poland) rising to 11.0 per cent in the United Kingdom. It should be noted that their Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) shares were one or two percentage points lower because of the large incidence of part-time workers in the industry (authors’ calculations based on Eurostat Annual enterprise statistics; Trawinska 2012). This particular incidence is one of the main characteristics of current retail employment. In a number of Western European countries (Denmark, Germany, United Kingdom) about half of the retail workforce is made up of part-timers. France with less than 30 per cent and the Netherlands with 70 per cent part-timers (Van Klaveren 2010) were at opposite ends of this particular spectrum.