Working conditions, everyday life and health of shopping center's workers

Abstract

The partial, temporary, precarious, sub-contracted jobs characterize the work relationships found in tourist cities. With the objective of characterizing some aspects of the workers’ condition, life, health and work and characterizing their behavior in their work places, the research studied 20 retail store salespeople from a shopping mall in a tourist city during the low season. From these 20 people, 8 were observed directly in the same place during the same period of time. It was noticed that most of them were women, with an average of 26 years old., with a participation of more than in the family income, low level salary, they had little stability, they felt satisfied with their work; they had good health conditions. The information obtained on the salespeolple’s behavior in their work places, when there’s clients’absence, revealed that the categories that presented more occurrences were the ones about amusement (46%), of waiting (44%) and of locomotion (43%); the behavior related to arrange the store had less occurrences (15%). When it comes to the salespeople’s behavior in relation to the costumers, the categories that appeared most were the ready service (28%) and during the service to the costumer, the ones that appeared most were the selling (19%) and the interaction with the costumer (11%). It comes to the conclusion that those employees seem to have good life conditions and health. However, in their jobs they have low salary level and little stability in their jobs. The information of the worker’s behavior in their local work indicate that they don’t have to replace activities for sales in the low season.