ILO conclusions give retail employer groups and unions a role in stopping customer abuse

The recommendation is addressed to organisations, not to individual stores. Employers' and workers' organisations should support their members in preventing and addressing violence and harassment in retail "as appropriate to their responsibility and capacity", according to the conclusions as hcamag.com reported them ^[2]. A second passage reaches further into the company. The representatives agreed that violence, harassment and their psychosocial risks are "important considerations" for national frameworks and for OSH management in retail ^[5]. Each retailer runs its own safety management system, so this passage applies to an operator directly.

For now, a technical meeting's conclusions oblige nobody to spend anything. The recommendation says organisations "should" act ^[2], and the conclusions go to the 359th Session of the ILO Governing Body in March 2027 for consideration ^[9]. The document also spreads responsibility widely. Preventing violence and harassment "requires appropriate action by relevant actors within their respective responsibilities," it reads ^[8].

The document also lists the exposures. "Customer interactions, retail crime, lone, or late-night work, cash handling, delivery and online communications may expose workers to harm," it reads ^[6]. Several of those are choices a retailer makes about its own stores, and it can assess them this quarter without any decision from Geneva: how many staff close at night, whether tills take cash, who does deliveries.

The text treats technology as both a safeguard and a source of risk. It can support prevention, emergency response and reporting, the conclusions say, but it can also cause or enable new kinds of violence, harassment or other OSH risks, and those will need safeguards ^[7].

The incident data published alongside the conclusions measure different things. Retailers using the Auror crime reporting platform in Australia recorded a 66% year-on-year rise in retail crime involving weapons in 2024 ^[10]. Retail NZ counted 140,746 incidents of retail crime or anti-social behaviour in 2023-24, and 99% of respondents, representing more than 1,500 stores, reported at least some ^[11]. Spread across 1,500 stores, that is about 94 incidents each, and fewer if the true store count is higher ^[16]. Singapore's police recorded 2,095 shop theft cases in the first half of 2026 against 2,050 a year earlier ^[12], an increase of 45 ^[15]. Those are theft figures. In the United States, the National Retail Federation said retailers report "increasing frequency" of guest-related violence and homelessness-related incidents ^[14]. The figures do not include a rate of harm per worker or a cost of prevention.

The evidence supports planning by operators more than budgeting. I'd expect the first practical effect to come through employer associations, since the recommendation addresses them ^[2]. The decision for this quarter is whether third-party violence goes into the store risk assessment next to lone and late-night work. The bigger one comes next year. Once the risk is assessed, a finding against single-staffed night shifts becomes a staffing cost the operator has written down and chosen to carry.