Aware of the harmful effects of traditional strategies to exclude older workers, public authorities are now promoting their retention in employment. In order to understand how and under what conditions this policy objective is or is not translated into concrete practices in the workplace, the article presents an analytical grid, inspired by societal analysis, for understanding the attitudes of companies and workers towards the retention of seniors in employment. The article then tests this grid by studying the practices of two retail companies, one in France and the other in Quebec, around four areas of interpretation: institutional, social dialogue, market and organization.

Our study reveals that French legislation, which forces companies with more than 50 employees to negotiate senior agreements, has generated fewer concrete practices for keeping seniors in work than Quebec’s incentives for cumulative employment and retirement. Societal analysis makes it possible to interpret this result based on the strong interactions between the different levels and spaces studied in each country. Thus, Quebec’s apparent «success» is based, above all, on the difficulty for employees with low wage levels to access sufficient retirement income, in the absence of an employer pension plan (institutional space), and on the accommodation efforts made or even sought by some employers facing labour shortages (market space). Conversely, the apparent «failure» of France can be explained by the need to sign an agreement quickly, which has generally led to a preference for compliance rather than adapting actions to the realities on the ground (institutional space), the presence of trade unions in stores being too low to raise expectations on the ground (social dialogue space), the economic difficulties faced by the brand (market space) and the preference of employees for the fastest possible retirement due to professional fatigue (organizational space) and a relatively high level of retirement income (institutional space).

Keywords: societal analysis, seniors, employment, retail trade, France, Québec.