Workforce Nutrition in Collective Bargaining Agreements

Abstract

Many adults spend most of their waking hours at the workplace, making the latter a strategic, yet underappreciated, environment for health and well-being interventions. Evidence shows that workforce nutrition initiatives can improve workers’ health and well-being as well as business outcomes, yet their full potential as occupational and public health interventions remain underexplored. This paper examines the extent to which collective bargaining agreements globally include clauses on workforce nutrition, operationalised as healthy food at work, breastfeeding support, nutrition-focused health checks and follow-up, and nutrition education. Using web-based and bibliographic searches, the study identified open-access global, national, and sector-specific collective bargaining agreement (CBA) repositories. It analysed 26,015 agreements from the WageIndicator CBA database (global coverage), Légifrance (France), and the Office of Personnel Management (US) databases. Explicit references to workforce nutrition were rare. The term 'nutrition' appeared in 3.88% of US agreements and 0.23% of French agreements and was not a standalone variable in the global database. Keywords for relevant contexts and arrangements, such as for meal vouchers or breaks (whether or not the consumed food was nutritious and health-promoting) or for medical care (whether or not it attended to diet-related diseases and risk factors), were captured far more frequently. Among the four workforce nutrition pillars examined, breastfeeding support received the most focused attention, though primarily in the global database. In-depth analysis of 49 agreements confirmed the quantitative findings but also provided detail of exemplar clauses of workforce nutrition. Findings suggest a substantial gap between the growing recognition of the importance of workforce nutrition and its formal inclusion in CBAs. In countries with strong access to collective bargaining, CBAs represent an underused instrument for advancing workforce nutrition and supporting broader occupational and public health objectives, highlighting opportunities to strengthen policy through greater use of collective agreements, expand programmes through coordinated action among stakeholders, and improve practice by embedding nutrition more systematically within the workplace.