8th Regulating for Decent Work (RDW) Conference - International Labour Organisation (ILO) - July 10-12, 2023 - WageIndicator.org

The 8th Regulating for Decent Work (RDW) Conference: "Ensuring decent work in times of uncertainty", organised by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) from 10-12 of July 2023. Many researchers and associates of WageIndicator will present papers, and WageIndicator host a session on WageIndicator's Collective Agreement Database. The event takes place in Geneva.

the 8th Regulating for Decent Work (RDW) Conference

International Labour Organisation's office in Geneva - 10 to 12 July 2023

During the 8th Regulating for Decent Work (RDW) Conference organised by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), many researchers and associates of WageIndicator will present papers, and will host a session on WageIndicator's Collective Agreement Database. The event takes place in Geneva from Monday 10th of July to Wednesday 12th of July 2023. The Conference will be co-hosted by the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Labour Studies / Hugo Sinzheimer Institut für Arbeits- und Sozialrecht (AIAS-HSI), the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Employment and Labour Relations Law (CELRL), Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies (CISLS), the University of Durham’s Decent Work Regulation Project, the Cornell University’s ILR School, the University of Duisburg-Essen’s Institut Arbeit und Qualifikation (IAQ), the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA), the Korea Labor Institute (KLI), and the University of Manchester’s Work and Equalities Institute (WEI).

Ensuring decent work in times of uncertainty

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 unleashed a crisis of great magnitude, exposing the fragility of socio-economic systems globally and underlining the vulnerabilities faced by people, especially in the world of work. Inequalities between and within countries became starker. In developing countries in particular, the pandemic revealed the extreme economic insecurity and vulnerability of workers in the informal economy. As the pandemic subsided, and while the labour market impacts – ranging from lost labour incomes to persistent gender gaps and limited access to social protection – were still being felt by many, the global economy and people’s lives were hit further by cascading crises. The climate crisis, conflicts, disruptions to global supply chains, among others, have led to rising inflationary pressures, further heightening the uncertainty in the labour markets.

The interlinked crises can threaten the development of the world’s most vulnerable and marginalized populations, including the well-being of those in high-income countries, where the cost-of-living crisis has been unfolding with ever greater ferocity. Not only do these crises undermine efforts to ensure decent work for all but could also hamper efforts to make labour markets more inclusive and resilient and risk further increasing inequalities between and within countries. In developing countries in particular, with large social protection deficits, overcoming these crises has been quite challenging as macroeconomic policies are severely restrained owing to lack of fiscal space and financial constraint. Challenges in global value chains have further heightened uncertainty with many small firms in both advanced and developing countries facing issues ranging from the cancellation of contracts to changes in payment terms, which have had major implications on workers as well as significant knock-on effects on prices. The multitude of these challenges has led many policymakers and researchers to explore the development of alternative policies and approaches to address the crises in advanced and developing countries alike. The crises are impacting workers’ well-being in a complex manner. The climate crisis – heat waves and floods – is already having profound impacts on the lives and livelihoods of people, and these impacts are being felt even more acutely in developing countries.

The RDW conference in 2023 will explore the implications of today’s multiple and interlinked crises on the world of work. There have been growing calls for a just transition towards environmentally sustainable economies and societies for all, which provides an opportunity to create decent jobs, address prevailing inequalities, strengthen social protection systems, enhance inclusion, and promote transition from a high- carbon economy. The conference will focus on what transformative policies and innovative institutions are required to tackle the labour and social consequences of the multiple crises in the world, and to ensure a more equitable and just society. Papers are invited to present research results and to propose new ideas and policies with a focus on:

Track I. Pro-employment macroeconomic policies in times of crisis and transition
Track II. Trade and global value chains in times of crisis: implications for decent work
Track III. The role of institutions in ensuring decent work and universal social protection
Track IV. Regulatory innovation in an era of crises

View the overall agenda of the RDW Conference:

Agenda of session organised by WageIndicator - 90min

10 July 2023 from 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm CEST

MINUTES	Wages & Working Conditions
90 Minutes	Chair: Kea Tijdens

11 July 2023 from 9:00 am - 10:30 am CEST

MINUTES

Labour Rights: Assessing Effectiveness and Performance

90 Minutes

Iftikhar Ahmad(1), Fiona Dragstra(2), Daniela Ceccon(2)

(1)Centre for Labour Research, WageIndicator Labour Law Office, Pakistan; (2)WageIndicator Foundation, the Netherlands

The current paper introduces the Labour Rights Index (LRI), comparing labour legislation in 135 countries. Given that labour law comparisons are rare or restricted only to employment protection legislation, working condition legislation or trade union rights legislation, LRI is the first comprehensive de-jure Index. It follows an employment life cycle approach and evaluates countries along ten indicators - fair wages, decent work hours, employment security, family responsibilities, maternity at work, safe work, social security, fair treatment, child and forced labour, and trade unions. The ten indicators and 46 sub-indicators are rooted in the ILO’s Decent Work Agenda.

The Index compares local labour legislation with international labour standards and scores a country accordingly. Based on their scores, countries are rated on a six-point scale ranging from a “Total Lack of Decent Work” to “Decent Work”. The Index analyses all labour legislation, ranging from minimum wage laws and employment protection laws to social security legislation and fundamental principles and rights at work legislation to the laws supporting work-life balance, as applicable on 1 January 2022. It uses publicly available labour legislation (on Government websites, ILO NATLEX, and WageIndicator Labour Law Database) and codes this information under a detailed yet straightforward methodology to make it comparable. The country profiles provide a full legal basis for each sub-indicator score, adding to the transparency and external validity of how each country was scored and rated. This leads to objective and replicable scoring.

Comparative work on labour regulations has been done before; however, it either covers a limited number of countries or a limited number of topics (World Bank’s Women, Business and Law Database, ITUC Global Rights Index) or is outdated (CBR-Labour Regulation Index).

With its binary scoring system, the Labour Rights Index provides a unique dataset enabling researchers, policymakers and transnational employers to track changes in labour regulations from 2020 onward for these countries. The Labour Rights Index is released biennially, and the next edition will be released in 2024, covering 140 countries.

Given that the WEF’s Global Risks Report 2023 identifies employment crises as an important risk in the short and long-term risk, comparing labour legislation globally and identifying best regulatory practices is crucial. Moreover, the Index provides a comprehensive perspective of de-jure working norms, making it a useful benchmarking tool in policy debates at the national and international levels.

11 July 2023 from 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm CEST

MINUTES	The Challenges of Understanding the Context of Collective Bargaining - combined presentations
5 minutes	Chair: Paulien Osse, WageIndicator Foundation In their renowned study, “What do unions do?” Freeman and Medoff (1984) argued that trade unions bargain for higher wages, equal pay, and fair working conditions, implying that collective bargaining is central to wage-setting processes and that wage outcomes vary according to the wage levels agreed upon in collective bargaining. Almost forty years later, however, little is known about which wages are set in collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). A few industrialized countries code the content of the CBAs, but the resulting databases are not comparable across countries. A large majority of countries does not collect the CBAs signed, let alone code their content. While information about wages and working conditions data is critical for monitoring their progress, many countries rely solely on data from labour force or enterprise surveys, on inventories of national bargaining systems or on reviews of legal regulations, but not on information about the wages agreed in CBAs. This absence of data on what exactly has been concluded in collective bargaining is most likely related to the fact that worldwide no person or institution is systematically collecting full texts of CBAs and coding their content. Our session highlights the first attempt to fill this gap, namely through the global CBA-Database maintained by WageIndicator. This database contains an increasing number of agreements from a growing number of countries, currently more than 2,000 agreements from 67 countries. Coding of CBAs is performed for twelve topics, namely Job titles, Wages, Working Hours/Schedules/Leaves, Employment Contracts, Work And Family Arrangements, Health And Safety And Medical Assistance, Sickness And Disability, Social Security And Pensions, Training, Gender Equality Issues, Coverage and General CBA data. The session covers how CBAs are collected and coded according to a predefined coding scheme, as well as how a representative sample of CBAs relative to the labour forces is composed, presents findings regarding the content of CBAs in agriculture and manufacturing in Africa, and on CBAs in the textile, garment and leather industry in Indonesia. The fourth contribution focusses on the entire dataset and highlights which gender-related clauses have been agreed. The fifth and final paper details the content of collective bargaining in Turkey.
10 minutes	Paper: Ceccon, D., & Medas, G. (2023). Explaining the Global WageIndicator Collective Agreements Database. WageIndicator Foundation, Amsterdam. Presentation
	Explaining The Global Database The CBA-Database was established in 2012 and, related to a range of projects, a growing number of CBAs has been added, of which approximately half come from European countries. Each agreement is collected, coded and analyzed according to a coding scheme with twelve macro topics with related sub-questions, resulting in around eight hundred variables. Almost all CBAs are published online in the WageIndicator national websites, all in the national language and accessible for free by all users, who can browse CBAs online, select the clauses and topics of their interest and use the CBA comparison tool, which provides a unique opportunity to closely examine the variation across agreements and countries. More than 900 CBAs of this database are used to identify what share of the workers who are earning under 105% of the statutory minimum wage (or an imputed minimum wage for countries without minimum wages) are covered by sectoral or enterprise collective bargaining in 9 European countries.
10 minutes	Paper: Besamusca, J., Guzi, M., & Tijdens, K. (2023) The interplay of statutory minimum wages and collective wage bargaining across European sectors. BARWAGE Project report 1. Amsterdam: WageIndicator Foundation. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.8314719 Presentation
	Explaining Sampling The Agreements To Be Collected And Coded.
10 minutes	Paper: Ngeh Tingum, E. (2023). Wage-setting in Collective Bargaining in Africa: Analyses using WageIndicator database. WageIndicator Foundation, Amsterdam. Presentation
	Main Topics In Collective Bargaining Agreements In Africa Are wage settings up to the negotiation process between the employers and employees or at the level of the collective agreements or wages are set by the state or in individual contracts? Do pay scales differ across sectors in Africa CBAs? The CBA-Database has 424 CBAs from 20 African countries. One-third are from manufacturing, followed by agriculture and transport. Analyses show that almost 90% have at least one clause related to wages. Exactly half of these state that wages are to be agreed in individual contracts, almost one in ten at sectoral level, one in ten at company level, three in ten unspecified. In manufacturing and education, wages are set the least in individual contracts. Only one in ten CBAs include pay scales, and these are most frequent noticed in human health and social work activities with 4 out of 5 CBAs. In manufacturing pay scales are hardly noticed with only 8 out of 108 CBAs.
10 minutes	Paper: Pralitasari, N., Feby, D,, & Hamid, L. (2023). Collective Bargaining After Labour Law Reform in Indonesia: An Analysis on the WageIndicator Collective Agreement Database. WageIndicator Foundation, Amsterdam; Gajimu.com, Jakarta. Presentation
	The Omnibus Law effects in collective bargaining agreements in the garment industry in Indonesia Late 2020, Indonesia passed the Omnibus Law–Job Creation Law No.11, followed by its derivative regulations in 2021 aiming to stimulate foreign investment and a more flexible labour market. The CBA-Database holds 239 collective agreements from Indonesia, of which 163 from textile, garment, and leather. All CBAs minus 2 are signed by a single employer or company, of which 28 are multinational enterprises. In terms of wages, structural wage increases are more often agreed in the textile, garment and leather industry than in the remaining industries (88% versus 77%). Out of those 163 CBAs, 4 companies were found with one CBA negotiated before the Omnibus Law was implemented and one after. In all four CBAs the provisions deteriorated, specifically on severance pay, while 3 out of 4 CBAs stated increasing maximum overtime hours from 14 to 18 hours/week. An improvement in wage clauses is seen in 3 CBAs that regulate pay scales for those working one year or longer.
10 minutes	Paper: Korde, R., & Gandhi, M. (2023). Female friendly clauses in collective bargaining agreements. WageIndicator Foundation, Amsterdam; FLAME University, Pune. Presentation
	Female-friendly clauses in collective bargaining agreements Women account for almost 50% of the global workforce. However, the Female Labour Force Participation varies across countries. Do countries with higher Female Labour Force Participation rates address gender equality and work/family balancing issues better through their CBAs? Or is it only the female dominated industries that have a higher percentage of female friendly clauses in their CBAs? Cross-Continental (Asia, Europe, Africa, Central and South America) analysis shows that almost eight in ten CBAs include clauses on work/family arrangements and four in ten do so on gender equality. With 30 weeks of maternity leave, CBAs in Croatia have the longest leave, whereas Mozambique has on average only 8.5 weeks. Other gender equality and work/family balancing clauses include health and safety, paternity leave, parental leave, and breastfeeding and childcare. More than 2000 agreements are analysed using 11 gender equality and 24 work/family balancing clauses to provide a comparative view of the female friendly CBAs across continents.
10 minutes	Paper: Güler, C. (2023). Understanding Collective Bargaining Agreements in Turkey. Dokuz Eylul University, Izmir. Presentation
	Understanding collective bargaining agreements in Turkey Collective bargaining in Turkey is subject to two different regimes, namely the public and private sector. Public sector CBAs are concluded at the national level to cover all sectors, especially regardıng wages and social rights. Additionally, CBAs are concluded at the national level for 11 different service branches. In the private sector, trade unions are organized at sector level and CBAs are concluded at the workplace and enterprise level. The CBA-Database has 68 CBAs for Turkey of which 25 were concluded by public servants' trade unions and 43 by the workers trade unions. It should also be noted that 13 of the relevant CBAs were concluded after the May 2020 period and are the renewed versions of the old CBAs in the CBA-Database. This situation has a very important place in terms of evaluating the reflection of the corona period on CBAs. Thus, the strengths and weaknesses of the collective bargaining system in Turkey will be made visible.
10 minutes	Discussant: Maria Sedlakova, Eurofound
15 minutes	Q&A

8th Regulating for Decent Work (RDW) Conference - International Labour Organisation (ILO) - July 10-12, 2023

the 8th Regulating for Decent Work (RDW) Conference

Ensuring decent work in times of uncertainty

Agenda of session organised by WageIndicator - 90min

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