Collective Bargaining in the Netherlands: Agreements Across Four Key Sectors

Abstract

Considering the figures on collective bargaining with regard to the number of collective (labour or bargaining) agreements (CBA), the ratio between sectoral collective agreements and company collective agreements and the degree of coverage of collective agreements, the collective bargaining in the Netherlands can be called peaceful. The Netherlands has about 700 regular collective agreements, of which just over 500 are company collective agreements and just under 200 are sector collective agreements. 1 Of the 5.5 million employees covered by a collective agreement, over 5 million are covered by a sectoral collective agreement and 500 thousand by a company collective agreement. Although the number of company CBAs is larger than the number of sector CBAs, the importance of the company CBA for Dutch industrial relations is less due to the fact that the number of employees covered by a sector CBA is almost eleven times larger. This is one of the reasons why it was decided to encode relatively more sector CBAs. Moreover, sectoral agreements in the Netherlands are more easily accessible to third parties than company agreements. Mainly because of competition considerations, few company collective agreements are freely accessible to third parties. Because of the corona pandemic, fewer collective labour agreements were concluded in 2020 than in previous years, but there are no indications that this trend will continue once the pandemic has ended.

In this report, the results of 100 coded collective agreements have been processed. The coding was done on the basis of 12 themes. These are: general data, coverage ratio, job titles, pension and social security, employment contracts, sickness and disability, health and medical assistance, work/family balance arrangements, gender equality, wages and working times.