EU CBA Database Feasibility: Gender Equality Clauses in Collective Agreements

Abstract

In this report, we explore the feasibility of a European database of working conditions clauses in collective agreements in EU countries. Our proposal builds on the methodology developed by the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the WageIndicator Foundation to build an international database of collective agreements and in the BARCOM (VS/2016/0106) and COLBAR Europe (VS/2019/0077) projects to collect and code European collective agreements. It also builds on the CNAM-CEET CAGE project which has developed a research infrastructure in France to study the outcomes of negotiations on gender professional equality and employer behaviour. The idea is to combine structured information from an employer-level survey with coded information from a database of collective agreements and unstructured data from an archive recording the full content of the OCR processed texts of collective agreements. Such an infrastructure would allow better analysis of the bargaining process, bargaining outcomes and employer behaviour. Using the example of gender equality clauses, we demonstrate the feasibility of building such an infrastructure and the added value of using coded information and text mining methods for comparative analysis. Two European surveys, the ECS and ESES, can be combined with the database of collective agreements at individual and/or sectoral level. We explore how collective agreements at sector and company level should be collected to achieve some form of representativity.