The impact of Covid-19 on industrial relations - Fourth quarterly report: preliminary results

Abstract

In this report, we present preliminary results of data mining and text analysis of the newsletter outputs published by the selected stakeholders at the EU level. The goal of these quarterly reports is to address the first research question of the BARCOVID project: “How have the Covid-19 crisis, the state-imposed measures and their consequences affected the industrial relations landscape in EU27 and 5 candidate countries?” To respond to this question, text data (text extractions) were collected from social partners’ press releases and newsletters at the EU level and then further analysed. In total, 1,428 texts were extracted from the newsletters of organizations, particularly Wageindicator (20%), ETUI (12%), BusinessEurope (10%), UniEurope (5%), country-level newsletters letters (40%), and others (12%), between March 2020 and March 2022 based on the selected list of keywords (in Annex).

As already explained in the First Quarterly Report, the methodology mainly consists of the text mining techniques (using Python), supported by qualitative and quantitative text analysis of the newsletter outputs. While looking at the most frequent topics and policies allows us to identify which have been the most relevant measures discussed in the public discourse among the social partners. The analysis presented in this report consists of a (1) descriptive quantitative analysis of the whole sample (1,428 text extractions) and a (2) qualitative and quantitative data analysis based on the welfare states typology (1,047 text extractions). 

The countries in the sample were categorised according to the welfare regimes classification (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Ferrera, 1996,; Adascalitei, 2012) as follows: Conservative regimes (Austria, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands),
Liberal regimes (Ireland and United Kingdom), Mediterranean countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus), Social Democratic Regimes (Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Iceland) and Central and Eastern Europe (Czechia, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia).