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

Abstract

This report presents preliminary results of data mining analysis on the most frequent themes contained in the newsletter outputs published by the selected stakeholders at the EU-level. It aims 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 provide the answers, text data was collected from social partners’ press releases and newsletters at the EU level and further analyzed. In total, 688 texts were extracted from the newsletters of organizations such as WageIndicator, ETUI, Business Europe, EPSU, ETUCE and IndustriALL between March 2020 and November 2021 based on the selected list of keywords (see Annex). The ID of the item, name of the country, date and the source were assigned to each item. At this stage, descriptive analysis was conducted to illustrate the very first insights regarding the most frequent topics discussed in the newsletters during the pandemic, particularly for what concerns industrial relations. As already explained in the First Quarterly Report, the methodology mainly consists of text mining techniques (using Python), supported by qualitative and quantitative text analysis of the newsletter outputs.