Collective Agreements in Europe Before and After COVID-19: Comparative Report

Abstract

One of the main goals of the European BARCOVID project is to assess whether the “bargaining agenda”, namely the content of collective agreements, has been affected by the pandemic, at a which extent and on which specific topics. Thanks to the collection of national collective agreements and considering the institutional specificities of each country under analysis, several national reports have been published with a focus on Austria, France, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Turkey, Estonia and East European countries. All country reports have shown patterns of stability in CBAs with respect to the main provisions of collective bargaining, reporting nevertheless some relevant changes on the number of clauses devoted to structural wage increase, flexible work arrangements, health provisions, and gender equality.

However, advancing any generalization from these findings might be risky given the limits of the data under analysis. National databases on collective agreements, as provided by WageIndicator, despite being a unique and original source of information on industrial relations at national, sectoral and firm level, do not cover a sufficient spectrum of CBAs to be considered statistically representative. Moreover, the identification and collection strategy of agreements often could not follow a specific sampling strategy, given the scarce availability of official documents, the different models of collection and storage, and the necessity to resort to those sources more easily available. What is more, the findings presented in the reports are mainly descriptive, leaving aside clear-cut interpretations on the relation between the observed changes and the explosion of the pandemic. Indeed, this type of analysis would need further investigation through a more in-depth qualitative analysis of the texts and direct interviews with social actors.

The report presented here summarizes the main results of the comparative analysis on national collective agreements expired before the explosion of the pandemic and renewed during the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on three countries: Austria, Italy and the Netherlands. For each of these countries was indeed possible to retrieve a sufficiently high number of CBAs. Moreover, data presented here can be easily enriched by the analysis provided in Jansen et al. (2023), where the main results of the BARCOVID Negotiator Survey are presented with respect to the same set of countries.