Collective Bargaining in Estonia During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The goal of this report should be assessing the changes in collective agreements’ content, comparing the same CBA signed before and after the pandemic. However, in the case of Baltic countries, it was not possible to collect enough agreements to make a comparison of the clauses included in official texts signed before the explosion of the pandemic and renewed after. Nevertheless, 19 Estonian agreements signed after the explosion of the pandemic have been collected and analysed by native speakers following the annotation scheme illustrated in Ceccon and Medas (2022). Given the scarce availability of agreements, most of the selection was made from company level agreements. Indeed, the selection of Estonian CBAs has been strongly limited by lack of publicly available documents. CBAs used for the current analysis have been gathered through direct contact with employers of Estonian companies.