Collective Bargaining in Italy During COVID-19: Evidence from the CBA Database

Abstract

The database of Italian national sectoral collective agreements built to perform the analysis presented in this report is based on 34 expired agreements and their successive renewal signed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Official texts were collected exploiting the national archive of sectoral collective agreements together with the updated list of metadata made publicly available by CNEL. The goal of collecting and annotating national collective agreements signed by social actors in the last two years turned to be more difficult than expected for two main reasons. First, because of the relatively long span of time that can pass from the signature of the renewed text and the time when the new and official document is released. In some cases, in fact, it was not possible to retrieve the official document, since only the hypothesis of agreement renewal (“Ipotesi di accordo”) was available. Moreover, in some cases even the expired agreement was still available in its “draft” version so that a backward strategy based on the collection and analysis of previous agreements was required to get a comprehensive and more adequate picture of all the clauses and changes contained in the new agreements.