Collective Bargaining in Spain During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This report presents the main results of the comparative analysis of Spanish collective agreements, looking at pair of official documents signed before and after the explosion of the Covid-19 pandemic. The main research question behind this study is  nderstanding how and to which extent the pandemic has affected the content of bargaining, through the introduction of new topics, the strengthening or rather the weakening of some provisions. To develop such challenging type of analysis, it was possible to rely on extremely rich data, both qualitative and quantitative, that result to be easily comparable across countries and sectors despite the original source (the CBA) is country specific. Information from collective agreements is systematized and converted into comparable data through a complex process of annotation, based on a coding scheme that contains more than 800 variables spanning from job contract to wages and gender equality issues. Each CBA is annotated by professionals, usually native speaker of the country under analysis.