Covid-19 impact on industrial relations: Final Report

Abstract

The explosion of the global pandemic in March 2020 has represented an exogenous shock to societies, production, world of commerce and politics. A massive new plan of investment and public funding to ensure the recovery and resilience of national economies (NextGenerationEU) has been adopted by the EU Commission, suggesting a potential rupture with previous mantra of austerity and fiscal consolidation. At the same time, unprecedented measures such of school closures, mobility restriction and suspension of activities have been introduced to face the most critical phases of virus diffusion. In this context, workers were called to engage in responsible actions, both keeping working if performing essential jobs, or staying at home and taking care of elderly and children.

Following up on the results of the quarterly reports (see References), this report not only summarises the final results but also presents new results of the network and text analysis using the data of newsletters published by the selected stakeholders at the EU and national level. The goal of these quarterly reports is 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 be more particular, we aspire to address to following sub-questions: How national social actors have reacted faced with such a shock? Which type of social discourse was developed during the pandemic and how did they address themselves to their constituencies? Answering these questions is far from being obvious, both because of the complexity of the topics under analysis and because of the relatively scarce attention devoted to the dimension of narrative and ideational power resources of social actors.

To respond to the research questions, text data (text extractions) were collected from social partners’ press releases and newsletters at the EU and national level and then further analysed. In total, 2,084 texts were extracted from the newsletters of organizations, particularly WageIndicator2(15%), ETUI (12%), BusinessEurope (10%), UniEurope (8%), country-level newsletters letters (40%), and others (12%), between March 2020 and March 2022 based on the selected list of keywords (see Annex). As already explained in the First Quarterly Report, the methodology consists of the text mining techniques (using Python), supported by qualitative and quantitative text analysis of the newsletter outputs.