COVID-19 and Industrial Relations: Seventh Quarterly Report

Abstract

This report adds to previous reports (see References) new results from data mining and text analysis of the newsletter outputs published by the selected stakeholders at the EU 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 respond to this question, text data (text extractions) were collected from social partners’ press releases and newsletters at the EU level and then further analysed. In total, 2, 084 texts were extracted from the newsletters of organizations, particularly WageIndicator (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.

The analysis in this report focuses on the quantitative analysis on the most frequent keywords discussed in the newsletters, distinguishing between the first and the second year of the pandemic. The analysis also proposes a comparison of the findings observed at country level, within the theoretical framework of the welfare regimes. The countries in the sample were categorised according to the welfare regimes classification (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Ferrera, 1996; Adascalitei, 2012) as follows: Conservative regimes (Austria, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands), Liberal regimes (Ireland and United Kingdom), Mediterranean countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus), Social Democratic Regimes (Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Iceland) and Central and Eastern Europe (Czechia, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia). In this report, the focus is not only on the policy measures discussed during the designated time, but also on the whole discourse emerged among social partners, including the channels of communications and the different key issues under discussion.

The main novelty of this report is the significant enlargement of the database, which has now almost doubled with respect to previous reports. To both increase the amount of data and ensure a better representativeness of the whole dataset, its new composition accounts for the relative weight of countries’ GDP and employment level over the European GPD and workforce.