Wages in CBAs in 10 European countries: provisions on minimum wages and pay scales

Abstract

BARWAGE investigates the potential of collective bargaining as a tool for ensuring adequate minimum wages in the European Union. It explores the size of four wage-setting arenas across EU countries and industries: the national or peak level, sector-level collective bargaining, firm-level collective bargaining, and individual (non-collective) negotiations. BARWAGE uses microdata to identify what share of the workers are earning under 110% of the statutory minimum wage are covered by sectoral or enterprise collective bargaining. Using coded data of 900 CBAs from 9 EU countries, the presence and nature of pay scales in the sectoral and firm-level collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) are analysed. To deepen the insight into the impact of collective wage bargaining, national level data will be used to detail the wage arenas in 2 EU countries (Netherlands and Italy). The project lasts 2 years (2022-2024) and includes 6 work packages.

In this report, which constitutes deliverable 3.6 of the BARWAGE project (European Union social dialogue grant 101052319), we aim to describe the specific content of CBAs on collective wage including minimum wages and pay scales to provide empirical evidence of how and at what level wages are negotiated in CBAs in 10 EU member states: Austria, Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Spain and Portugal. These member states represent a variety of bargaining traditions, ranging from countries where sector level bargaining covers almost the full labour force (e.g., Italy, Austria) to countries with sparce and decentralized collective bargaining (e.g., Estonia).