| Aim of the project |
The overall objective of COLBAR-EUROPE is to improve knowledge about industrial relations and social dialogue, specifically about the content of Collective Agreements in Europe. lt aims to undertake research activities to enhance the collection of comparative information on collective bargaining outcomes in EU Member States and Candidate Countries and at European level. Collective bargaining is key for wage setting and working conditions, but very little is known about what exactly is agreed. Few countries code agreements, but most countries are lacking such overviews, and databases for cross-country comparisons are absent. Since 2014 however associate partner Wagelndicator maintains a database with full text, annotated, and coded Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBAs), using a standard coding scheme. ln BARCOM (VS/2016/0106), the Action's predecessor, 120 agreements from the commerce sector from 23 countries were successfully analysed. Social partners expressed their interest in getting for the first time ever insights into the content of Collective Agreements. COLBAR-EUROPE aims to deepen these insights by adding more than 500 agreements plus 25 Transnational Agreements to the CBA Database, now covering commerce, manufacturing, construction and public sectors for EU28 plus 5 candidate countries. Using the coded data of the agreements, the Action's reports will focus on comparisons across industries, on public versus private sector agreements, on wage setting, on trade-offs in the wider bargaining agenda, on possible convergence of agreements concluded by various daughters of the same multinational company or that are related to Transnational Agreements. The Action will also prepare reports about agreements in the Visegrad countries, ltaly, the Netherlands, and Spain. The reports will be presented at the Main Event in Amsterdam, for which bargaining negotiators from the 33 countries, social partners and other stakeholders will be invited. |
