CELSI organised the regional kick-off workshop of the COLBAR-EUROPE project (EUROPE wide analyses of COLlective BARgaining agreements, project No. VS/2019/0077, led by the Wage Indicator Foundation) in Bratislava on 9 October 2019.

There is little systematic information about what is agreed in Collective Agreements in European countries. The project COLBAR-EUROPE aims to mitigate this knowledge gap by several activities, among them kick-off meetings in different regions that bring together researchers, trade unions and employer organizations for formal presentations and informal discussion about the project’s main research questions.

The 26 registered participants representing trade unions, employer organisations and independent researchers from all countries of the Visegrad region had the chance to get better acquainted with the project objectives and its first preliminary regional results through the introductory presentations of Paulien Osse (director, WageIndicator) and Gabor Szudi (research analyst, CELSI).

The workshop also featured presentations from Monika Martiskova (researcher, CELSI) and Szilvia Borbely (freelance researcher) showcasing the current collective bargaining landscape in Slovakia and Hungary respectively, as well as presentations on potential best case practices linked to the topic of COLBAR-EUROPE: Paul Schwab (editor, OGB Publishing House) showed the technical and content details of the Austrian collective agreement database, while Matthias Rasche (data officer, Eurofound) talked about the Eurofound's upcoming project regarding collective agreements in the context of minimum wages.

A lively discussion followed the presentations where participants had the chance to ask from presenters and touch upon the different aspects of the collection and analysis process of collective bargaining agreements in the region, e.g. regional accessibility, privacy and data handling issues, data comparability, co-operation opportunities.

All presentations and a summary of the event are available here.