Barcovid Negotiator Survey

The Barcovid Negotiator Survey, is part of the wider BARCOVID project, which studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on collective bargaining in Europe. To analyze the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the renewal process of collective agreements in Europe, the BARCOVID project developed and fielded an international survey conducted among negotiators and signatories of collective bargaining agreements in five European countries. The survey was conducted to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on industrial relations. An online questionnaire was created using Qualtrics, and fieldwork was conducted between January 16 and March 10 2023. The survey questions were designed to understand the renewal process of CBAs during the pandemic and the wider implications of the pandemic on relations between social partners. To gather respondents, the Barcovid team identified the signatory parties—both employee and employer organizations—for all collective agreements listed in the CBA Database for Austria, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain. The survey encompassed 180 negotiators involved in 124 different agreements spread across these five nations. The survey results offer substantial insights into the CBA renewal process during the pandemic, highlighting the effects of COVID-19 on labor negotiation dynamics. The data indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic did not fundamentally change the process of collective bargaining in the countries under study. Although negotiators attribute substantial impact to the pandemic and often perceive it to have made reaching an agreement more difficult, they also report remarkable levels of stability and continuity regarding the negotiations process (format, topics and outcomes) and the wider industrial relations climate. This is an anonymized version of the dataset, without personal or organizational identifiers, and without open answers.