Trade Unions, Collective Bargaining, and Income Stagnation in Europe

Joshua Cova

Across many advanced democracies, real wages have stagnated, threatening the legitimacy of different growth models and fueling increased levels of voter dissatisfaction. While these economic trends are well known, less attention has been paid to how trade unions, which are the actors that are traditionally responsible for protecting workers’ incomes, understand and communicate this issue. This project explores the communicative role of trade unions in the political economy of different European countries by analyzing what topics they discuss and how their focus shifts with changing economic conditions. Using a large-scale collection of press releases from national trade unions, the project employs computational text analysis to map discourse across countries and over time. Given the persistence of wage stagnation in Italy, particular attention is devoted to the Italian case, where the project also undertakes a large-scale digitization of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) using optical character recognition (OCR). These digitized texts are then analyzed with natural language processing techniques to trace sectoral wage developments.