1. Background

ILO Research Director was approached by a group of researchers, namely Prof. Irene Dingeldey, Dr. Heiner Fechner, and Prof. Ulrich Mückenberger, from University of Bremen heading a project "Coverage and Generosity of Employment Law" to continue previously established collaboration with NORMES and RESEARCH departments.  Based on previous collaboration, it is proposed to continue collaboration through a joint webinar to present the book on Constructing Worlds of Labour: Coverage and Generosity of Labour Law as Outcomes of Regulatory Social Policy and to discuss the sustainability of the legal database collected through aforementioned project. The webinar will be hosted by ILO RESEARCH and information on the event will be widely distributed (event page here).  The internal meeting dedicated to the issue of ensuring sustainability for the world of labour databases will be held on 24 October, with the participation of colleagues from RESEARCH, NORMES, LABGOV.

2. Objective

The objective of the workshop, carried out as a bilateral ILO-University of Bremen meeting, facilitated by RESEARCH, will be to explore the sustainability of data sets developed in the framework of the project on “Coverage and Generosity of Employment Law". In the first place, the project has collected and digitalised a large set of historical labour laws, going back as far as 1870s reflecting legal development in at that time colonial countries, as well as social legislation. Second, the data sets of the project include the coding of labour laws (commented extracts) concerning 35 indicators of individual labour law for large periods of time, including a separate set of coding of ILO conventions.  Information on these data sets will be presented in the framework of the workshop by the project team from the University of Bremen with a general discussion of how to ensure sustainability and accessibility of the collection of legal texts and data and the potential for the collaboration with the existing legislation databases managed by the ILO.