The Georgian Institute of Labour Studies produces rigorous, open-access labour market intelligence — data tools, law analysis, and policy research — grounded in ILO frameworks, answerable to no government or employer, and freely available to anyone who needs it.
Georgia's labour market is structurally under-documented. Wages are unmeasured against cost-of-living benchmarks. Occupational safety data is fragmented. Collective bargaining coverage is poorly tracked. Professional classifications in healthcare remain legally undefined. Policy decisions affecting millions of workers are made without independent, publicly available data to guide or challenge them.
"You cannot improve what you cannot measure. And in Georgia's labour market, far too much has gone unmeasured for far too long. GILS exists to change that — one open-access dataset at a time."
— Prof. Giorgi Pkhakadze, Founder, GILS
GILS organises its work around four interlocking domains, each producing publicly available outputs in English and Georgian.
Real-time and historical data tools covering wages, employment, informality, regional disparities, productivity, and labour costs. Sourced to Geostat and ILOSTAT. Updated quarterly.
Systematic analysis of all 12 core Georgian labour laws benchmarked against ILO conventions. GILS ratings, compliance gaps, and policy recommendations on every law.
Three original indices — the Decent Work Index, the Labour Rights Index, and the South Caucasus Labour Scorecard — providing internationally comparable assessments of Georgian labour conditions.
Research on collective bargaining, tripartite commission effectiveness, social dialogue institutions, and Georgia's alignment with ILO C087, C098, and the DWCP 2023–2026 framework.
Everything GILS produces is free, open-access, and available in English. Georgian-language versions are in production.
Salary checker, living wage calculator, gender pay gap tracker, labour productivity index, informal economy monitor, youth labour monitor, and more — all sourced and documented.
Open the Observatory →Every core Georgian labour law — from the Labour Code to the Funded Pension Law — analysed for ILO compliance, with GILS ratings, policy gaps, and comparator country benchmarks.
Browse the Law Library →The Decent Work Index (11 ILO dimensions), the Labour Rights Index (law quality score), and the South Caucasus Labour Scorecard (Georgia vs Armenia vs Azerbaijan).
View the Indices →ILO conventions, DWCP analysis, collective bargaining monitor, government decrees, glossary, history of Georgian labour law, global labour network, and more.
Enter the Knowledge Hub →Analysis of Georgia's tripartite commission, social dialogue framework, and profiles of 10 key labour organisations — government, worker, and employer sides.
Social Dialogue →Employer surveys, education-mismatch research, migrant worker analysis, and working poverty studies — all freely downloadable and citable.
Research Programme →Prof. Pkhakadze has spent twenty-five years at the intersection of public health systems, international standards, and labour conditions — across 25+ countries, with WHO, ILO, UNFPA, UNHCR, UNRWA, UNICEF, UNODC, and the UN Independent Accountability Panel. He served as principal public health adviser to the Prime Minister of Georgia during COVID-19 (2020–2022), and founded Accréditation Sans Frontières (Paris, 2020) — the body that delivered Georgia's first national healthcare accreditation programme. His work at PHIG since 2011, and through ASF and Accreditation Canada since 2023, produced the evidence base that made GILS both necessary and possible.
GILS did not emerge from a blank slate. It is the policy-intelligence output of fifteen years of documented, measurable reform work — with verifiable results.
Working with ASF — the international accreditation standards body founded in Paris by Prof. Pkhakadze — PHIG engaged Georgian healthcare facilities in a national accreditation cycle for the first time in the country's history. ASF standards embed occupational health and safety, staff wellbeing, professional development, and workforce management as core accreditation criteria.
As Georgia's in-country implementation partner for Accreditation Canada (Qmentum International), PHIG conducted a full accreditation cycle across 23 facilities. Labour standards — OHS, professional development, workforce planning — were among the most consistently under-developed domains across all facilities assessed, providing the primary evidence base for GILS's research agenda.
GILS sits at the centre of an integrated research, publishing, education, and public communication platform — all open-access, all connected.
Open-access, internationally indexed. OHS Knowledge Hub active. English-language. ISSN 3088-4322.
gmj.ge →English-language news and analysis on Georgian labour, health workforce, and occupational safety.
news.gmj.ge →Georgian-language labour and health workforce news — domestic audiences, native language.
sheniekimi.ge/ambebi →Certified CPD platform. OHS course in development. Open to Georgian and regional professionals.
academy.gmj.ge →International accreditation standards body, Paris. Hospital, ambulatory, LTC, PHC, and wellness standards published.
france-asf.fr →PHIG — founded 2011. Home of GILS. Accreditation, research, policy, and international partnership.
publichealth.ge →Independence is not a brand claim at GILS. It is an operational condition — structurally enforced, publicly stated, and open to challenge by anyone who believes it has been compromised.
GILS holds no contracts with the Georgian government, no ministerial mandates, and no state funding. Our analysis of government policy is conducted without financial dependency on the entity being analysed.
GILS has no membership of employer associations, no corporate sponsorship, and no advisory relationships with private sector employers. We assess employer behaviour using publicly available data.
GILS is not a trade union body, is not affiliated with GTUC or any sectoral union, and receives no union funding. We analyse collective bargaining coverage as an empirical researcher, not an advocate.
Every GILS data point is sourced to Geostat, ILOSTAT, ILO databases, or peer-reviewed research — with methodology documented and available. We do not publish unsourced claims.
All GILS outputs — data tools, law analyses, indices, research papers — are freely available to everyone. No paywalls, no registration gates, no access tiers.
When GILS publishes an error, we correct it publicly and document the correction. Credibility is our only institutional asset — we protect it by admitting mistakes, not concealing them.
Fourteen tools. Twelve laws. Three indices. All free, all sourced, all open.