Collective bargaining covers only 4 percent of Georgian private sector workers. The legal framework for expansion exists; the institutional will to use it does not.
Collective bargaining — the process by which employers and trade unions negotiate wages, working conditions, and employment terms on behalf of groups of workers — covers approximately 4 percent of Georgia’s private sector workforce. This figure, derived from GTUC data and cross-referenced with Geostat establishment surveys, places Georgia among the lowest collective bargaining coverage rates in Europe, comparable to Lithuania before its 2017 Labour Code reform and significantly below any EU member state.
The contrast with the European norm is stark. In Belgium, France, and Austria, collective bargaining coverage exceeds 90 percent — close to universal. In Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands, it ranges from 65 to 80 percent. Even in newer EU member states that began from low coverage bases in the 1990s — Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia — coverage has grown to 20–35 percent through deliberate policy choices: extension mechanisms that apply collective agreements to non-union employers in a sector, minimum quorum requirements for employers to participate in sectoral bargaining, and legal recognition of sector-level unions as legitimate bargaining agents.
Georgia’s Labour Code provides a legal basis for collective bargaining at the enterprise level — individual employers and unions can negotiate collective agreements that bind their own members and employees. What Georgian law does not provide is a functioning extension mechanism: no route by which a sectoral agreement negotiated between a sector-level union and one group of employers can be extended to cover all employers in that sector. The absence of extension means that collective bargaining in Georgia can only ever reach workers in unionised enterprises, which are a small and shrinking share of the formal workforce.
The sectors where collective bargaining does function in Georgia are narrow: the Port of Poti, several large mining enterprises in Chiatura and Tkibuli, and a handful of public sector areas with legacy union structures from the Soviet period. These are important but not representative. The overwhelming majority of Georgian workers — including the entire informal sector, all small businesses, and most of the services economy — have no access to collective bargaining and no mechanism through which it could be extended to them.
ILO Convention C98, ratified by Georgia, protects workers’ rights to organise and bargain collectively and prohibits interference by employers with union activities. It does not require high coverage — the convention’s requirements are procedural rather than outcome-based. But the EU Adequate Minimum Wages Directive, which Georgia will need to align with in the accession process, contains the 80 percent coverage requirement noted in the GILS social dialogue analysis: states below this threshold must produce action plans for increasing coverage. Georgia’s 4 percent would require the most ambitious collective bargaining expansion in the Eastern Partnership region.
GILS Position: A realistic target for Georgia is not 80 percent coverage within one legislative cycle — that would require institutional infrastructure that does not currently exist. A realistic target is 15 percent coverage by 2028, achieved through: legal recognition of sector-level bargaining units in three pilot sectors (construction, retail, and healthcare); introduction of a limited extension mechanism requiring that collective agreements covering more than 30 percent of a sector’s workers be applied to all employers in that sector; and GTUC capacity building support for enterprise-level union establishment in firms with more than 50 employees.
Read the full GILS analysis: https://labour.edu.ge/collective-bargaining-georgia/