Twelve years of incremental reform have improved Georgia’s Labour Code substantially — but core gaps in collective bargaining rights and enforcement remain.
Georgia’s current Labour Code was adopted in 2010, replacing a transitional code from the 1990s. Since 2013, it has been amended 23 times — an average of nearly two substantive legislative changes per year. The pace and scope of amendment reflects the intensity of the EU integration process, which has required Georgian legislators to revise employment law provisions across a wide range of subjects: working time, occupational safety, non-discrimination, collective bargaining, and social protection.
The cumulative effect of these amendments has been significant. The 2013 changes introduced a requirement for written employment contracts, addressed a gap that had left a substantial portion of Georgian workers with no documented basis for their employment relationship. The 2020 amendments substantially strengthened the Labour Inspection Service: inspectors gained the right to conduct unannounced inspections, a right that had been removed in the deregulation wave of 2006. Maximum working time provisions were clarified, and overtime limits aligned more closely with ILO standards. The 2022 amendments addressed anti-discrimination provisions and introduced explicit definitions of harassment and sexual harassment with associated employer obligations.
These are genuine improvements. A Georgian worker in 2024 has substantially more legal protection than a Georgian worker in 2010, and substantially more than a worker in 2006, when the sweeping deregulation of the early Saakashvili period stripped much of the Labour Code’s original protective content. The legal trajectory since 2013 has been consistently progressive.
But the improvements are uneven, and important gaps remain. Collective bargaining provisions are among the weakest in the Code. The law provides for enterprise-level collective agreements but contains no sector-level bargaining framework, no extension mechanism, and no duty to bargain in good faith enforceable through administrative or judicial process. Strike action provisions are technically permissible but encumbered by procedural requirements — mandatory pre-strike mediation periods, quorum requirements — that make legal strikes practically difficult in sectors where employers can easily fragment their workforce to avoid majority thresholds.
The informal economy is barely addressed in the Code at all. Workers without contracts — estimated at 37 percent of all employed Georgians — have no effective access to the Code’s protections because the enforcement mechanism assumes contractual employment. The Labour Inspection Service can document a missing contract and issue a notice to an employer; but the employer can choose not to comply, and the penalties for continued non-compliance are modest. The dynamic that produces informality — the rational economic calculation by employers that informality is cheaper than compliance — is not disrupted by the current enforcement framework.
GILS Position: The Labour Code is a living document that has improved substantially. The next phase of reform should address three areas: collective bargaining, where the Code needs a sector-level bargaining framework with an extension mechanism; enforcement, where penalties for non-compliance need to be materially increased to change the cost-benefit calculation for informal employment; and coverage, where specific provisions need to be introduced for domestic workers, agricultural workers, and platform workers who currently fall between the Code’s definitions.
The trajectory is right. The pace needs to accelerate.
Read the full GILS analysis: https://labour.edu.ge/law-labour-code/