Observing the Liberalization of Employment Relations Through the Scripts of Collective Agreements

In this paper, we argue that the employer-employee relationship is multifaceted, encompassing the employment contract, workplace practices, labor processes, trade unions, and collective bargaining. All these aspects are interconnected and have undergone significant transformation since the 1980s, signalling a shift from traditional norms to more liberal ones. To test our arguments, we analyze the digitized text of over 38,000 Israeli collective bargaining agreements (1957–2022), using dictionary-based and topic-modeling analyses to track changes in the language of employment relations. Our findings reveal three key points: (1) dimensions of employment relations are more interconnected than previously thought; (2) strong workers’ associations slow the shift to more liberal norms; (3) employment relations in the 1950s-1970s differ markedly from those in the 2000s, with the 1980s-1990s representing a transformative period.