BARWAGE investigates the potential of collective bargaining as a tool for ensuring adequate minimum wages in the European Union. It explores the size of four wage-setting arenas: the national level, sector level Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBAs), CBAs at the enterprise level, and individual wage-setting. Due to uneven bargaining coverage across the EU, the importance of the four arenas will be analysed by country, by industry, and by bargaining level. BARWAGE applies quantitative and qualitative methods. It focusses on the EU27 countries, using data of EUROSTAT’s 2018 Structure of Earnings survey to identify what share of the workers are earning under 105% of the statutory minimum wage (or an imputed minimum wage for countries without minimum wages) are covered by sectoral or enterprise collective bargaining. Using coded data of 900 CBAs from 9 EU countries (AT, BG, CZ, EE, ES, IT, FR, NL, PT), the presence and nature of pay scales in the sectoral and enterprise CBAs are analysed. For CBAs that include pay scales, EUROSTAT microdata are used to estimate the distribution of workers across pay scale tables. If the CBAs have no pay scales agreed, technique for text extraction from CBAs are applied and interviews conducted with CBA signatories to identify alternative wage-setting arenas. To deepen the insight into the impact of collective bargaining on wages, national level data will be used to detail the wage arenas in 2 EU countries, one with and one without a statutory minimum wage (Netherlands and Italy). The consortium includes four partners, based in the Netherlands (2x), Italy and Slovakia, jointly with 11 researchers and 2 organization and communication specialists. ETUI in Brussels and the Dutch AWVN act as associate partners. The project lasts 2 years (2022-‘24) and includes 6 work packages. The results will widely be disseminated and discussed in virtual seminars, in 7 reports, and in Newsletters and online activities.