Coding Legal Segmentation in Employment Law. The Worlds of Labour (WoL) Dataset

This Technical Report on the Worlds of Labour Dataset (WoL) outlines the operationalisation of data collection and coding of employment law. The Wol covers 35 indicators measuring the evolution of particular normative regulations, seven indicators measuring and defining labour law types and functions, and one that dates back to the adoption of the first labour legislation. The historical period spans from 1880 to 2022, with a focus on countries in the Global South and colonial powers. The rest of the world is covered between 1970 and 2022, or from 1991 to 2022 for former communist countries. The focus is on the three major functions of labour law: standard setting, privileging, and equalising (SPE), with partial use of the leximetric labour law database CBR-LRI (Deakin et al. 2023a).

The first part of this report describes general rules for coding the law. These Coding Instructions describe the coding objectives, principles and rules used for coding the Worlds of Labour (WoL) SPE-Index on the standard-setting (S), privileging (P) and equalizing (E) functions in worldwide national labour legislation. The second part, the Description of Indicators, contain the two template versions used, including coding instructions by variable for both WoL-SPE and CBR-LRI variables. The third part lists technical information on the countries covered by WoL, including sources for the introduction of labour regulation. This technical paper is complementary to the conceptional and theoretical articles concerning the database (Dingeldey et al. 2022; Carlino et al. 2025) and the theoretical background on legal segmentation (Mückenberger and Dingeldey 2022; Fechner et al. 2025). The commented dataset country by country as described here is published in GESIS as „WoL – The Worlds of Labour Dataset“ (Fechner and Carlino 2025).