The 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey

 

WERS 98 is a national survey of people at work. It follows in the acclaimed footsteps of earlier surveys conducted in 1980, 1984 and 1990. The survey is jointly sponsored by the Department of Trade and Industry, Acas, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Policy Studies Institute. Its purpose is to provide an account, for all to use, of management-employee relations. For this reason, the survey is supported by leading organisations like the Confederation of British Industry, the Trades Union Congress, and the Institute of Personnel and Development. For those who are familiar with the WERS series, it will be apparent that there have been several major changes made to the survey. This has come about because the sponsors felt that there had been so much irrevocable change since the late 1970s that a recasting of the questionnaire design and the structure of the survey was called for. A full account of the changes that have been made and the reasons behind these changes can be found in the paper, A Survey in Transition (see link under Related Documents).

Release of first findings

In September 1999 Routledge published Britain at Work, a full, interpretative account of the survey findings, together with an additional volume on change in employment relations, All Change at Work (published 2000). A booklet was produced before September 1999 containing the first findings from the survey. See The 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey: first findings.

Who has been surveyed?

All workplaces in Britain with 10 or more employees were eligible for the survey, be they schools, shops, offices or factories. In the main survey, 2191 workplaces participated, a response rate of 80 per cent. Interviews were conducted with a manager in each workplace, and 950 worker representatives were also interviewed, representing 82 per cent of cases where an eligible representative was identified. Completed questionnaires were obtained from 28,323 employees, around two-thirds of those distributed. In the panel survey, 882 surviving workplaces from the 1990 survey took part, a response rate of 86 per cent.

Areas covered in the survey

The focus of the questions are about what goes on at the workplace, not head office, so interviews were conducted with people at their workplace. There were questions on:

  • Consultation & Communication
  • Worker Representation
  • Payment Systems
  • Recruitment & Training
  • Equal Opportunities
  • Health & Safety
  • Flexibility & Performance
  • Workplace Change
  • Employee Attitudes to Work

Survey data

Survey data has been made publicly available from the Data Archive in anonymised form for academic, employer association, business and trade union researchers. There were six separate survey questionnaires used in WERS 98, each of which can be downloaded by clicking on the relevant line.

1998 Main Survey

1990-98 Panel Survey

Research emanating from the WERS series

A bibliography of all publicly available papers that have made original use of the data from the 1980, 1984 and 1990 Workplace Industrial Relations Surveys (WERS/WIRS) is available from this site. The bibliography contains details of the following:

  • "sourcebooks" reporting the primary analysis
  • other books wholly based on WERS technical reports and methodological papers
  • journal articles and contributions to books, discussion papers, working papers and mimeos
  • doctoral theses
  • dissertations
  • reviews of WERS results

For a copy of the bibliography see: The British Workplace Industrial Relations Survey Series: A bibliography based in WERS.

Further information on the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey is available from the ESRC funded WERS98 Data Dissemination Service, which has been set up to provide expert advice about the survey and its analysis to both current and prospective users. The WERS98 Data Dissemination Service is located at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research; it is staffed by Neil Millward, John Forth, and Simon Kirby.

All of the above publications are available from Routledge publishers. The ISBN numbers for ordering are as follows:

All Change at Work - ISBN 0-415-20635-9

The 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey: first findings - ISBN 0-85605-382-1

Britain at Work - ISBN 0-415-20637-5

 

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