About The First Findings

This booklet reports the first findings from the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS 2004), and provides information on what has changed inside British workplaces since 1998. WERS 2004 is the fifth in the series of surveys conducted by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas), and the Policy Studies Institute (PSI). Previous surveys in the series were conducted in 1980, 1984, 1990 and 1998.

The booklet will be followed by two further publications in Spring 2006, one providing an in-depth exploration of the survey findings and the other reporting on employment relations in small workplaces.

WERS 2004 provides a nationally representative account of the
state of employment relations and working life inside British workplaces. The WERS surveys have generally been considered to be one of the most authoritative sources of information on employment relations in Great Britain.

WERS 2004 involved interviews with around 3,200 managers and about 1,000 worker representatives. Over 20,000 employees completed and returned a self-completion questionnaire. The survey links the views from these three parties, providing a truly integrated picture of employment relations within workplaces.

The researchers were Barbara Kersley and Carmen Alpin, from DTI, John Forth, from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and on contract to DTI, Gill Dix and Sarah Oxenbridge, from Acas, and Alex Bryson and Helen Bewley, from PSI.