An interesting aspect of British research on unions based on the Workplace Industrial/ Employment Relations Surveys has been the apparent shift in union impact on establishment performance in the decade of the 1990s compared with the 1980s – and the recent scramble to explain the phenomenon....

Using two nationally representative establishment data sets, this paper investigates collective bargaining coverage and firms' choice of governance structures for the employment relationship in Britain and in (western and eastern) Germany. Both countries have experienced a substantial decline in...

This paper examines the determinants of job satisfaction in Britain using nationally representative linked employer-employee data (WERS2004) and alternative econometric techniques. It uses eight facets of job satisfaction for the purpose. As well as underscoring the importance of accounting for...

This paper investigates the demise of unionisation in British private sector workplaces over the last quarter century. We show that dramatic union decline has occurred across all types of workplace. Although the union wage premium persists it is quite small in 2004. Negative union effects on...

Perhaps no other country in recent years has witnessed greater change in its collective bargaining framework than the UK. This paper describes the dramatic developments and their consequences. Like Gaul, it is in three parts. The first part charts the six major pieces of legislation –...

The Workplace Employment Relations Survey series is a tremendously useful source of data for industrial relations researchers. But, like all large-scale secondary datasets, it has a number of design problems. These have not been articulated previously in much depth. Looking at the 2004...