A key text for anyone interested in employment and the changing world of work in the UK, whether as a student, researcher, teacher, analyst, advisor or practioner.

Have configurations of labour-management practices become embedded in the British economy? Did the dramatic decline in trade union representation in the 1980s continue throughout the 1990s, leaving more employees without a voice? Were the vestiges of union organization at the workplace a hollow shell? These and other contemporary issues of employee relations are addressed in this report. The book reports the results from the series of workplace surveys conducted by the Department of Trade and Industry, the Economic and Social Research Council, The Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service, and the Policy Studies Institute. Its focus is on change, captured by gathering together the enormous bank of data from all four of the large-scale and highly respected surveys, and plotting trends from 1980 to 1999. In addition, a special panel of workplaces, surveyed in both 1990 and 1998, reveals the complex processes of change.;Comprehensive in scope, the results are statistically reliable and reveal the nature and extent of change in all bar the smallest British workplaces.

1. Introduction, The essential features of the WIRS design,
Elements of the survey employed in this volume, The changing landscape, 1980-98, The nature of our analysis and contents of the book 2. The dynamic context of workplace employment
relations. Industry and Ownership, Size of Workforce, Location within larger organizations, Internationalization, Age and relocation, Changes in technology, Changes in the composition of the workforce, Summary and conclusions 3. The Management of employee relations. Who manages employee relations, The emergence of a profession, The gender issue: women managing employee relations, A changing role for employee relations managers, The status and influence of employee relations managers, Conclusions 4. Have employess lost their voice? Union presence, Union membership density, Trade Union recognition, Other channels for collective employee voice, Direct Communication methods, An overall view of employee voice, Conclusions 5. Union recognition: a 'hollow shell'? Workplace union density, The nature of union representation, Procedural involvement and the appointment of committee representatives, Collective bargaining, Limits on management's ability to organize work, Industrial action, Conclusions 6. Pay determination and reward systems. The overall pattern of pay determination, The overall coverage of collective bargaining, Multi-unionism and bargaining structure, Payment systems, The dispersion of pay within workplaces, Conclusions 7. Verdict and
prospect. The changing context of employment relations, The
nature of employment relations management, Decentralization
and workplace autonomy, Joint regulation of the employment relationship, Sources of change, A transformation - but to what? Technical Appendix The workplace industrial relations survey series, The 1980-98 time series, The 1990-98 panel survey, The 1990 dataset of 'leavers', The 1998 dataset of 'joiners', Accessing the data used in this volume