WIRS marked a radical departure in the study of industrial relations (IR) by Ômapping' IR in Britain with nationally-representative large-scale surveys of workplace managers, thus permitting investigation of the incidence of practices and changes over time. This paper reflects on some of...

The last twenty-five years have seen the world of work transformed in Britain. Manufacturing and nationalized industries contracted and private services expanded. Employment became more diverse. Trade union membership collapsed. Collective bargaining disappeared from much of the private sector,...

Using nationally representative workplace surveys we examine the relationship between unionization and workplace financial performance in Britain and France. We find that union bargaining is detrimental to workplace performance in Britain and that this effect is larger when unionization is...

There is little quantitative data on the employment practices of small and medium-sized firms (SMEs), despite the fact that 94 per cent of all private sector firms in the UK have less than 250 employees. This study uses the nationally representative 2004Workplace Employment Relations Survey...

We chart the decline of employee representation in Britain since 1980. Evidence points not only to much smaller numbers of shop stewards but also to a much reduced role for those who remain.

We examine how employees' experiences of, and attitudes towards, work have changed over the last quarter of a century. It assesses the extent to which any developments relate to the economic cycle and to trends in the composition of the British workforce. Many of the findings are broadly...

Presentation at TUC's Public Sector Union Strategy meeting. Draws on national data sets to map union membership trends, unions' organisational capacity and union effectiveness in Britain since the late 1990s.

For most of the twentieth century, collective bargaining provided the terms on which labour was commonly employed in Britain. However, the quarter century since 1980 has seen the collapse of collectivism as the main way of regulating employment. Our argument is that the tacit settlement between...

The desire to better identify the micro-foundations of improved productivity has increased demand for data that can illuminate the link between management practices and business performance. Data on the performance of individual businesses have historically been collected by national statistical...

TV interview about the unofficial strike action at large plants in the energy sector in protest against the employment of foreign workers. Main focus of the interview was on the workers\\\'/unions\\\' ability to resist the employer, given the legislative changes and weakening of unions over the...