Employment Relations in the Shadow of Recession: Findings from the 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study, by Brigid van Wanrooy, Helen Bewley, Alex Bryson, John Forth, Stephanie Freeth, Lucy Stokes and Stephen Wood. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2013, 268 pp., ISBN: 978 1137275769, £24.99, paperback.
| Author | William Brown |
| Published date | 01 September 2014 |
| Date | 01 September 2014 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12069 |
Employment Relations in the Shadow of Recession: Findings from the 2011 Workplace
Employment Relations Study, by Brigid van Wanrooy, Helen Bewley, Alex
Bryson, John Forth, Stephanie Freeth, Lucy Stokes and Stephen Wood.
Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2013, 268 pp., ISBN: 978 1137275769, £24.99,
paperback.
How has the current severe recession affected employment relations? No country can
offer as full an answer as Britain because no other has a research instrument as refined
as the Workplace Employment Relations Study (WERS) surveys. This sourcebook
for the sixth 2011 WERS survey is in the best tradition of its predecessors, dating back
to 1980, in providing a rigorous account of the changing world of employment, fully
attuned to recent developments in legislation and managerial practice. The team
behind it has been able to provide an additional focus by exploring the ways in which
the economic crisis precipitated in 2008 had distinctive effects by comparison with the
halcyon economic setting of the previous survey in 2004. The result is a fascinating
and authoritative analysis of both long-term trends and cyclical responses.
The sophistication of the WERS surveys deserves emphasis. This latest one uses
a representative sample of 2,680 workplaces with five or more employees from
private and public sectors, including a representative panel from the 2004 survey of
989 workplaces. As well as the key managers at each workplace, 1,002 worker rep-
resentatives and 21,981 employees were interviewed. Although the overall work-
place response rate has fallen to a (still creditable) 46 per cent, the consistency of
findings where consistency would be expected provides reassurance about the high
technical competence of the survey. The many multivariate analyses are well
explained, and in a particularly welcome innovation it is made explicit in tables
where differences are statistically significant. Quite apart from the detailed picture
provided of British workplaces in 2011, it provides a powerful basis for comparison
with 2004.
The long-term view is superficially one of surprising stability. The growing diversity
of contractual forms of the 1990s appears to have stabilized. Use of part-time and
agency workers and of subcontracting has barely altered since 2004. While use of
freelance, homeworking, zero hours and fixed-term contracts has increased slightly in
the private sector, it remains at a low level. The use of multi-skilled workers for
greater functional flexibility has not increased. Past surveys had detailed the dramatic
collapse of collective bargaining in Britain since the 1980s. But union recognition has
plateaued since 2004, as has the proportion of unionized workplaces with a lay union
representative. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that unions have been consolidat-
ing their membership in their bedrock of larger sites.
This apparent equilibrium is misleading. In the private sector, collective bargaining
coverage of employees in 2011 remained at the same (low) level of 16 per cent it was
in 2004. But the range of items on which bargaining takes place has continued to fall.
Most notably, even of those workplaces with union recognition, almost a half
reported in 2011 that there is no bargaining over pay. For the public sector, the
change underlying the apparent stability of union recognition has been sharper
because, although collective bargaining is ostensibly the norm, and although its scope
is superficially unchanged, union influence over pay has diminished sharply. In part
this is because independent Pay Review Bodies now cover employees in a third of
public-sector workplaces. It has also been influenced by public-sector pay freezes. But
it also reflects the collapse of national pay bargaining arrangements in, for example,
public administration and health. The combined facts that private-sector pay is now
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620 British Journal of Industrial Relations
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics.
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