Britain at Work: Letting the Facts Speak for Themselves?

Abstract

BRITAIN AT WORK (Cully et.al.1999) is the fourth in a series of surveys of workplace industrial relations that began in 1980 (Daniel & Millward, 1983, Millward & Stevens, 1986, Millward et. al. 1992) and follows an interim report published in 1998 (Cully et.al.). Each survey has gathered information from managers and employee representatives at over 2000 workplaces employing 25 or more workers. Britain at Work is inevitably an important piece of empirical work in an indispensable series which the new survey has further developed by including companies with between 10 and 24 employees and surveying, although not interviewing, the workers themselves. To ignore it would be folly but to rely on its own interpretation of itself would be equally foolish. Indeed the authors themselves suggest that ‘some readers will arrive at different interpretations of the survey results - if they did not it would be a dull read indeed’ (xvi).