Have new 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? Are the vestiges of union organisation at the workplace a hollow shell? These and other contemporary issues of employee relations are addressed in this report.

This book is the latest publication which 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 the present. 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