Introduction

This book presents an up-to-date portrait of the diverse nature of employment relations in the workplace in contemporary Britain. It does so through the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS 98), a large and complex edifice constructed to collect, collate and classify what might otherwise remain disparate and diffuse. In this introductory chapter we give a short account of how the survey was carried out, setting it in the context of the times in which it took place.