Government Administered Workplace Surveys and Industrial Relations in Canada

In his recent essay on government administered large-scale workplace surveys, John Godard (2001) has challenged researchers to consider the advantages and disadvantages of using these data sets in industrial relations research. Godard focused his critique on Australia’s Australian Work and Industrial Relations Survey (AWIRS), UK’s Workplace and Employee Relations Survey (WERS), and Canada’s Workplace and Employee Survey (WES). In what follows, we present a somewhat different viewpoint than does Godard on the role and future relevance of the WES to Canadian industrial relations research. We view the WES as good for extending IR related research, although it is clearly not the best. In contrast, Godard (2001: 27) concludes that: “The WES… could represent a ‘new dawn’ for researchers interested in various labour market and economic policy issues … But it may represent a ‘bad moon rising’ for mainstream Canadian IR research and possibly for the field of IR in general.” We are of the view that it will likely do neither. While the WES will present significant new research possibilities, research on this data will neither transform labour economics nor labour policy. Similarly, while IR research using WES data stands to yield considerable insights into some important issues, it will not significantly alter the course or future of Canadian IR research; hence, neither will it be a “bad moon rising.” But we do consider the outlook for a “brighter day” to be excellent because the WES is an important source of data that augments the IR data that is currently available and will, consequently, expand the possibilities for rigorous empirical research in the IR field. We begin by identifying the general areas and arguments put forward by Godard with which we are basically in agreement and concentrate on those with which we have some disagreement. Then, we proceed to focus more intensively on the WES itself. We present our case for the conclusion that IR research based on the WES will contribute to our knowledge base in IR and therefore contribute to a “brighter day.” We wish to emphasize at the outset that we agree with many of Godard’s observations. However, we tend to view progress in data gathering and, more generally, advances in the knowledge-building enterprise as unfolding more incrementally. The WES represents an imperfect but, nonetheless, very valuable new source of data that stands to advance IR research and, hence, the field of study. We agree with Godard (2001: 6–7) that the WES, as with other large scale government administered surveys, has a number of significant advantages including: excellent response rates, comprehensiveness, the ability to link employees with their employers and to follow them over (limited) periods of time, and a tendency to use more standardized measures. These represent substantial advantages relative to other sources of micro-level data. Godard (2001: 8–9) also raises a number of general problems as well, including issues related to facilitating the construction of appropriate indices, the depth to which questions are investigated, the lack of research hypotheses underlying the survey construction and, more seriously, that the workplace constructs that the surveys are aimed at measuring are actually too complex to be captured by “single numbers” because they are “processes and relationships” and the surveys may have added little to our understanding of IR phenomena. While not taking absolute issue, there are several alternative considerations worth noting about each of these points. IR researchers are constantly testing alternative models (and specifications of similar models), derived hypotheses, and so on. In IR, the variety of models used is compounded by the multi/inter-disciplinary nature of the field. The key advantage of the WES, as Godard (2001: …