Taking the pulse at work: An employment relations scorecard for Australia

Abstract

This study, and the project behind it, is an attempt 100 years on from the Webbs to comprehensively assess the health of the industrial relations/employment relations system by ‘taking the pulse’ of the employment relationship. If, as we argue, the relative health and performance of the employment relationship remains the key dependent variable of the field of employment relations today, there have been remarkably few attempts to audit and measure its critical dimensions. This study, founded on a large representative survey of workers and managers across Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, attempts to do just that, and produces in this article, results of those survey questions for Australia. The article is novel since this kind of employment diagnostic is based on a unique nationally representative survey of employers and employees. The study is also innovative, in that it presents the results of the health of the system in the form of an employment relations scorecard and is the first such attempt to do so in industrial relations.