Fair Work Commission

About this report

The Australian Workplace Relations Study (AWRS) is the first Australia-wide statistical dataset linking employer data with employee data since the 1995 Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (AWIRS 1995).

Consistent with linked employer-employee research undertaken in other jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom and Canada, the AWRS has used surveys of employers and their employees to collect information about a range of workplace relations and employment matters. The ability to link these data greatly enhances the extent of analysis that can be performed compared to datasets which only obtain information from employers or households.

The data produced from the AWRS will inform the work of the Fair Work Commission as well as informing a diverse range of stakeholders, including policy makers, researchers and representative organisations, about contemporary employment matters.

This report provides an initial analysis of the AWRS data across the broad themes of:

• Enterprise operations and indicators of performance
• Employment practices
• Wage-setting and outcomes, and
• Employee experiences.

This report illustrates the breadth of topics included in the AWRS, while also demonstrating how employee data can be linked to the employer data in the AWRS.

This report does not intend to provide a comprehensive analysis of the data available in the AWRS. Rather, it provides an introduction to the opportunities for more in-depth analysis that the AWRS data can provide.

The Commission plans to enable more in-depth analysis through releasing the AWRS data and providing a range of user-driven applications in the first half of 2015. If you are interested in receiving regular news about the AWRS, including the release of AWRS data, please subscribe to the AWRS update service by going to our Subscribe to updates page and following the instructions there.

The First Findings report can be read in conjunction with the AWRS technical notes.

Reporting conventions

Unless otherwise stated, data presented in the First Findings report exclude cases where a respondent did not provide an answer (i.e. refused to answer, did not know or could not recall).

All survey estimates presented in the First Findings report are considered by the Commission to be reliable unless otherwise stated in cautionary notes presented under the applicable tables and figures.