Small business employment relations

Chapter 1 explained how and why the employment size threshold for the survey had been dropped from 25 employees in previous surveys to 10 employees in WERS 98. For reasons noted in that chapter, the analysis so far has excluded the smallest workplaces, those with between 10 and 24 employees. This allowed us to present comparable data with other surveys in the series and to avoid these smallest (and most numerous) workplaces dominating the overall results. In this chapter we draw in part on the data collected in these small workplaces to present a separate account of small business employment relations. Small businesses occupy a distinct part of the lexicon in academic and policy debates. There are separate academic departments wholly devoted to studying small business and separate associations representing their interests. They even have their own Minister at government level.