Government Administered Workplace Surveys and Industrial Relations in Canada

John Godard's article, 'New Dawn or Bad Moon Rising? Large Scale Government Administered Workplace Surveys and the Future of Canadian IR Research' (2001), is discussed. Godard has challenged researchers to consider the advantages and disadvantages of using data sets in industrial relations research. This comment agrees with Godard that the Workplace and Employment Survey (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.