Employees' Awareness, Knowledge and Exercise of Employment Rights Survey, 2005

The DTI commissioned the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) and BMRB Social Research to undertake this second benchmark survey of employees' awareness, knowledge and exercise of employment rights, which was conducted in 2005. The main aims of the study were:<ul><li>to assess employees' general awareness of the scope of their employment rights and, where appropriate and relevant, to draw comparisons with the 2000 survey</li><li>for selected topics, to establish employees' knowledge of specific employment rights provisions (e.g. level of the National Minimum Wage, holiday entitlement, maternity leave and anti-discrimination law)</li><li>to find out the main sources of information and professional advice about employment rights issues, and, where employees had experienced a problem in the previous five years, where they sought advice and guidance and what they did to try and resolve the problem</li><li>to identify the personal and employment characteristics that influence employees' level of awareness knowledge and preparedness to seek advice and take action to enforce their individual employment rights (including employment status)</li></ul>In addition the survey sought to estimate the extent of 'on-call' working in Great Britain, differentiating between those on call at their place of work (residential on-call) and those who are able to leave their place of work.<br><br>The first survey in the series was conducted in 2000 (held at the UK Data Archive (UKDA) under SN 5082), and provided a baseline against which future surveys could be compared. However, as detailed in the technical report for this study, there were major improvements to the methodology and questionnaire between 2000 and 2005 so comparisons must be made cautiously with attention drawn to this caveat.<br><br><br>