firms and workers characteristics as well as on the organization of the workplace. In particular, there
is information on the value of the firm’s capital stock, the age of its equipment, the amount spent on
new equipment during the current year, labor and other costs, the establishment’s industry and size
and whether the establishment is part of a multi-establishment company.
The information on workforce characteristics include the percentage of workers in different categories
(front-line workers, clerical workers, technicians, supervisors, and managers), the average education for
each of the category, the proportion of women and minorities, the percentage of workers hired during the
current year and whether the employees are represented by a union or covered by collective bargaining
agreements.
Information on wages comes from a question on the average pay for each category of full-time workers
in the establishment and is reported in one of the following ways: hourly, weekly, monthly or annual. I
use hourly wages and since average hours per week for each type of workers are asked in a subsequent
question, I compute average hourly pay for each case where pay were not reported on an hourly basis.
Note that in the NES 1993, average weekly hours worked are not asked about for managers. Since the
NES questions only concern full-time workers, I computed hourly pay for managers based on a 40 hours
week of work. 5
Questions related to the organization of the workplace are identical in the two surveys with only one
exception. The NES 1993 asked whether the establishment has adopted a Total Quality Management
program, but this question is not asked in the NES 1996. In place, it is asked whether the establishment
has undergone re-engineering. Since TQM can be viewed as a form of re-engineering of the workplace,
both questions provide similar information and will be considered in the analysis hereafter. The final
samples, with non missing observations on all variables, contain information for 816 establishments in
1993 and 765 in 1996.
3.2 Workplace Organization and Employee Involvement Practices
The NES contains detailed information on the practices related to the level of employee involvement,
workplace organization, and the use of stock option or profit sharing. This section presents summary
statistics for these variables (table 1) and analyzes the question of adoption versus intensity of use of
employee involvement practices (table 2).
Table 1 presents the means of the different variables on workplace practices for the year 1993 and
1996. Considering first the year 1993 for all sectors (first column), one can see that among the three
practices related to employee involvement, job-related meetings is the practice that applied the most
5 Note also that for for workers reporting annual pay, I computed hourly pay dividing by weekly hours times 51 weeks
of work per year.