Family-Friendly Work Practices in Britain: Availability and Awareness

We use linked data on over 20,000 individuals and almost 1,500 workplaces from the Workplace Employee Relations Survey 1998 to analyze the perceived and actual availability of six major familyfriendly work practices amongst British employees. We find a low base rate of actual availability, a lower rate of perceived availability, and evidence that accurate awareness of availability is further limited. We identify a range of individual worker and workplaces characteristics that are associated with greater perceived availability and typically also to awareness. Acknowledgements The authors acknowledge the Department of Trade and Industry, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, and the Policy Studies Institute as the originators of the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey data, and the Data Archive at the University of Essex as the distributor of the data. None of these organisations bear any responsibility for the authors’ analysis and interpretation of the data. Financial support and aid for Karen Mumford was supplied from a Summer Placement in Whitehall 2001, their help is gratefully acknowledged as is the advice of Peter N Smith.