Australia at Work: Wave 1

The Australia at Work Survey is the first in a series of surveys, funded by the Australian Research Council and Unions NSW, exploring changes and challenges of Australian working life. The survey explores employees' perceptions of their labour contract, working conditions and attitudes towards work, and life course transitions. The respondents in this survey were Australians in the Australian work force in March of 2006. The survey compares how their work situation changed in the period between March of 2006 and 2007. The Australia at Work survey includes questions regarding wages and working conditions. Some of these variables are employment status, earnings, working hours and preferences, working arrangements, the labour contract, union membership, industry, occupation and living standards. Background variables include age, sex, marital status, ethnicity, education, study, and number of dependent children. WRC will shortly be depositing a revised Wave 1 Australia at Work dataset and the Wave 2 Australia at Work dataset. The revision to the Wave 1 dataset relates to a change in the weighting strategy. In the dataset that is currently deposited with ADA, owner-managers of incorporated entities (OMIEs) were included as employees for weighting and analysis purposes. Whereas with the revised Wave 1 dataset (and subsequent waves of data), the weighting strategy includes owner-managers of incorporated entities (OMIEs) in the self-employed category.