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National Employer Survey
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The National Employer Survey provides and relates information on worker education, employer training and employer business characteristics, including business productivity. The United States Code, Title 13, authorized this survey and provided for voluntary responses. The National Center on the Educational Quality of the Workforce (EQW), a nonprofit research group, fully funded the survey. All U.S. manufacturing and nonmanufacturing establishments with 20 or more employees, except agriculture and government establishments. A major finding was that, in the early 1990's, increased worker training and education raised business productivity more than comparably increased hours worked or capital equipment. The NES was a one-time survey primarily covering conditions in 1993, with a follow-up covering 1995 conducted in 1996. Primary data collection began in August 1994 and continued for about 8 weeks; data collected were mostly for activities taking place in the prior calendar year but included some information for earlier years. Data on employers is now available in the Annual Business Survey.
Detailed Methodology
The sample was evenly divided between manufacturers and non-manufacturers, with explicit oversampling of establishments that have 100 or more employees and implicit oversampling of manufacturers because they are greatly outnumbered by non-manufacturers in the Busines Register universe. Sampling was adequate to produce regression panels for 10 NAICS-based manufacturing categories and 11 non-manufacturing categories. Each NAICS-based category was stratified into 5 establishment size classes and the regression model could calculate relationships by establishment size class.
Data were collected on four topics: employees and employment, employee training, business characteristics, and equipment and technology. Employees and employment included number of employees, work week, pay, benefits, supervision, hiring practices and union representation. Employee training included organization, purposes, formal and informal programs, duration, trainees and effectiveness. Business characteristics included year operations began, company and establishment size, principal product and exports. Equipment and technology included capital assets, recent investments, age of equipment, use of computers and research activities.
The survey was conducted using a a computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI) survey of 3,100 establishments, supplemented by historical census and survey performance (productivity) measures for most manufacturing establishments. Establishments were randomly selected from the Business Register (BR) and placed in industry-based panels that would support regression estimates by business size and type of activity. Historical performance measures were obtained from the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD). Respondents received an introductory letter describing the survey but, because this was a telephone survey, no printed forms were sent.