Employee Earnings and Hours Survey  

The EEH Survey

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Employee Earnings and Hours Survey (the EEH Survey) is an employer-based survey conducted once every two years, providing detailed statistics on the composition and distribution of employee earnings and paid hours of work. Since 2000, the survey has been the primary ABS data source on methods of setting pay including awards, collective agreements and individual arrangements.

Advantages of the EEH Survey

Although the EEH Survey is only conducted once every two years, it has a number of key advantages over other data sources used to measure the gender pay gap in Australia, including the most widely known source, the quarterly Average Weekly Earnings Survey (the AWE Survey). For example, the EEH Survey is the only source of ABS data on pay-setting arrangements.

Another key advantage of the EEH Survey compared with other ABS sources of earnings data, including the Employee Earnings Benefits and Trade Union Membership Survey (EEBTUM Survey) and the Survey of Income and Housing Costs (SIHC) is that, like the AWE Survey, it is a survey of employers. This means, essentially, that the data is generally taken directly from pay-roll systems. As such, both the EEH and AWE surveys are considered to be more reliable and accurate than the EEBTUM Survey and the SIHC, which as household surveys are both prone to problems of respondent recall.

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A third major advantage of the EEH Survey is that the data are highly disaggregated allowing for measures of the gender pay gap to be derived that would not be possible using the AWE Survey. These measures include, in particular, a set based on hourly, in addition to, weekly earnings. The use of hourly measures is a key consideration in measuring the overall gender pay gap, as women generally tend to work fewer hours than men, even when restricted to full-time employees, and this can distort estimates of the gap making them appear bigger than they otherwise would be. While it is possible to derive hourly measures of the gap from the AWE Survey, based on hours worked data from the ABS Labour Force Survey, the combination of data from the two surveys with different sampling methodologies, makes such measures less reliable than those obtained directly from the EEH Survey.

Finally, in addition to providing data that allows for measures of the gender pay gap to be derived on either an hourly or weekly basis for standard categories such as industry and state and territory, the EEH Survey also includes data on earnings by occupation, which are not included in the AWE Survey.

Methods of setting pay

The method of setting pay data in the EEH Survey include data on awards, collective agreements, unregistered individual arrangements and registered individual agreements. The individual arrangements category includes unregistered individual contracts, letters of offer, common law contracts, over-award payments and working proprietors. The registered individual agreements category includes both federal and state registered individual agreements. As the number of state registered individual agreements is considered to be relatively small, compared with those in the federal jurisdiction, that is Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs), the registered individual agreement category is generally taken to be a measure of AWAs.

Data by method of setting pay has been collected as part of the EEH Survey since 2000. While normally conducted in May, the survey was delayed in 2008, until August. Accordingly, the timeframe between the latest two surveys is May 2006 and August 2008.