Employer & Employee Relations (AQA A Level Business): Exam Questions

Source A: Royal Mail

Royal Mail delivers letters and parcels to every address in the United Kingdom. It is part of International Distribution Services, which also owns the European parcel business GLS and which employed 153 552 people in 2024 and had revenue of £12 679 million. Around 85 000 of Royal Mail's people are postal delivery workers, and the business takes on about 16 000 extra temporary workers each year between late October and January to cope with the Christmas rush.

In June 2025 the company stopped being a public limited company listed on the stock market. EP Group, controlled by the Czech businessman Daniel Křetínský, completed a £3.6 billion takeover that the UK government had approved in December 2024 and that became unconditional on 30 April 2025.

Most of Royal Mail's people belong to the Communication Workers Union, and relations with that union have been difficult. Strikes ran from August to December 2022, and before the two sides returned to talks Royal Mail said it was losing up to £1 million a day. The dispute ended in July 2023 with a three-year deal worth a 10% pay increase and a £500 one-off payment, accepted by 76% of those who voted on a 67% turnout.

A second three-year deal followed on 3 July 2025: 4.2% in 2025, then increases linked to the Consumer Prices Index of at least 2% in 2026 and at least 2% in 2027, worth more than 8% in total and backdated to 1 April 2025. The company also promised no compulsory redundancies for the life of the deal.

Service quality remains a problem. In October 2025 the regulator Ofcom fined Royal Mail £21 million for missing its delivery targets in 2024/25, the third year in a row it had been fined. The fine was reduced from £30 million because the company admitted liability and settled. Royal Mail returned to profit in 2024/25, reporting £12 million.

Source: International Distribution Services, Ofcom and Communication Workers Union announcements, 2022 to 2026

Appendix A: Royal Mail and the Communication Workers Union, 2022 to 2025

Source: company and union announcements

Appendix B: Selected data for Royal Mail and International Distribution Services

Source: International Distribution Services and Ofcom

Assess the impact of Royal Mail's relationship with the Communication Workers Union on its financial performance.

Source A: Revolut

Revolut is a digital bank. It has no branches: customers open an account on their phone, usually in minutes, and use it to spend, send and exchange money. It was founded in London in 2015 by Nik Storonsky and has grown faster than almost any European business of its size.

The numbers are remarkable. In 2024 it had 52.5 million retail customers, up 38%, revenue of £3.1 billion, up 72%, and net profit of £790 million. In 2025 customers rose another 30% to 68.3 million, group revenue rose 46% to 6.0 billion US dollars and profit before tax reached 2.3 billion US dollars, a profit margin of 38%. A fundraising in 2025 valued the company at 75 billion US dollars. The workforce passed 10 000 in April 2024 and reached 12 200 during 2025.

That growth has been built on a demanding set of stated values. Revolut tells its people to “get it done” and to “never settle”, alongside “deliver wow”, “think deeper” and “dream team”. Performance is measured against quarterly targets, and the company says the values are not posters on a wall but the basis on which people are hired, promoted and let go.

The culture that produces those results also attracts criticism. On the review site Glassdoor, 76% of employees say they would recommend Revolut to a friend, but the company scores 3.6 out of 5 for work-life balance and 3.8 for culture and values. A number of reviews describe meetings in which people are humiliated, managers who lack interpersonal skills, and so heavy a focus on quarterly targets that employees lose sight of anything else. Commentators have questioned whether people who are overworked and burnt out can be expected to be good colleagues, and the chief executive's management style has been criticised for creating long hours and high staff turnover.

Revolut has begun work on changing parts of its culture while insisting that the high-performance core of it stays.

Source: Revolut annual report 2024, Revolut results announcements 2025, and published reviews

Appendix B: Revolut's stated values and what employees say

Source: Revolut and published reviews

Appendix C: Revolut's workforce

Source: Analyst

Assess the impact of Revolut's relationship with its employees on its costs.

Calculate Revolut's employee turnover in 2025 to support your answer.

Source A: Amazon UK

Amazon runs a network of fulfilment centres across the United Kingdom, where orders are picked, packed and despatched. One of the largest is BHX4 in Coventry, which employs about 3 000 people.

In January 2023 workers at BHX4 held the first strike at any Amazon site in the United Kingdom. Over the following eighteen months the GMB union signed up members there and applied for statutory recognition, which would have obliged Amazon to negotiate pay with the union rather than setting it alone. It would have been the first such agreement at any Amazon site in the country.

The ballot ran from 8 to 15 July 2024. Around 2 600 people voted. 49.5% voted in favour of recognition, and the union lost by 28 votes.

The weeks before the ballot were not quiet. The GMB said Amazon ran a sustained campaign against recognition: messages on screens around the site, posters in the toilets, managers brought in from other sites to talk to staff about what a union would mean, and QR codes in the canteens linking to a page for cancelling GMB membership. Amazon has said it respects employees' right to choose and prefers to deal with its people directly, pointing to its pay rates and the fact that it reviews them each year without being obliged to.

The union's main demand was a minimum of £15 an hour. Amazon's pay at the site at the time of the ballot was below that.

Amazon now has to decide what to do next, knowing that half the people who voted wanted a union and that another application can be made.

Source: GMB and Amazon statements and press reports, 2023 to 2026

Appendix A: The Coventry recognition ballot

Source: GMB and Amazon statements and press reports

Appendix B: Pay at the Coventry site

Source: Analyst

Assess the impact on Amazon of nearly half of those voting wanting a union at the Coventry site.

Source A: Patagonia

Patagonia makes outdoor clothing and equipment, and has spent fifty years arguing that people should buy less of it. It employs about 4 000 people worldwide, repairs what it has already sold through its Worn Wear programme, and has given 1% of its sales to grassroots environmental groups every year since 1985.

In September 2022 its founder, Yvon Chouinard, gave the company away. All the voting shares, which are 2% of the company, went to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, which exists to hold the company to its values. All the non-voting shares, the other 98%, went to the Holdfast Collective, a non-profit organisation that uses the money to fight the environmental crisis. The company was valued at about 3 billion US dollars at the time. Patagonia's own statement was short: Earth is now our only shareholder.

The culture inside the company is as unusual as the ownership. There has been childcare on site at head office for more than thirty years. Employees may take time out of the working day when the surf is up or the snow is good, on the understanding that the work still gets done. Very few people leave: about four in every hundred each year, against roughly thirteen in a hundred across retail and consumer products.

None of this removes the contradiction at the centre of the business. Patagonia sells clothing, and making clothing uses materials and energy. One per cent of sales goes to protecting nature; the other ninety-nine per cent goes on running a clothing company that would rather its customers mended what they already own.

Source: Patagonia Works

Appendix B: Patagonia compared with its sector

Source: Analyst

Appendix C: What Patagonia stands for, and what cuts against it

Source: Analyst

Assess how well Patagonia involves its employees in the decisions that affect them.

Source A: Dalmuir Shipworks Ltd

Dalmuir Shipworks Ltd repairs ships and offshore vessels in three dry berths on the Clyde. The yard has been working for ninety-six years, employs 290 people and had revenue of £42.8 million in the year to March 2025, with an operating profit of £2.3 million.

Seventy-eight per cent of the workforce is in the union, which appoints six safety representatives. They stopped work twenty-three times last year. There is a written safety procedure signed off with the union, nine reportable injuries were recorded, and 435 working days were lost to injury.

Because the yard employs more than 250 people it has to publish its gender pay gap, and the figures are uncomfortable reading. Thirty-two of the 290 employees are women, which is 11%. The median hourly rate for men is £19.20 and for women £16.32. Women make up 24% of the lowest-paid quarter of employees and 2% of the highest-paid quarter. None of the fourteen supervisors is a woman, and men are far more likely than women to receive a bonus.

The commercial problem is different and just as hard. The three berths are only full three days in four. A third of the yard's revenue comes from work that arrives at short notice, which is exactly the work that needs an empty berth, and the only ways of filling the gaps are to work through the night or to stop taking short-notice jobs at all.

The board is reviewing both the pay figures and the berths this spring.

Source: Dalmuir Shipworks Ltd

Appendix A: Dalmuir Shipworks Ltd selected data, year to March 2025

Source: Dalmuir Shipworks Ltd

Appendix C: How the yard works, and what lost time costs

Source: Analyst

Assess the value to Dalmuir Shipworks Ltd of recognising a union in its yard.

Source A: Revolut

Revolut is a digital bank. It has no branches: customers open an account on their phone, usually in minutes, and use it to spend, send and exchange money. It was founded in London in 2015 by Nik Storonsky and has grown faster than almost any European business of its size.

The numbers are remarkable. In 2024 it had 52.5 million retail customers, up 38%, revenue of £3.1 billion, up 72%, and net profit of £790 million. In 2025 customers rose another 30% to 68.3 million, group revenue rose 46% to 6.0 billion US dollars and profit before tax reached 2.3 billion US dollars, a profit margin of 38%. A fundraising in 2025 valued the company at 75 billion US dollars. The workforce passed 10 000 in April 2024 and reached 12 200 during 2025.

That growth has been built on a demanding set of stated values. Revolut tells its people to “get it done” and to “never settle”, alongside “deliver wow”, “think deeper” and “dream team”. Performance is measured against quarterly targets, and the company says the values are not posters on a wall but the basis on which people are hired, promoted and let go.

The culture that produces those results also attracts criticism. On the review site Glassdoor, 76% of employees say they would recommend Revolut to a friend, but the company scores 3.6 out of 5 for work-life balance and 3.8 for culture and values. A number of reviews describe meetings in which people are humiliated, managers who lack interpersonal skills, and so heavy a focus on quarterly targets that employees lose sight of anything else. Commentators have questioned whether people who are overworked and burnt out can be expected to be good colleagues, and the chief executive's management style has been criticised for creating long hours and high staff turnover.

Revolut has begun work on changing parts of its culture while insisting that the high-performance core of it stays.

Source: Revolut annual report 2024, Revolut results announcements 2025, and published reviews

Appendix C: Revolut's workforce

Source: Analyst

Appendix D: Two ways of changing Revolut's culture

Source: Analyst

Revolut is considering two ways of changing its culture:

Option 1: keep the five values but change how managers are measured

Option 2: replace the quarterly target system with half-yearly goals

Evaluate both options and recommend which one Revolut should choose.

Calculate the annual cost of replacing the employees who left in 2025 to support your answer.

Source A: Patagonia

Patagonia makes outdoor clothing and equipment, and has spent fifty years arguing that people should buy less of it. It employs about 4 000 people worldwide, repairs what it has already sold through its Worn Wear programme, and has given 1% of its sales to grassroots environmental groups every year since 1985.

In September 2022 its founder, Yvon Chouinard, gave the company away. All the voting shares, which are 2% of the company, went to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, which exists to hold the company to its values. All the non-voting shares, the other 98%, went to the Holdfast Collective, a non-profit organisation that uses the money to fight the environmental crisis. The company was valued at about 3 billion US dollars at the time. Patagonia's own statement was short: Earth is now our only shareholder.

The culture inside the company is as unusual as the ownership. There has been childcare on site at head office for more than thirty years. Employees may take time out of the working day when the surf is up or the snow is good, on the understanding that the work still gets done. Very few people leave: about four in every hundred each year, against roughly thirteen in a hundred across retail and consumer products.

None of this removes the contradiction at the centre of the business. Patagonia sells clothing, and making clothing uses materials and energy. One per cent of sales goes to protecting nature; the other ninety-nine per cent goes on running a clothing company that would rather its customers mended what they already own.

Source: Patagonia Works

Appendix B: Patagonia compared with its sector

Source: Analyst

Appendix C: What Patagonia stands for, and what cuts against it

Source: Analyst

Appendix D: Two ways of giving employees more say

Source: Analyst

Patagonia is considering two ways of giving its employees more say:

Option 1: an elected employee forum with two seats on the board

Option 2: a yearly vote on how the 1% donation is spent

Evaluate both options and recommend which one Patagonia should choose.

Calculate the cost for each employee reached under Option 1 to support your answer.

Source A: Caledon Rail Services Ltd

Caledon Rail Services Ltd maintains track, signalling cabling and lineside structures under nine contracts across central Scotland. It employs 260 people, had revenue of £31.4 million in the year to March 2025 and an operating profit of £1.18 million.

Of those 260, 196 work trackside, mostly at night and in all weathers. The other 64 are managers and office staff. The median trackside wage is £34 600 and the median management salary is £52 800, so a manager earns about one and a half times what the people on the track earn.

Last September the union asked for 7.5%. Caledon offered 2.0%, explaining that its largest contract is fixed-price and runs for two more years. In November the trackside staff voted for industrial action, and in December the company improved its offer to 3.0%. Neither side moved after that, and in February there were four days of industrial action, the first in eleven years.

What the union keeps returning to is not only the percentage. The trackside rate at Caledon is below the median for the sector while the management rate is above it, and the company has no written code setting out how a dispute should be handled and no employee forum separate from the union. Everything has gone through seven meetings and a ballot.

Talks resumed in March with a conciliation service in the room, and the board has to decide what it is prepared to pay.

Source: Caledon Rail Services Ltd

Appendix C: How the dispute has run

Source: Caledon Rail Services Ltd

Appendix D: Two ways of settling the dispute

Operating profit £1.18m. The union's claim is 7.5%.

Source: Analyst

Caledon Rail Services Ltd is considering two ways of settling the dispute:

Option 1: pay the 3.0% already offered and hold firm

Option 2: pay 5.0% to trackside staff only

Evaluate both options and recommend which one Caledon Rail Services Ltd should choose.

Calculate Caledon Rail Services Ltd's operating profit margin under Option 1 to support your answer.