CHAPTER ONE


Canada’s Training System in Outline

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you will be able to:

      Define labour-market training and explain why it occurs.

      Identify how the interests of training stakeholders converge and conflict.

      Define access to, control of, and benefit from training and explain why these dimensions are analytically important.

Fear of the economic consequences of a skill and labour shortage is a recurring theme in Canadian newspapers and television reports. For example, a 2016 report by the Information and Communication Technology Council warned, “If Canada does not address the talent and skills gap, it could cost the economy billions of dollars in lost productivity, tax revenues, and gross domestic product.”1 The remedies proposed by this industry lobby group are typical and include mandatory computer science classes for school children, the reduction of barriers to labour force entry for women and other traditionally excluded workers, and tax breaks to encourage employer-sponsored training.2

That same year, the Canadian Agricultural Human Resources Council predicted a shortfall of 17,000 farm workers in the prairie grain-and-oilseed industry by 2025. This projected labour shortage could lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in lost product sales, opined the industry lobby group. Its proposed solution to the aging farm labour force was to allow prairie farmers better access to temporary foreign workers.3 Neither report engaged with the rather obvious possibility that employers providing better wages and working conditions might help attract workers to these industries and thereby reduce or avoid the projected shortages.

Many commentators question the accuracy of employer claims about skill and labour shortages, noting that they are often self-serving and based on poor evidence.4 But, faced with seemingly endless corporate hand-wringing, the media tends to focus on laying blame for these shortages. Governments and educational institutions are characterized as out of touch with the needs of employers. And students and workers are said to be too ill-informed, naïve, or lazy to get the training they need to be competitive in the labour market. Mostly ignored in this discourse is the low and continually declining level of employer-sponsored training.

The overall impression left by these discussions is that the Canadian labour-market training system is broken because it is unable to supply an adequate pool of appropriately skilled workers to industry.5 This book examines the key forms of labour-market training in Canada and asks whether this criticism of the system is warranted and true. A good place to start is asking whether a coherent and functional training system is a reasonable expectation for anyone to have.

Systems and Metaphors

We often reflexively consider a system as a collection of parts that operate together to achieve a goal. For example, a car’s subsystems—the engine, transmission, and steering—all work together so we can get where we want to go. If we examine the four main components of Canada’s training system—post-secondary education (PSE), government training and immigration policies, workplace training, and community education—through the lens of this mechanical metaphor, we’ll see that Canada does not have an integrated training system. Rather, Canada’s training “system” is a collection of mismatched parts that are constantly changing and often working towards different (and sometimes conflicting) goals. Not surprisingly, this training “system” seems to fall short of its putative goal of an adequately trained workforce.

So, does that mean Canada’s labour-market training system is broken? Maybe. But it might also mean that thinking about the Canadian training system as a machine is wrong-headed. There are many other metaphors for systems besides the organization as machine. For example, we might think about organizations as biological organisms, which have needs and imperatives of their own. Or we might view organizations as cultures, which have developed specific ways of seeing the world and of behaving within it. In short, the lens through which we choose to view the world affects what we see, what we don’t, and what behaviour and outcomes we expect and desire.6

This book uses a political metaphor to understand the Canadian labour-market training system. A political system is one wherein groups of actors seek to advance their interests. These interests sometimes converge and sometimes conflict. Where there is conflict, different groups will seek to exert power in order to achieve their goals (often at the expense of other groups). Considering how power and differing interests shape labour-market training in Canada reveals that there is an underlying logic to the existing training system. Over the six chapters of this book, we’ll see that Canada’s seemingly ad hoc and dysfunctional training “system” serves to stabilize and replicate a class-stratified social and economic system.

Stabilization and replication of a system riven with conflict can occur in a number of ways. Sometimes a government will intervene with legislation or money in order to prevent conflict or disruption. Other times, actors may use rhetorical strategies to manage discontent. For example, employers may assert that workers can better their lives by undertaking training. This draws attention away from other ways workers could improve their lives, such as by seeking social, economic, or political change. Prioritizing social stability and replication may sometimes interfere with the training system’s ability to ensure there is an adequately trained labour force. For example, allowing students to choose the post-secondary program they want to enroll in (a reasonable expectation by students in a democratic society) may result in skill mismatches. The training system’s components and how they interact with one another reflect that training—like most other aspects of employment in Canada—is contested terrain.

Training, Education, and Learning

Training is the process of intentionally acquiring, modifying, or reinforcing knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) as well as values and preferences. The intentionality of training distinguishes it from the broader process of learning. That is to say, we undertake training with the explicit goal of learning something and, thereby, becoming more capable. Of course, the world isn’t as neat and tidy as that. For example, we may go seek out information about how to paint a landscape and practise doing so. During this training, we may also learn other things unintentionally (or even unconsciously), such as how the colour of objects appears to become lighter as the distance to them increases.

The terms “training” and “education” are often used interchangeably. Both training and education entail acquiring, modifying, or reinforcing KSAs. So is there a difference? Perhaps not. Yet, imagine how your expectations might differ between two classes, one advertised as “sex education” and the other as “sex training.” Clearly, there is some sort of widely held qualitative difference between training and education.7 This difference centres on the tendency of training to develop KSAs for immediate use and perhaps with a greater vocational (or performance) focus. This stands in contrast with the longer-term, intellectual, and perhaps intrinsic-reward focus of education. That said, the dividing line between training and education is unclear, and the terms are often used interchangeably.

There are many forms of training. We may take a class, watch an online video, or do hands-on work with tools or machinery. We might also practise what we have learned, either on our own or with others. Indeed, training often entails cycling back and forth between learning something new and incorporating that learning into our daily practice. Training is also often framed as something that is done to others. For example, an employer may train a worker in the correct operation of a cash register. But we can also train ourselves. For example, confronted with a flat tire, we may figure out how put the spare tire on. In doing so, we have (quite intentionally) learned a new skill. This example also reveals that training doesn’t just occur in formal situations, such as a classroom or training program with formal learning objectives and curriculum. In fact, training can occur almost anywhere—the key characteristics of training are (1) an intentional effort to (2) improve our (or others’) capabilities (3) through learning.

The analysis in this book looks at Canada’s overall labour-market training system. Labour-market training is often defined fairly narrowly. For example, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) defines labour-market training as follows: “Labour market training measures are those undertaken for reasons of labour market policy, other than special programmes for youth and the disabled. Expenditures include both course costs and subsistence allowances to trainees, when such are paid. Subsidies to employers for enterprise training are also included, but not employer’s own expenses.”8

The OECD’s definition focuses on programming provided by the government (or “the state”) to operationalize labour-market policy. In this definition, apprenticeship programming is labour-market training because the state funds training at colleges and technical institutes as well as financially supports apprentices during training through the Employment Insurance (EI) system. Yet training offered by employers, trade unions, or professional regulatory bodies would be excluded from consideration.

Looking at the entire Canadian labour-market training system—including post-secondary education, government training and immigration policy, employer workplace training, and community-based education—provides a broader picture that allows us to better understand the interrelationships in the system. For example, as we saw in the opening vignette of this chapter, employer groups often seek to address skill and worker shortages via changes in immigration policy, rather than by offering training or improving the terms and conditions of work. For this reason, this book broadly defines labour-market training as policies, programs, and activities intended to result in an adequate number of appropriately trained workers.

Training, Employment, and the Labour Market

In considering the operation of the Canadian training system, it is important to have a basic understanding of Canadian employment relationships and the labour market. Employment—hiring a worker to do a job—is one way for employers to get work done. There are other ways to accomplish work. The use of slaves was common in the United States until only 150 years ago, for example, and Indigenous peoples in Canada have often been compelled by the federal government to work in order to receive income support.9 Employers might also use volunteers or a group of workers might get together to form a co-operative. And many employers now contract work out in order to avoid the obligations and costs of direct employment.10 But most work is still done by workers in an employment relationship.

An employment relationship is an economic relationship, wherein workers trade their time and skills to their employer in exchange for wages. Workers selling their capacity to work to an employer in the marketplace is sometimes called the commodification of labour. Routinely selling one’s labour as a commodity to others is a recent phenomenon and reflects that other pathways to accessing the necessities of life (e.g., agricultural work) have becoming largely inaccessible to most workers. In Canada, this exchange of labour for wages occurs in the context of a capitalist economy. A capitalist economy is system of production and exchange characterized by the private ownership of capital (i.e., money, land, equipment, and tools). Capitalists combine their capital with the efforts of workers (sometimes called “labour”) in order to produce goods and services that are sold in a marketplace in order to generate a profit.11

Box 1.1 unpacks the complexities of social class in capitalist economies. The notion that labour and capital have differing interests reflects a class-based analysis of society. In this approach, class refers to a group of individuals who share similar social, economic, educational, cultural and/or political characteristics. Such efforts to categorize individuals is always to some degree a subjective process (e.g., who really is a member of the middle class?) and can obscure intra-group differences. That said, grouping individuals together on the basis of certain characteristics (such as their respective roles in the production process) can often help us identify broad patterns and common interests that are otherwise somewhat hard to see. Box 1.1 presents a more nuanced examination of the capitalist class structure in Canada.

In an employment relationship, capitalists (or the managers they hire to run their businesses) have significant power to direct how work is performed. This power stems from the legal rules that have developed around employment. The common law of employment requires employees to be obedient or risk summary dismissal. Employers’ legal power is buttressed by their labour-market power. Basically, there are usually more workers than there are jobs, so workers always face the prospect of being replaced—thereby losing their ability to feed, clothe, and shelter their families—if they don’t follow their employers’ directions.

Various government programs developed in the middle of the twentieth century—such as Unemployment Insurance (renamed Employment Insurance in 1996), and other income support programs—allowed workers to (at least partially) resist this whip of hunger. Such alternate sources of income reduced employers’ labour-market power and increased their labour costs. Since the late 1970s, Canadian governments have moved to reduce access to social benefits, although this trend has occurred in fits and starts. Declining levels of income support have, in turn, pressured workers to sell their capacity to work on whatever terms employers are prepared to offer.13 As we’ll see in Chapter 2, these reductions in government spending have made it more difficult for workers to access some forms of labour-market training, given the rise in the costs associated with post-secondary education.

The relative ability of workers to resist employers’ demands is important because the interests of workers and employers often differ. In a capitalist economy, employers must profit or they will go out of business. This profit imperative pressures employers to minimize costs. Labour is expensive and employers often seek to intensify work—getting workers to complete more work per hour—in order to minimize labour costs. Such management efforts can run contrary to workers’ interests. Workers typically want to maximize their wages as well as control how and how hard they work—the opposite of what most employers want. Employers’ greater legal and labour-market power means that employers’ interests tend to prevail. What this tells us is that employment is not only an economic relationship but also a social one. By accepting employment, workers accept the employer’s authority and agree (however grudgingly) to do as they are told—even when doing so runs contrary to their own interests.14

Employment relationships are formed in a labour market. Historically, labour markets were physical places where employers sized up potential workers, sometimes by physically poking and prodding them. Employers and workers would then negotiate wages. Wage rates were determined by the supply of and demand for workers. Modern-day labour markets are more often imaginary places where employers find workers to perform jobs, screening potential workers based on their education, experience, and the results of standardized tests.

Yet, there remain striking similarities between historical and contemporary labour markets. Employers and workers each try to achieve the best bargain that they can, and the price of work is greatly influenced by supply and demand (see Box 1.2 for an explanation of how labour markets operate). When the demand for workers outstrips the supply, wage rates typically rise (this is often called a tight labour market). And when the supply of workers exceeds demand, wages normally fall (this is called a loose labour market). There are, however, a number of constraints on wages. For example, employment contracts, collective agreements, and legislation may fix wage rates and thereby shape the wage rate independently of supply and demand.15

While we often talk about “the labour market,” there are actually many labour markets in Canada. Most labour markets have a geographical element to them. For example, the potential pool of workers for low-paying retail jobs may be limited to those workers who live within reasonable commuting distance of a specific workplace. Other labour markets may centre on specific qualifications or skills, such as holding the professional designation required to be nurse or being able to operate a crane. Geographical proximity may be less important in these labour markets. The relative scarcity of such workers may cause employers to look further afield to hire. And the higher wages associated with such jobs may mean workers are prepared to relocate to take a job.

Workers may also commute significant distances to take such jobs. Canadians often commute between municipalities and sometimes provinces. Workers travelling to undertake employment are engaged in employment-related geographic mobility. The propensity for long-distance commuting is higher among men, younger workers, workers in Newfoundland and Labrador, and workers in specific industries, such as mining or the oil and gas industry.16 These trends are evident in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Local employers, who were operating in a boom-and-bust economy based on extracting bitumen oil, met their seemingly insatiable demand for skilled workers during the first decade of this century by using fly-in-fly-out workers. These workers would commute from distant homes (often in Atlantic Canada) for two- or three-week stretches of work (often living in employer-operated work camps) before returning home.

As noted in Box 1.2, the supply of workers in the labour market is not fixed. Workers, employers, and the government respond to signals from the labour market. Imagine an occupation with unmet demand that results in wage increases. Trained workers may return to the labour force or geographically migrate to take such high-wage jobs. Untrained workers may also seek to become qualified for such jobs. Indeed, employers may offer to train workers (or pressure governments to do so) in the hope that an increase in the number of trained workers will reduce their wage costs. Employers may also consider substituting capital (e.g., machinery) for workers to reduce demand for workers. This tells us that, for employers, the goal of the labour-market training system is having available an adequate number of appropriately trained workers at the lowest possible cost.

Alternately, employers may redesign jobs to require less skill, in the expectation that this will increase the pool of potential workers. Consider how the job of a cashier has changed over time, as scanners and electronic tills have reduced the memory and computation skills required of workers. Deskilling work is not the only reason stores have implemented scanner systems. These systems also speed up cashiers’ work, facilitate better inventory control, and allow just-in-time ordering that reduce on-site storage space requirements. But reducing wages through deskilling has played a role.17

Employers may also lobby governments to increase the ease with which employers can bring appropriately skilled immigrant or temporary foreign workers into the country. Accessing migrant workers can loosen a tight labour market. Foreign workers may also be more productive than domestic workers, reflecting that they are often younger, highly motivated to work long hours, and less able to resist work intensification by employers.18 For their parts, governments often intervene to address shortages of trained workers. Historically, governments have funded a variety of training schemes, such as post-secondary institutions and apprenticeship training systems. Governments can also adjust labour-market policy to provide training and motivate workers to take it.

While workers often participate in training for vocational reasons, this is not necessarily their only or most important motive. Cyril Houle’s examination of the reasons adults participate in education revealed three underlying motivational factors. Goal-oriented learners saw education as a means to achieve an end, be it in their work or personal lives. Activity-oriented learners saw education as a social activity. And learning-oriented workers were seeking knowledge for its own sake. Learners may, of course, have multiple reasons for undertaking training. A worker may hope that training will qualify her for a better job but may also enjoy that training provides a break from her everyday routine and a chance to socialize with her co-workers.19

Similarly, training providers may have motives beyond developing workers’ skills. Community groups, such as unions, may provide health-and-safety training because they have a moral commitment to undertake such work. They may also view such work as a way to build member interest and loyalty as well as possibly political support for legislative change or workplace action. Governments may seek to develop citizens’ basic literacy, numeracy, and computer skills (all of which have utility in the labour market) because individuals need such skills to successfully manage their day-to-day lives—an outcome that also enhances social stability and the legitimacy of a government.

Government Regulation of the Labour Market

It is also necessary to understand how government works in order to grasp why governments intervene in the labour market and in the training system as they do. While we often refer to a generalized “government” or “government policy,” neither is monolithic. In Canada, there are different orders (or levels) of government. In terms of labour-market training, the two most important orders of government are (1) the federal government and (2) the provincial and territorial governments.

The authority granted each order of government by the constitution shapes how these governments intervene in matters of labour-market training. Canada’s constitution grants different orders of government control over different fields of policy that are related to the labour market and training. On some issues, the federal government is predominant while, on others, provincial and territorial governments are predominant. And, in some cases, there is shared or parallel authority. These different arrangements are summarized in Table 1.1.

In practice, the provinces and territories (the PTs) deliver most labour-market training. Provinces and territories have virtually total control over the operation of their post-secondary systems (which fall within their jurisdiction). Much of the non-PSE labour-market training that the PTs deliver is shaped by agreements with the federal government, in part because much of the funding for this work comes from the federal government. Specific funding arrangements are discussed in detail in Chapter 3. Both federal government funding and its control over the Employment Insurance system has resulted in the development of broadly similar training regimes across the country. Governments have also created various mechanisms for intergovernmental coordination, such as the Forum of Labour Market Ministers (FLMM), but the effectiveness of such efforts has been limited.20 A key source of diversity among the PTs is the unique history of and political arrangements in Québec.21 A second source of diversity is economic differences among the PTs (e.g., the decline of the fisheries and coal mining in Atlantic Canada and manufacturing in Ontario, the boom-and-bust nature of Alberta’s petroleum-based economy) that create pressure for different kinds of labour-market training interventions.

Table 1.1  Jurisdiction of labour-market policy

Source: Adapted from Haddow, R. and Klassen, T. Partisanship, Globalization and Canadian Labour Market Policy.

As we examine the responses of PTs to these sorts of pressures, it is important to be cognizant that PTs are also not monolithic. Within each provincial and territorial government, there are different departments (e.g., post-secondary education, social assistance) that may have different training stakeholders, objectives, and mechanisms that can spark policy diversity and even intragovernmental conflict. It is also important to be mindful of the differing interests of politicians (who set policy and come and go with the electoral cycle) and public servants (who enact policy and often have lengthy tenures). Differing perspectives and priorities can often result in discrepancies between the policies that are set and the programs that are delivered.

Finally, it is important to note that government policy is not necessarily stable over time. Some changes reflect broad policy shifts, such as the move from Keynesian to neoliberal economic policies detailed in Box 1.3. Other changes reflect short-term policy changes following the election of a new government or shifting priorities. Chapter 3 examines some of the more recent changes in government training and immigration policy.

Stakeholders and Their Interests

The Canadian training system has three main stakeholder groups: workers, employers, and the state. At a high level, all three groups benefit from labour-market training, which is one component of the reproduction of labour power. The reproduction of labour power refers to the various tasks that must be accomplished in order to maintain a class of workers. These activities include the very obviously reproductive activity of bearing and raising children. For example, someone (usually women) must perform (usually for free) the day-to-day tasks associated with keeping house and home, such as cooking, cleaning, and providing child care and eldercare. And, of course, a working class needs to have an adequate repertoire of KSAs in order to perform work, which requires education and training. Less obviously, workers must also accept the inequities of capitalism and their place within it.

Employers require a certain number of appropriately trained workers in order to get work done. Consistent with the profit imperative, employers benefit when the cost of training is borne by someone else, such as workers, the state, or even other employers. Employers also benefit when the supply of qualified workers exceeds their needs because this tends to depress wages (thereby lowering labour costs). This, in turn, suggests that it is in employers’ economic interests to claim there is a skills shortage. This self-interest should make us cautious about employer claims about skills shortages. For example, rather than making jobs more attractive or increasing their training efforts, employers have systematically restructured work to make it more precarious.

Precarious work is “paid work characterized by limited social benefits and statutory entitlements, job insecurity, low wages and high risks of ill health.”24 Precarious work directly benefits employers by reducing their upfront labour costs (or, rather, transferring these costs to the workers in the form of greater insecurity) and has increased significantly over the past twenty years.25 The long-term economic and health consequences of precarious employment for workers (which PSE can help workers to avoid) make post-secondary education desirable. Training can also be a means of career advancement for workers and can increase their job security and control over their work. In this way, precarious work can also indirectly reduce employers’ costs by externalizing the cost of training on workers.

The state has two main (and sometimes competing) interests in capitalist societies: maintaining the processes of production and social reproduction. Production is the process by which we make stuff (including profit). Social reproduction is the process that perpetuates the social arrangements necessary for economic production. This includes ensuring there are workers and consumers. It also means ensuring workers accept being subordinate to employers in the production process.26 Training is one way the state maintains the social-reproduction process. Developing workers’ KSAs contributes to the reproduction of labour power, which is a necessary condition for the perpetuation of production. The notion that workers can, through the acquisition of KSAs, improve their positions in society helps to frame worker dissatisfaction with their place in the production system as remediable via self-improvement (rather than political, social, or economic reform).

Training providers—such as private companies, post-secondary institutions, and not-for-profit organizations—are also stakeholder groups in the training system. Training providers typically have less ability to influence the shape of the training system than do governments and employers. Indeed, they are frequently clients of, or otherwise dependent upon, the state or employers. In this way, they tend to be minor actors in shaping the training system. For these reasons, the interests of training providers are dealt with in more detail in the chapters that follow.

The potentially conflicting interests of key stakeholders suggest there is more to training than it simply being one way that individuals can improve their skills, thereby advancing themselves and society as a whole. The position taken by this book is that training may be more usefully understood as part of a system designed to maintain the status quo. The KSAs, values, and preferences that are conveyed in training typically seek to reinforce the operation of organizations and, more broadly, society: there is no profit in training workers to be critical of the system or to act disruptively. The fact that training does allow (some) workers to improve their life circumstances legitimizes existing social, economic, and political arrangements. But this process of individual advancement and selection also serves as a means of selecting out disruptive workers.27 In this way, non-participation may reflect more than just the barriers workers face to accessing training—non-participation may also be an act of intentional resistance by workers.28

Conflicts among the interests of labour, capital, and the state are most visible in three areas of training:

1. Who determines which workers can access training and how?
2. Who controls the content of training and how?
3. Who benefits from the training and how?

How these conflicts emerge and are managed in PSE, training and immigration policy, workplace training, and community education are addressed in the respective chapters that follow; however, a brief examination of each issue is useful.

Access to Training

One of three recurring questions in this book is, Who determines which workers access training and how do they do so? This question matters because training is unequally and inequitably distributed along several different dimensions. For example, while men and women undertake formal studies or training at similar rates (36.2 per cent and 35.9 per cent respectively), men are more likely to receive employer support for doing so (54.6 per cent versus 48.0 per cent for women).29 This gender difference becomes even starker when we look at employer-supported training for low-wage workers and less-educated workers. Gendered access to training reflects broader patterns of gender-based discrimination in the labour force, such as the persistent wage gap between men and women who perform similar work.30

Gender is not, of course, the only identity factor that affects access to training. Workers with university degrees typically participate in subsequent formal work-related training at three times the rate of workers without high school diplomas. Unionized workers are also 50 per cent more likely to participate in workplace learning than non-unionized workers.31 Similar differences can be discerned on the basis of age, language, location (e.g., urban versus rural), heritage (which is sometimes called culture, ethnicity, or race), and income. We will pay specific attention to the experiences of Indigenous workers throughout this book.

The complex interaction of these identity factors causes overlapping and interdependent systems of disadvantage, a phenomenon that is referred to as intersectionality. Being aware of the cumulative effect of each person’s various social identities allows us to better understand the sometimes nuanced effect of intersecting identity factors. For example, the labour-market and training experiences of rural and urban women or the experiences of workers from the same cultural group—one with secure employment and one employed precariously—may be quite different.

The differing levels of access to training experienced by workers based upon their identities also suggest that training serves to reproduce a particular pattern of advantage and disadvantage. This is easiest to see if we look at the tendency of university-educated workers (who often already earn higher incomes and have more stable employment) to command the greatest access to additional training. Essentially, the allocation of training opportunities (through whatever means) helps the already well off in society to maintain their position of privilege. If we add in another personal characteristic (such as gender), we find that the difference in access experienced by university-educated and non-university-educated workers grows—to the advantage of university-educated men and to the disadvantage of non-university-educated women.

Access to training is often examined in terms of the barriers that workers face. For example, a 2003 Canadian study found the main worker-reported barriers to accessing job-related training were cost (45 per cent) and time. Regarding time, 35 per cent of workers indicated they were too busy at work, 27 per cent cited family responsibilities, and 27 per cent identified conflicts between work and training schedules.32 As noted in the earlier discussion of social reproduction, gender often shapes the barriers workers face, with men in this study being more likely to report that work demands are a barrier to training while women are more likely to cite family responsibilities.33

Yet, it is also useful to think about the various structural mechanisms that have an impact on access to training. As we’ll see in Chapter 2, access to PSE is controlled in several ways—such as entry requirements, enrollment caps, and tuition fees—and the policy decisions underlying them often reflect complex tradeoffs among the interests of stakeholder groups. Location can also be an issue, with rural and northern students having fewer locally available PSE options than urban and southern students. Access to training provided as part of government labour-market programs is generally controlled by governments via criteria such as EI eligibility. Such programs can also simply grant employers the power to determine who receives training, as in the case of the Canada Job Grant and the Québec training levy that we’ll examine in Chapter 3.

Employer control over access is clearest in workplace training. Chapter 4 looks at the various ways that employers may determine who gets what kind of training. Key trends in workplace training are declining employer support for training and a shift towards leadership training. We’ll conclude our look at access in Chapter 5 when we consider various forms of community education. Some forms of community education require membership—such as in a union. Other forms may have some form of participation fee (often cost recovery) or otherwise restrict access to specific categories of individuals, such as the unemployed or immigrants.

Control of Training

The second recurring question is, Who determines what training is available, and how do they do so? The question matters because stakeholders who control the content of training can (and do) use this control to advance their interests at the expense of the interests of other stakeholders. For example, an employer’s interest in minimizing costs and the risk of other employers poaching its staff may cause that employer to favour extremely employer-specific (i.e., non-portable) training. The employees, who likely view training as a way to get ahead, will likely want broader training so their skills are more transferrable to other jobs and employers. If the employer decides the content of the training, it will likely be short, narrowly focused, and designed to improve the employer’s bottom line. Chapter 4 highlights this trend in the form of declining employer investments in workplace training.

Of course, who controls the content of training and how they do so varies across the components of the training system. In PSE, governments may exert control by limiting which programs of study are offered and where. Governments can also shape enrollment in each program via operational and infrastructure funding. Institutions can broadly control the content of programs through regulations, while instructors can control the content of specific courses through pedagogical and course material decisions. Employer input varies depending upon the nature of the post-secondary education. In vocational training (such as the apprenticeship system), employers determine what is taught on the job and also shape classroom curriculum. Students have relatively little input into these PSE curricular decisions and may be reduced to voting with their feet.

Governments control the training provided through labour-market policy. As we saw above, policymakers’ decision-making is influenced by the sometimes competing demands of production and social reproduction. Literacy education offers an interesting example of how this plays out. Historically, improving literacy levels was viewed as a way to improve the social, political, and economic lives of Canadians. Programming was often provided at, or in association with, workplaces as well as through non-workplace, adult education programs.34 This broad framing of literacy work reflected the fact that federal and provincial literacy policy served multiple purposes that met the vocational and non-vocational needs of workers and employers. As we’ll see in Chapter 5, since the 1980s, literacy has increasingly been framed as a means to economic growth. This has profoundly reshaped what kind of and how literacy is taught in government-funded programs, which increasingly frame literacy as an individual responsibility and make funding conditional on a program’s return on investment.35

The content of community education is usually shaped by the values and goals of the group providing the education. Yet, the programs for which funding can be found and the outcomes required by funders place important constraints on what training is available. For example, the Alberta Workers’ Health Centre (which we’ll read about in Chapter 5) is a not-for-profit organization that uses theatre to educate teenagers about workplace dangers and rights. Students whose employers steal their wages or expose them to hazards can respond in a variety of ways, such as taking no action, quitting, complaining to the government, or organizing their fellow workers to take direct action against the employer. Some funders will be more comfortable than others with training that discusses direct-action options. This (dis)comfort may, in turn, constrain the content of the offered training. Overall, we see the importance of the golden rule (they who hold the gold make the rules) in the scope of training available to Canadians.

Benefits of Training

The final recurring question this book will examine is, Who benefits from training, and how do they do so? At a high level, the answers are obvious: workers get the KSAs required for jobs, employers get trained employees, and governments get social, economic, and political stability. Nevertheless, when we look deeper, we see that the return-on-investment logic that permeates discussions of training often focuses on shifting the cost of training from one group of stakeholders to another. Interestingly, these discussions often frame training in two competing and contradictory ways. Framing is the process of shaping public discourse through the selection, interpretation, and presentation of information. Sometimes the beneficiary of training is said to be individuals, and other times the beneficiary is said to be the public.

Framing the beneficiary of training as individual students and workers implies that training yields economic benefits primarily to workers. As Box 1.4 reveals, additional formal education clearly benefits workers. We’re less able to accurately identify and allocate the financial benefits of other forms of labour-market training among workers, employers, the state, or society. Nevertheless, framing individuals as the primary beneficiaries of training justifies off-loading training costs onto workers, by such means as increasing post-secondary tuition or reducing the availability of state-funded skills training for the unemployed. It also excuses employers’ declining investment in workplace training. Interestingly, while workers may be “consumers” of training, they have limited ability to influence what training is available: they can only opt in (if they can afford it) or opt out of whatever training is offered.

By contrast, framing the beneficiary of training as the broader public assumes that training contributes to the economic growth of the nation through the development of human capital. Human capital is said to be the cumulative stock of KSAs, intelligence, experience, and judgment of an individual or a population. Human capital theory asserts that human capital comprises a key input into the production process and that its utility can be maintained or increased through education and training. We’ll look more at this theory in Chapters 2 and 4.

If the beneficiaries of training are all Canadians, then the cost of training should be borne by public funding. But where does public funding come from? Public spending is mostly funded from various forms of taxes.42 Most tax revenue comes from personal income tax (49 per cent) and consumption taxes and duties (17 per cent). By contrast, corporate taxes comprise about 14 per cent of tax revenue.43 In effect, this “public good” framing of training facilitates and legitimizes the reduction in training costs paid directly by employers and capitalists, shifting it onto individuals through income and consumption taxes.

The transfer of production costs from employers to other groups (often called “externalizing cost”) is widespread. For example, the workers’ compensation system in each province and territory was created in order to provide stable, predictable, and immediate wage-loss benefits to injured workers. Employers pay insurance premiums to fund the cost of this system. There are good reasons to believe that, over time, employers have shifted the cost of workers’ compensation onto workers in the form of foregone wage increases.44 Other examples of employers externalizing production costs onto the public include polluting the environment (instead of employers remediating or eliminating pollution) and benefitting from publicly funded health care.

It is interesting to note (as we’ll see in Chapter 4) the wide agreement that Canadian employers spend little on training (compared to other countries) and that this spending is declining over time. Yet there is little public demand for, or government effort to require, greater employer spending on training. Giving employers a “pass” on providing adequate training may reflect the widespread adoption of a neoliberal view of society. Neoliberalism is a set of political and economic prescriptions that centre on minimizing government regulations, programs, and expenditures. In the resulting laissez-faire economy, the role of the state is to maintain order and provide infrastructure and services only when the market cannot. Workers are expected to earn their crust by finding work, and income support is reduced. As the primary beneficiary of training, workers are also expected to bear the cost of it.45

As we’ll see in Chapter 3, Canadian government training policies have increasingly become focused on supply-side measures, wherein the state seeks to fast-track workers into jobs through short-term training. This approach sits in contrast with previous demand-side measures, such as job-creation and economic-development programs. The shift towards supply-side solutions (and neoliberalism more generally) has coincided with an increasing concentration of income, education, and opportunities among the wealthiest group of citizens. This, in turn, suggests that externalizing the cost of training onto individuals reinforces and intensifies the existing class structure. This growing inequality in opportunities and outcomes is justified by framing greater employer provision of training as unrealistic because doing so would purportedly reduce employer competitiveness.

According to this view, the remedy prescribed for so-called skills shortages—as evident in the vignette that opened this chapter—includes the further vocationalization of primary, secondary, and post-secondary education; unspecified efforts to reduce barriers to workers joining the labour market; tax breaks for employers that provide training (i.e., publicly subsidized workplace training); and increasing access to hyper-exploitable foreign workers. Again, the costs of training are externalized onto workers and taxpayers.

Conclusion

So what are we to make of widespread employer claims of skills and labour shortages? Employers may well be facing difficulty hiring an adequate number of appropriately trained staff. But why is that? Is it that workers don’t want to, or can’t, get training in the occupations or skills employers demand? Blaming workers for workplace problems is a recurring theme in Canada—consider the welfare bum or the workers’ compensation malingerer (who is too lazy to work) or the careless worker (who caused his or her own injury)—but not a particularly helpful one. As we’ll see in Chapter 2, access to post-secondary education and apprenticeship training is often constrained—both by what opportunities are available and by the cost of PSE. Of particular interest is that the lack of skilled trades workers may be caused by employers failing to offer an adequate number of apprenticeships.

As we’ll see in Chapter 3, labour shortages do occur in Canada, but they tend to be geographically isolated and occupation specific. This reality sits uneasily with media coverage of skills shortages. In addition to overstating the degree of labour shortage that exists, media coverage often fails to differentiate between absolute shortages (a situation where there are no qualified potential workers available) or relative shortages (a situation where there are no qualified workers prepared to work for the wages and working conditions on offer). Employers improving workers’ wages and working conditions can remedy relative labour shortages. But such changes are contrary to employers’ economic interests. Consequently, we see (as in the opening of this chapter) employers seeking greater public funding and policy changes in order to externalize costs.

The notion that there are conflicting interests helps us to understand why the training system appears fragmented and clumsy. As workers and employers jostle in pursuit of their own interests, the state tries to ensure both production and social reproduction. While this tension exists throughout the training system, it is perhaps easiest to grasp in the context of training that occurs in specific workplaces. The implementation of fads like learning organizations and/or the meaning of terms like “skill” and “competency” provide concrete examples of conflicting interests, as we’ll see in Chapter 4. There is also conflict within groups. For example, professional regulatory organizations constrain which workers may practise in some occupations.

The role of professional regulatory organizations in controlling both workplace training and entry to the professions is picked up in Chapter 5, which examines community-based training, such as literacy training, settlement services for immigrants, and union-sponsored training. While this training can have labour market benefits, the training often stands at some remove from the labour market. Further, community education often develops skills and knowledge that allow workers to engage in political activity, which may be disruptive to capital’s interests. This discussion of the emancipatory tradition of adult education helps bring out the differing interests of training stakeholders.

This book concludes in Chapter 6, which identifies clear patterns in training (around access, control, and benefit) and the conflicted and sometimes dysfunctional nature of the so-called training system. This final chapter then considers the degree to which the seemingly ad hoc nature of the training system can be understood as the product of different stakeholders seeking to advance their (often competing) interests. Of specific interest is the role that training plays in the reproduction of labour power as well as in stabilizing and replicating Canada’s class-based social and economic system.

Notes

1    Quoted in Tencer, “Tech Jobs Will Boom in Canada.”

2    Information and Communications Technology Council, Digital Talent.

3    Arnason, “Farm Labour Shortfall Expected to Soar.”

4    Sears, Retooling the Mind Factory.

5    Grant, “Aligning Skills Development.”

6    Morgan, Images of Organization.

7    I was deeply pleased when I thought up this comparison. Sadly, it was not an original thought, having been previously published in Cross, “Training vs. Education.”

8    Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, “Labour Market Training,” Glossary of Statistical Terms.

9    Laliberte, “The ‘Grab-a-Hoe’ Indians.”

10  Vosko, “Precarious Employment.”

11  Yates, Naming the System.

12  Livingstone, “Starting with the Education-Jobs Gap.”

13  Broad and Hunter, “Work, Welfare, and the New Economy.”

14  Godard, Industrial Relations, the Economy and Society.

15  Drost and Hird, Introduction to the Canadian Labour Market.

16  Haan, Walsh, and Neis, “At the Crossroads.”

17  Basker, “Change at the Checkout.”

18  Preibisch, “BC-Grown.”

19  Merriam, Caffarella, and Baumgartner, Learning in Adulthood.

20  Wood, “Comparing Intergovernmental Institutions in Human Capital Development.”

21  Haddow and Klassen, Partisanship, Globalization, and Canadian Labour Market Policy.

22  McBride, Working? Employment Policy in Canada.

23  “List of Alberta Provincial Ministers,” Wikipedia.

24  Vosko, “Precarious Employment,” 4.

25  Lewchuk et al., It’s More than Poverty.

26  Mandel, Power and Money; Picchio, Social Reproduction.

27  Jarvis, The Sociology of Adult & Continuing Education.

28  Crowther, “Participation in Adult and Community Education.”

29  Canadian Council on Learning, Securing Prosperity through Canada’s Human Infrastructure.

30  Turcotte, Women and Education; Cooke, Zeytinoglu, and Chowhan, “Barriers to Training Access”; Status of Women Canada, Women in Canada at a Glance.

31  Canadian Council on Learning, Securing Prosperity through Canada’s Human Infrastructure.

32  Peters, Results of the 2003 Adult Education and Training Survey.

33  Merriam, Caffarella, and Baumgartner, Learning in Adulthood.

34  Morrison, Camps and Classrooms.

35  Smythe, “Ten Years of Adult Literacy Policy and Practice.”

36  Blundell et al., “Human Capital Investment.”

37  Bartel, “Measuring the Employer’s Return on Investments in Training.”

38  Tharenou, Saks, and Moore, “A Review and Critique of Research.”

39  Percival, Cozzarin, and Formaneck, “Return on Investment for Workplace Training.”

40  Blundell et al., “Human Capital Investment.”

41  Aguinis and Kraiger, “Benefits of Training and Development.”

42  An exception to this rule is training funded through Part 2 benefits under Employment Insurance. This training is funded by Employment Insurance premiums, which are jointly paid by employers and workers. That said, the majority of training funding is ultimately derived from federal taxation.

43  Department of Finance Canada, “Annual Financial Report.”

44  Barnetson, The Political Economy of Workplace Injury in Canada.

45  Sears, Retooling the Mind Factory.