CHAPTER SIX


Reproducing Patterns of Advantage and Disadvantage through Training

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you will be able to:

      Explain the purposes that the Canadian training system serves.

      Identify patterns in terms of access to, control of, and benefits from training.

      Explain how and why the Canadian training system reproduces patterns of advantage and disadvantage.

Occupational segregation by gender means that women are often under-represented in occupations and industries such as construction. Nationally, women make up less than 5 per cent of workers in construction occupations.1 Indigenous peoples in Canada and immigrants are also under-represented in the skilled trades.2 Employers have periodically expressed interest in drawing workers from traditionally under-represented groups into the skilled trades to address worker shortages, but such efforts have not been particularly successful.

In 2007, only 8 per cent of Canada’s female apprentices apprenticed in construction trades. While women comprised 3.7 per cent of all building-trades apprentices, those women who completed the apprenticeship represented only 1.8 per cent of all completions, suggesting disproportionately high attrition among female apprentices.3 The Alberta government developed a 2007 workforce strategy with Alberta’s construction industry that emphasized increasing the participation of traditionally under-represented groups through promotional activities and training, and by altering workplaces to become more welcoming to such groups. This strategy also advocated increasing employer access to temporary foreign workers.4

One of the stakeholders involved in developing this strategy was the training provider Women Building Futures (WBF). This not-for-profit was established in 1998 to prepare women for employment in traditionally male-dominated industries, such as construction. In 2016, several hundred women took programs and/or courses through WBF (28 per cent being Indigenous women) with 93 per cent of graduates being employed in the construction industry within six months of graduation.5 According to WBF CEO Kathy Kimpton:

When we started, there were few women working in the trades. In those early years, employers were mainly looking to hire women to provide some diversity in their workplaces. Now, those same employers and more are hiring our graduates because they are well trained and prepared.6

While the training offered by WBF clearly helps individual women attach to the labour market, an interesting question is whether such programs meaningfully alter the overall composition of the workforce. Analysis of who is employed in Alberta construction occupations between 2003 and 2014 suggests the answer is no. Men remained the primary labour source for construction employers. While the overall number of workers employed in the industry went up during this time period, women, youth, Indigenous persons, and immigrants did not see their relative share of employment increase significantly.7

The finding of little change in the participation rates of women, youth, Indigenous persons, and immigrants in the construction sector over a 12-year period strongly suggests that the Alberta government’s 10-year labour-force strategy and the efforts by construction industry partners to increase recruitment and retention for these groups were unsuccessful. An important question is, why did this plan yield no change in the gender composition of the workforce? There are likely two explanations.

First, employers continued to organize construction work in ways that pose barriers to women. Work continues to require long and unpredictable hours, often in remote locations. This arrangement maximizes employer profitability and negatively affects women’s ability to manage social reproductive obligations. Second, construction employers tolerate a hyper-masculinized culture where women (and other non-traditional groups) face discrimination and harassment. This hyper-masculinization is also a result of employers seeking to maximize profitability. Construction employment is very precarious: jobs are often short term, with workers moving from employer to employer. This precarity pressures workers to constantly demonstrate their utility to the employer and also denigrate the work of others in order to demonstrate that they themselves should be kept on. Women and workers of colour are easy to “other” because of their physical differences and lack of social power in the predominantly white and male workplace. Employers tolerate this discrimination because it is an acceptable cost of having a workforce that is highly motivated by its precarious employment.8

One result of these factors is that women typically experienced a last-hired–first-fired relationship with construction employers. When the labour supply tightens, women workers become relatively more attractive to employers, and their rate of employment increases. However, these gains are ephemeral, as their job losses are more severe when the labour market loosens and men are once again available. A part of the loosening of the labour market in Alberta was due to the federal government’s efforts to increase the availability of temporary foreign workers (who, in construction, are mostly male). What these dynamics mean is that while training is likely helpful to individual female workers to develop skills (which may make them more marketable relative to other women), it is unlikely to change the overall rate of female employment in the construction industry, because a lack of training is not the only (or most significant) barrier to employment.

Emphasizing training makes it look like government and industry are taking action on this issue. Emphasizing training also frames women’s occupational segregation as the result of skills deficiencies (i.e., the workers’ fault) rather than as the result of systemic discrimination (i.e., the employers’ fault). This framing perpetuates a structure that advantages employers, who minimize labour costs. It also advantages male workers, who keep a source of additional construction workers out of the labour pool (thereby potentially improving their own wages and job security). But there is not a perfect accord of interests between employers and male workers: employers have loosened the labour market by seeking access to temporary foreign workers, which has the effect of displacing male Canadian workers. What this example suggests is that the Canadian labour-market training system serves multiple functions and is riven by conflicting interests among stakeholder groups.

Functions of the Training System

The preceding chapters have shown that the Canadian training system serves three main functions:

it reproduces labour power,

it creates docile and obedient workers, and

it maintains and legitimizes capitalist social formation.

It is not surprising that one of the functions of the training system is to create, maintain, and improve workers’ KSAs. As we’ve seen, the training system does such a good job of reproducing labour power that many Canadian workers find themselves overqualified for the jobs that they hold. This conclusion sits at odds with most media coverage of training. Media coverage typically emphasizes the presence and effect of (largely fictional) skills shortages. It would be more accurate and socially useful for the media to cover how the allocation of labour-market training is profoundly uneven. Specifically, workers’ access to training is affected by their gender, heritage, socio-economic status, and geographic location. The result of discriminatory access to training is a replication of historic patterns of advantage and disadvantage in the Canadian labour market and, more broadly, society. But such coverage sits at odds with the interests of capitalists (i.e., the owners of media corporations) who use the skill-shortage narrative to help loosen the labour market via more government-subsidized training and greater access to foreign workers.

One of the less obvious effects of the training system is that it contributes to the creation and maintenance of certain values and preferences. Of particular interest is the way in which the training system contributes to creating and maintaining a docile and obedient workforce. The K-12 system inculcates rules and rule-following behaviour into future workers quite directly. Employers use the threat of unemployment as a stick to reinforce obedience and docility. But some also use training as a carrot—rewarding “good” employees with skills development. What skills and competencies are developed remains largely in the control of employers, which reinforces their existing legal and labour-market power (framed as “management rights”) in the workplace.

The prospect of obtaining a better job via training also helps maintain the legitimacy of capitalist social formation. It is easy to see that workers with training (especially formal training that leads to a credential) are more likely to secure high-paying jobs with good working conditions and more job security than workers without such training. The existence of this (ever-lengthening) pathway to a good job incentivizes workers to seek training. It also subtly suggests that workers are to blame when they cannot secure good employment—a belief consistent with the notion that Canada is a meritocracy.

That access to training continues to be inequitably distributed is largely ignored. So too are employer efforts to make jobs increasingly precarious and ensure that the labour market is as loose as possible. Workers have little ability to alter the basic structure of capitalism, which ensures that (1) many workers will not have good jobs, no matter what they do, and, as a result, (2) employers will benefit at the expense of workers. The most sensible option for individual workers is to seek more training to secure one of the fewer and fewer good jobs that are available. Yet, in doing so, they are also helping to further loosen the labour market and drive down their own wages.

The broad stability of the Canadian training system over time reflects that it meets (in at least a minimal way) the needs of each of the major stakeholders. Employers get, for the most part, an adequate number of appropriately trained workers at low cost. Workers have a pathway to securing good jobs, although many will not be successful in navigating it. And government has a system that contributes to ensuring that both the production process and the social-reproduction process continue more or less uninterrupted. Yet the broad stability of the training system does not mean that there are no changes afoot.

Three important trends in the Canadian training system are:

1. Shifting training costs away from employers and onto workers,
2. giving employers greater power to determine what workers learn, and
3. advancing the economic interests of employers at the expense of workers.

Shifting Labour-Market Training Costs

The shifting of training costs onto workers is most evident in escalating PSE tuition costs. Rising tuition has the effect of making PSE (which is, in part, a form of labour-market training) less accessible to students, particularly those whose families have a lower socio-economic status. Governments have also shifted costs of training onto (other) workers by increasingly relying upon community groups to provide some kinds of labour-market training. Employees in not-for-profit agencies often have low wages and/or high workloads. As discussed below, government is not monolithic and, thus, not every government policy pushes this agenda (e.g., Québec’s training levy or Alberta’s recent tuition freeze). But, overall, the broad and long-term trend is towards shifting training costs to workers.

Given that holding formal PSE credentials is positively associated with greater workplace training later in life, the rising cost of PSE is a significant contributor to the intergenerational transfer of advantage (and disadvantage). Those who can afford initial PSE also tend to receive the most subsequent workplace training. The idea that who you are (your socio-economic status) is a greater determinant of your success in life than is your effort to better yourself sits uneasily with the broadly held belief that Canada is (mostly) a meritocracy. Advancing policies that undermine the meritocracy narrative—and which demonstrate that training reproduces existing patterns of advantage and disadvantage—has the potential to profoundly damage the legitimacy of both government and capitalist social formation. Given this risk, why then would governments engage in such behaviour? There are several, interrelated explanations as to why governments support off-loading labour-market training costs onto workers.

First, the relationship between shifting the cost of labour-market training onto individuals and the hardening of class boundaries in Canada is difficult to see. The shifting of cost is immediate and visible. But the effect it has on individuals’ life prospects takes years to unfold and occurs mostly in private. Further, the relationship between cost shifting and life outcomes is imperfect. There are many factors mediating labour-market success, and some people will succeed (or fail) regardless of their level of (dis)advantage. Anecdotal evidence of success in the face of adversity (e.g., one or two stories of people overcoming the odds) is a powerful rhetorical tool. It aligns with the broadly held belief that Canada is a meritocracy. And most people fail to grasp that anecdotal evidence emphasizes exceptions rather than the norm (because everyday happenings elicit little comment). As a result, anecdotal evidence is routinely given vastly more weight than it warrants. In short, the murky causality and long latency periods between cost shifting and life outcomes, combined with efforts to obscure this relationship, dramatically reduce the risk to government (and to social stability) associated with such policies.

Second, there are significant political pressures on governments to minimize public spending. The neoliberal prescription of the 1980s and 1990s profoundly shaped public expectations around government spending and provision of services. Governments that increase taxes in order to maintain services are frequently assailed by employer lobby groups, right-wing think tanks and politicians, and the media. Faced with political consequences for raising taxes and the framing (in human capital theory) of labour-market training as primarily benefitting individuals, the path of least resistance for governments is to off-load training costs onto workers wherever possible. Such efforts avoid negative publicity and may even attract praise from politically powerful groups.

Where this shift creates (or reinforces) inequities, governments can sometimes manage the issue through rhetorical strategies. For example, the virtual absence of women in the skilled trades suggests that there is systemic sexism. As we saw in the opening vignette of this chapter, both the government and employers often make very public promises about remedying this issue. Task forces are struck, and the key players agree to plans to resolve matters. But such reports often fail to identify the real factors driving the problem, such as workplace culture and job design, that are barriers to greater female participation. Instead, attention is focused on educating workers about careers in the trades and developing their skills. These strategies suggest workers’ ignorance or skill deficiencies are the root cause of low female participation. Providing career counselling and skill training then allows employers to blame workers for low participation rates. This, in turn, allows governments to justify policies (such as expanding the temporary foreign worker program) that serve to eliminate structural pressures on employers (i.e., a tight labour market) that might otherwise cause employers to make cultural and job design changes in the workplace that would attract more women.

The third explanation for governments off-loading labour-market training costs onto workers is that those who are opposed to such policies are less powerful than those supporting it. Consider PSE tuition increases. The largest opponents of tuition increases are students from middle and lower socio-economic backgrounds. For them, tuition increases create a significant barrier to accessing labour-market training. These students have limited political power for several reasons. University students are viewed as a relatively privileged group (which, in aggregate, is probably correct); thus, they may have a hard time gaining the sympathy and support of other Canadians (many of whom will not have had PSE opportunities). Students are also most often speaking in their own interest, behaviour that, rightly or wrongly, tends to undermine the credibility of any claim. And even a small number of student voices supporting tuition increases further undermines the sense that students may be right about the effect or desirability of tuition increases.

A more compelling case against off-loading labour-market training costs might be made by those Canadians excluded from PSE (or other labour-market training) entirely. Such voices are rarely heard because there are few mechanisms by which such opinions can be aggregated and articulated. Further, such Canadians may have little time to engage in policy discussions (as they are most likely working). And they may be disinclined to undertake such advocacy work. This disinclination perhaps reflects their expectation that advocacy would yield little benefit to them and might entail some risk to their own employment. Further, the meritocracy narrative is a powerful one, and many Canadians may be convinced that their level of success is commensurate with their worth or effort.

Controlling Content of Training

Control over the content of Canadian labour-market training is shared among all stakeholders—except workers. Governments, PSE institutions, and faculty members shape the content of labour-market training offered by PSE institutions, with students having little curricular input. Governments also determine what kinds of state-funded labour-market training is available to workers, although the agencies responsible for delivering training may have some discretion over what specifically is taught and learned. Employers largely shape the content of apprenticeship training. And, except where constrained by a collective agreement, employers also control what workplace training occurs. Other than the few instances where unions deliver training, workers have little official control over the content of training.

This lack of control over the content of labour-market training is not surprising. Training is a microcosm of capitalist employment relationships. Employers dominate the employment relationship, and their control over training content is just an extension of their so-called management rights. Even where governments mandate employer spending on training (e.g., Québec), they won’t mandate employers sharing power over what kind of training is on offer. An exception to this general rule might be when governments require employers to provide training around hazardous materials and other workplace hazards.

In some cases, governments have ceded what little control they have over training to employers. The Canada Job Grant we read about in Chapter 3 saw the federal government shift funding from government-driven labour-market training to employer-directed training under the CJG. The result was almost complete employer control over how a significant portion of publicly funded labour-market training was spent. There was no compelling rationale for this decision; it was simply a sop given to employers by the federal Conservative government. The ceding of power to employers under the CJG broadly parallels the federal Liberal and Conservative governments’ ceding of control over immigration to employers through expansion of the temporary foreign worker program. Not surprisingly, employers took advantage of inadequate federal screening to flood the labour market with TFWs, whom they often mistreated.

The willingness of governments to increase employers’ already significant control over training suggests that governments (1) prioritize the needs of employers over those of the workers and (2) accommodate workers’ needs only when absolutely necessary and to the minimum degree possible. What this, in turn, suggests is that the state is not a neutral referee in matters of labour and training. Rather, the state frequently acts as the handmaiden of capitalists—enabling them to maximize profit. Only when employers act in ways so egregious that the legitimacy of the government or capitalist social formation is at stake—such as the brazen exploitation of migrant workers—will the state usually act to contain employers’ behaviour.

Workers’ power over training also parallels workers’ power in the broader field of labour relations. Workers can negotiate training content, funding, and job-protected leaves with their employer. Such negotiations tend to be limited to unionized worksites. Workers can resist training they don’t care for by not learning or practising what they have been taught. This response mirrors workers’ abilities to resist other forms of management direction via absenteeism, presenteeism, sabotage, or theft. Basically, it constitutes direct action to resist employer directions—an approach that can result in workers being fired for insubordination. Workers can also seek out or organize their own training, assuming they have the resources required to do so.

Advancing Employers’ Economic Interests

There is no doubt that labour-market training can (and often does) improve the lives of workers. Training is often the best pathway available to workers seeking higher wages, better working conditions, and greater job security. As we’ve seen in earlier chapters, workers’ access to training appears to systematically differ, depending upon their gender, heritage, socio-economic status, and location. Further, the intersection of these characteristics often has a compounding and negative effect on workers’ experiences. This dynamic is perhaps most clearly visible in the labour-market and training experiences of Indigenous peoples in Canada, which, while improving, remain markedly worse than average.

Society at large also benefits from labour-market training. There isn’t much evidence that training directly results in economic growth. This may reflect that employers consistently fail to provide jobs that take advantage of the skills that Canadians already have. That said, labour-market training (particularly literacy, public legal education, and settlement services) may have positive social effects, because it allows workers to better manage their lives and interact with an increasingly complex society. There is a clear link between increasing levels of formal education and overall health, social engagement, and happiness.

The main beneficiary of labour-market training is, of course, employers. The Canadian training system generally provides employers with access to an appropriate number of adequately skilled workers at low cost. Most of the training required to develop these skills and competencies have been paid for directly by the worker or indirectly by the worker through the tax system. In this way, the training system represents a significant business subsidy for employers. It is notable that employers rarely acknowledge this generous subsidy.

Instead, employers clamour for greater public funding of training and greater access to foreign workers while complaining of non-existent skills and worker shortages. It is important to recognize these claims as statements made by employers in their self-interest. Essentially, employers are seeking to further lower labour costs in order to increase their profitability. The resulting contradictions (e.g., employers demanding more training while reducing their own training expenditures) generally go unremarked and ignored. Given this, workers, policymakers, and academics should subject employer claims and demands around training to searching analysis before accepting them.

Conflict Among and Within Stakeholder Groups

The major site of conflict in capitalist economies is between the interests of labour and capital. While the state will sometimes step in to protect the interests of workers, this intervention tends to be restricted to instances where employer behaviour is so egregious that it threatens some aspect of production or social reproduction. And government intervention is often tempered by a desire to minimally impair employer latitude in organizing production in the way that is maximally profitable. Consequently, governments will often adopt strategies designed to deflect conflict into manageable dispute-resolution processes. In the opening vignette of this chapter, the government addressed the issue of women’s inability to access jobs in the construction sector through a workforce plan that was non-binding, contained actions (increasing access to TFWs) that undermined other actions (hiring more women), and the success of which was never publicly evaluated.

Conflict can also emerge among stakeholders, reflecting that “workers” and “employers” are categories comprising many actors with differing interests. For example, a 50-year-old male psychologist might well view high licensing standards as in the interests of both himself and society at large. A 35-year-old female immigrant with a foreign credential might well agree that high licensing standards, which prohibit her from entering the profession, are in the interests of existing psychologists but not necessarily society in general or herself in particular. Similarly, the training needs and approach of a very large and a very small employer will be different. In order to develop more nuanced understanding of the politics of the Canadian training system, it is important to acknowledge that intragroup conflict exists.

For example, “government” is not monolithic. Rather, there are multiple governments involved in labour-market training. The result is that there can be conflict between different orders of government (e.g., between the federal government and its provincial and territorial counterparts). A part of this conflict includes efforts to shift blame for problems to other orders of government. As we saw in Chapter 3, when the federal government announced the CJG in 2014, provinces and territories raised two main concerns:

1. The CJG shifted control over which workers could access what kind of labour-market training from governments to employers.
2. The CJG redirected existing LMA funding away from programs aimed at workers facing multiple barriers to labour-market attachment and towards workers who were job ready. Although the federal government made some compromises around CJG, these concerns went largely unaddressed. The result was that provinces and territories funded labour-market training for workers facing multiple barriers to employment themselves and/or curtailed such programming. Employers used the redirected federal funding to offset existing training costs, mostly to the benefit of already employed men in high-skill jobs and possessing PSE credentials.

There is also sometimes conflict (albeit muted and difficult to observe) within a specific government or between government policies. We saw this kind of conflict play out over foreign credential recognition and professional licensure in Chapters 4 and 5. Governments grant PROs authority to determine who can practise in some occupations. One outcome of this policy is that foreign-trained professionals often have great difficulty gaining licensure. Rather than addressing this systemic problem, a government will instead fund programming designed to help foreign-trained professionals navigate the (problematic) system.

Conclusion

So what, at the end of the day, can we conclude about Canada’s labour-market training system? Well, first, we know that the major criticism of the training system (that it has resulted in skills shortages) is mostly untrue. Indeed, if there is a training problem, it is that employers are failing to fully utilize the existing skills of workers. There is also little evidence of worker shortages more generally. Employers that find themselves unable to hire may wish to consider whether improving the wages and working conditions on offer might attract more (or new) workers into their workplaces. This conclusion—that employers sometimes shade the truth in their own interest—should cause us to be skeptical of claims that training is a panacea for problems in a workplace or the workforce.

It is also true that Canada’s training system is sprawling and uneven, often with limited connections between its major components. What is unclear is whether this is a problem or whether it is indicative of a system that responds to the (often conflicting) interests of various stakeholders. While a system that pushes individuals towards careers at an early age and presents a clear, step-by-step process to becoming qualified in a specific occupation may sound appealing on grounds of efficiency and simplicity, such a system is largely unworkable. Employers and governments are unable to accurately predict labour-force requirements in the future. And workers (quite understandably) might resist being pigeonholed into a career at a young age. Such a system (that is essentially one of central planning) also sits uneasily with the notion that Canada has a free-market economy, wherein individuals can make, remake, and accept responsibility for their occupational choices.

As suggested in the introduction, it is more useful to think of the training system as a political system (where conflicting and converging interests result in certain institutional forms and arrangements) than as a machine. For example, understanding that employers want trained workers at the lowest possible price helps us to understand why they minimize their own investments and push governments to socialize or externalize costs. The stability of such a system depends upon the relative power of the key stakeholders. If one stakeholder group becomes more powerful (or colludes with another stakeholder), then changes—perhaps large ones—may occur.

Absent changes in power, the system tends towards stability. A training system is based upon the existing power structure in society, and this reproduces not just labour power but also existing patterns of advantage and disadvantage. We see this in the differing levels of training access and labour-market success that specific worker groups have (resulting in the intergenerational transfer of advantage and disadvantage) as well as the training system’s tendency to respond to employers’ demands more than to workers’ demands. Essentially, the training system is part of the broader system of labour relations that operates to keep those in control powerful and everyone else weak.

The fact that change tends to flow from (and reinforce) power shifts suggests that technocratic efforts to “fix” the training system will likely be unsuccessful unless they happen to align with existing interests and power distribution. Prescriptions such as starting computer training in kindergarten don’t recognize the power that professionals (such as teachers) have to resist such bad and self-interested ideas. Similarly, fads like the learning organization tend to founder, because they ignore structural imperatives and political compromises within organizations (i.e., there are often practical reasons for why organizations are the way they are). As we read about at the beginning of this chapter, the failed strategy to increase women’s participation in Alberta’s construction industry can be seen as an effort to fix a problem without altering the political economy that gave rise to the problem. Not surprisingly, this approach was unsuccessful—although some individual workers may have benefitted from training investments—and was quietly swept under the rug.

Finally, we need to recognize that government intervention in labour-market training (and labour relations more broadly) is not necessarily benevolent. Governments often “play” for the employer’s team because problems with the production process appear more quickly and generate more focused political pressure on governments than do issues around social reproduction. It is also important to be mindful that government interventions are not necessarily competent: the labour-market training system is complex, and governments may not fully appreciate the interplay of interests. Both the Canada Job Grant and the temporary foreign worker program demonstrate that the federal government routinely underestimates how far employers will go in order to maximize their profitability. And the tepid and ineffective response by the government to both problems suggest that governments often find it politically difficult to extricate themselves from failing projects and policies.

Notes

1    Construction Sector Council, State of Women in Construction.

2    Ibid.; Yssaad, Immigrant Labour Force Analysis Series.

3    Construction Sector Council, State of Women in Construction.

4    Government of Alberta, “A Workforce Strategy.”

5    Women Building Futures, “Report to the Community: 2015 & 2016.”

6    Love, “Women Building Futures’ Success.”

7    Foster and Barnetson, “Who’s on Secondary?”

8    Paap, Working Construction.

9    Chan, “Foreign Farm Workers in BC.”

10  Stueck, “In British Columbia, Employers Brace for Changes.”