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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Thomas R. Klassen, Precarious Values: Organizations, Politics and Labour Market Policy in Ontario (Montréal and Kingston: School of Policy Studies, Queen's University and the Institute of Public Administration of Canada, 2000)

FOR SOME TIME NOW, training has been the buzzword of politicians and business groups alike. Training, or lifelong learning as it is now more fashionably labeled, is seen as the key to strengthening economic competitiveness, overcoming unemployment, and ensuring productivity growth. Indeed, it is difficult to find a public figure, no matter what their political stripe, who has not embraced training as gospel.	1
Yet, despite all the bold political rhetoric about training, organizations designed to promote and implement training policies in Canada have almost always ended in failure. What explains these failures is the subject of Klassen's study.	2
A former Ontario civil servant, Klassen draws upon a number of interviews with senior bureaucrats and politicians as well as his own experience with the Ministry of Skills Development (MSD) and the Ontario Training Adjustment Board (OTAB) to conduct an autopsy into the cause of death of these two organizations. For Klassen, the answer lies in the premise that they were built on a shaky foundation of "precarious values." Using this conceptual starting point, Klassen argues that both the MSD and OTAB carried the seeds of their own destruction, lacking clear goals and values and, perhaps more critically, the support of key stakeholders in society.	3
Here, the author situates himself within the broad sociological tradition of institutional analysis that sets out to investigate both the internal workings of organizations and the external environment in which they are embedded: "the values, norms, rules and requirements to which organizations must conform if they are to gain legitimacy and survive." (7) In this view, organizations thrive or wither based on whether their values are widely shared by social actors. Organizations that have values which have a low degree of consensus or are highly contested among key stakeholders have weak legitimacy and are vulnerable to ongoing disagreement about their proper scope and domain of activities.	4
Precarious values were deeply entrenched within the MSD and OTAB, Klassen asserts, because key political and economic actors fundamentally disagreed about the most effective way to meet the province's training objectives. Both organizations were charged with the overly ambitious goal of fostering an ill-defined "training culture" in Ontario that would require some behavioural change on the part of governments, business, and labour. Not surprisingly, the two agencies under study emerged into an environment rife with basic disagreements.	5
Klassen's analysis is strongest in providing a rare insider's glimpse into the internal factors that worked to undermine these organizations. Ontario's MSD, hastily established in 1985 in response to rising youth unemployment in the province, centralized many of the training programs that were scattered about in other ministries. As such, the MSD immediately encountered hostility from other ministries; and most notably the more powerful Ministry of Colleges and Universities (MCU). The latter lost a good share of its budget and its responsibilities for industrial training to the MSD, something that precipitated an ongoing and bitter turf war between the two ministries as the MCU sought to protect its territory. This lack of "domain consensus" and subsequent weak leadership worked to spell the end of the ministry by 1990.	6
Similarly, Klassen provides an intricate internal account of the rise and fall of OTAB. Formed in 1991 by the NDP government of Bob Rae, OTAB had a highly participatory structure that included representation from business, labour, education, and social action groups. Cabinet documents at the time highlight some disagreements about the composition of the board, particularly in terms of gender and ethnic representation. These concerns eventually forced business and labour groups to ensure greater diversity in their representatives on the board. Curiously, Klassen claims this diluted OTAB's effectiveness because it meant the "best people were not nominated to the board of directors of OTAB." (145). It is hard to follow this conclusion given it is offered as an assertion with little supporting evidence.	7
More importantly, two other issues surrounding the birth of OTAB quickly soured relations among government, business, and labour. One was the demand by the Ontario Federation of Labour that the board have responsibility for training in both the private and public sectors, something that was only partially resolved with the creation of a special table within OTAB to deal with public sector training. Secondly, business groups, already furious with the provincial government's new labour legislation, demanded that non-unionized workers be included on the board. The government refused to budge on that issue, leading the Canadian Federation of Independent Business to end its participation in OTAB.	8
Again, Klassen's focus in detailing the birth and death of OTAB is on the internal workings of the agency and its precarious values. Of course, what Klassen terms "precarious values" others may prefer to call an ideological struggle between competing social interests. Klassen does not ignore this broader social and economic context in which MSD and OTAB emerged, and admittedly his focus is on the internal workings of organizations, but he does give relatively short shrift to these fundamental ideological clashes.	9
This is important because ideological battles have paralleled and contributed to the transformation of labour market policy in Canada. Until the mid-1970s, as Klassen himself notes, some version of Keynesian economic theory held sway whereby governments intervened on the demand side to smooth the business cycle and achieve full employment. This strategy has to a large degree now been replaced by supply-side labour market policies. This includes the training of the workforce, with its seductive connotation of self-improvement, as a way to solve unemployment and for Canada to remain competitive in a global economy.	10
This shift in labour market policy is deeply rooted in the struggles of competing class interests. In this context, training policy is necessarily a contested concept. Labour is rightly concerned that training not be used by business as an excuse to impose greater "flexibility" on workers, a fact not lost on the Canadian Auto Workers who refused to participate in OTAB. By contrast, businesses want to ensure that training policies do not increase the power of employees and their unions. The key question then is whose interests will training policy serve?	11
It is true, as Klassen asserts, that the failure of MSD and OTAB was partly a result of design flaws. Even so, it is difficult to imagine that even if these organizations had been better built they would have been able to withstand the deeper ideological conflict that facilitated their demise. Klassen recognizes this and recommends that any future training agencies will have to be "imposed" by the state. He proposes the creation of an advisory committee on labour market policy composed only of government, business, and labour elites — the less inclusive and democratic the better, Klassen implies. Business and labour representatives would offer advice only on "visionary and operational issues" and not specific policy. A completely separate agency to deliver training programs would be established.	12
Such an agency may have a longer life, but it is difficult to see how it would have any more legitimacy than the MSD and OTAB. In the end, the central question of who defines training policy and in whose interests remains.	13
David Robinson Canadian Association of University Teachers

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