| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 55

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Marjorie Griffin Cohen, ed., Training the Excluded for Work: Access and Equity for Women, Immigrants, First Nations, Youth, and People with Low Income (Vancouver: UBC Press 2003)

IN THE CONTEXT of corporate-induced hysteria about the purported lack of skills among Canadians, Cohen's latest edited book provides a useful and sober counterbalance. It is an important text, documenting skill training programmes and projects across Canada. As such it serves as a detailed and clear record of these initiatives. It also provides valuable insights into less asked, but pivotal questions such as what kinds of equity did these programmes advance and what was the impact on systemically marginalized populations such as women, recent immigrants, Aboriginal people, youth, and people with low incomes. The fourteen chapters review projects in the building trades, construction, mega projects, general job preparation, and life skills for systemically excluded populations.

The chapters are well-written and thoughtful, most providing conclusions that resonate soundly with demands advanced by the women's movement, unions, and community activists for years, including: programmes are best when they are run for and by marginalized populations; longer programmes are better than shorter; long-term, consistent government funding with few strings attached sustains programmes while short-term, unreliable funding with numerous strings attached undermines programmes and places them in ongoing jeopardy; programmes need autonomy and flexibilty in order to meet new and unanticipated needs; ancillary supports are required to address the specific barriers to equity and participation encountered by specific populations; and on-site or easily accessible equity officers and outside groups provide accountability and integrity to equity programmes. The chapters also document ongoing problem areas in job training such as: the need for change in the closed and harassing culture of male-dominated trades and work sites; difficulties in finding and retaining employment once training is completed; lack of equitable access to advancement and on-the-job training opportunities; and unfair assignment of tasks and job assignments.

Cohen's collection exposes the successes and failures of recent initiatives in job training. Successes include: a highway construction project on Vancouver Island aimed at providing training opportunities for women and Aboriginal people (Cohen and Braid); services aimed at and provided by immigrant women in Toronto (Manery and Cohen); and a project in Saskatchewan aimed at expanding women's access to training and careers in carpentry (Little). Notable failures include: youth employment programmes in British Columbia (Wong and McBride); and women's training on the Hibernia project (Hart and Shrimpton). Considerable attention is also provided to the impacts of government restructuring and offloading, including: the removal of supports for women's job training (McFarland); the transfer of training from the federal to the provincial governments (Critoph); and the ways that private market training programmes undermine equality.

As Cohen notes in her introduction, job and skill training is intrinsically connected to employment policy. In the absence of policies that promote full employment and the availability of good jobs, job training can act as a holding tank, where groups of people are temporarily taken out of the labour market in order to learn skills that may never provide employment or provide only very temporary employment within tight and inequitable labour markets. Indeed, this was the situation in a number of the cases examined in this book: after completing training programs workers were laid off or employed temporarily and left with few options beyond ongoing unemployment, marginal employment, or relocation. In other cases, such as carpentry and the building trades, the harassing and bullying culture of workplaces and employers creates barriers that discourage many even where jobs are available.

This is an excellent book for undergraduates, policy analysts, and service providers. It carefully records policies and practices that promoted equality and those that, intentionally or unintentionally, undermined equity. The recommendations are positive and clear although few venture beyond a liberal model of equal opportunity and affirmative action. For the most part, the recommendations and descriptions extend equality but do not build liberatory practice or suggest ways to reorganize job training so that marginalized populations are emancipated rather than maintained as a more highly skilled, but still largely underemployed, underutilized pool of cheap labour.

The skills discourse, like the competencies and best practices discourses, pivot on ideological constructs that start to take on a life of their own when they become manifest in programmes and policies. Currently, skill debates are couched in terms of human capital wherein workers are responsible to acquire sufficient capital in the form of skills in order to be marketable and appealing to employers. Within this highly ideological understanding of skills, if the kinds of activities that workers perform are not deemed to be adding "value" they are removed from lists of "best practices" and thought to not be skills at all, though they may be the very actions that keep workers safe and ensure a reasonable quality of goods and services. Thus, the kinds of "skills" that workers are taught in training programmes and the impact of this training on the overall well-being of trainees need to be carefully assessed, scrutinized, and understood within a broader ideological context.

Butterwick touches on many of these issues in her very interesting chapter on life skills training, a programme in which people are taught basic, everyday skills such as cooking, grooming, self-presentation, and parenting as part of job and life preparedness, the assumption being that those who are presumed to lack these commonplace capacities are unlikely to make good employees, even in the low-wage labour market. While some of Butterwick's respondents find life skills courses to be supportive and normalizing, others find them to be punitive, humiliating attempts to homogenize marginalized workers and make them responsible for the problems that shape and limit their worlds. As one of Butterwick's interviewees put it, "I didn't need to sit and discuss how to do my life ... I'm not having problems with my life, I'm having a problem with my career." (172)

Job training exists at the nexus of gender, race, ability, class, and power. It provides an outstanding opportunity to extend our analysis and theorization of the multiple factors that create and maintain the economic, social, and political marginalization of women, some immigrants, Aboriginal people, youth, and poor people. This collection would be enhanced by a deeper analysis of the political and ideological role played by job training in the context of neoliberal reorganization of labour markets, welfare states, and social relations, as well as by recommendations that went beyond building greater equity within the current, very limiting context in which those with power benefit from the ongoing marginalization of large portions of the labour force.


Donna Baines McMaster University

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