A Narrow Vision of Work and the Labour Market

A short post today. Yesterday I discussed the narrow view of knowledge in the dominant discourse.  Today I describe the narrow view it has of Work and the Labour market. 

A consideration of the narrow vision of knowledge held by the second generation discourse quickly segued into its vision of the relationship between knowledge and learning and the work and the labour market.  Bagnall (2000) complains that the discourses’ construction of work, the world, and the individual are being presented as though they represented the only social reality.  One might question, in terms of individuals and their jobs (as opposed to terms of multinational corporations in global competition), if we really are in a knowledge-based economy that requires workers to continually up-skill?  Do most jobs and most people really need LLL in order to maintain employment?  That is a question that I will not address in this paper, however, it is a question worth asking. The main construction of work that is critiqued by the academics in LLL is that of insecurity.  The labour market is presented as fragmented, uncertain and insecure.  Workers should expect to have periods of unemployment and should expect to have to re-educate themselves in order to gain or maintain employment. (Bagnall, 2000; Edwards, 2008; Rose, 1999).

Cruikshank (2008) interviewed workers, labour leaders and adult educators and argues that this is a misdiagnosis of the problem which blames workers for unemployment. She summarizes that several authors have argued that the unemployment is a systemic problem (Livingstone, 2004; Shields, 1996; Stanford, 2001) and that that one quarter of Canadians with post-secondary education are working in service industry or clerical jobs that don’t require that level of education (Stanford, 2001).  She further criticizes the skills-agenda for failing to promote thinking and problem-solving in favour of technical skills with short-half lives. She argues that 92% of Canadian jobs are not related to science and technology so the emphasis on them is misplaced. Canada has one of the most qualified workforces in the world, and 25% of workers think they are overqualified for their jobs. This sentiment is true at all levels of educational attainment. Jobs are increasingly structured to minimize the skills required.  Thus, the high educational achievement amounts to education inflation and a way to cull the applicants for a particular job. 

Tomorrow's post will be much longer. In it, I will describe the discourse narrow view of learning and education.