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Skills Training: Who Benefits?

Nancy S. Jackson, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Steven S. Jordan, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

The rise of neo-liberalism has brought common contradictions to skills training policies in Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada and Great Britain. An apparent consensus among business, labour and individuals has been built around the promise that high levels of ‘skill development’ will fuel productivity, competitiveness and prosperity for all. But in practice, these groups have quite different experiences and sometimes conflicting interests in the structure and purposes of skills training.

In the past, differing interests have led to a key role for unions in securing training for their members and shaping training arrangements, particularly in apprenticeships.
But recent reforms, promising to make training more ‘responsive’ to industry, significantly reduce the influence of unions and redirect benefits of skill training away from individuals and into the hands of employers. This trend can be seen in two quite different but pervasive realms of skills training – apprenticeship training and ‘soft skills’ training for workplace communications.

Apprenticeship reform has been going on across the industrialised world for nearly two decades, as part of a broad campaign to make labour more ‘flexible.’ The trend has been toward shorter apprenticeships, leading to certifications of more limited scope. These changes do make apprenticeships more accessible, but they lead to jobs with significantly lower wages and reduced power in the workplace. Thus the concept of apprenticeship no longer means the same thing.

In the case of Australia, apprenticeship reform has been a very strategic showcase initiative of the federal Liberal/National Coalition government elected in 1996. Their New Apprenticeship program bundles together a number of elements of the neo-liberal policy agenda in a unified and streamlined program meant to cover 80% of the labour market. The New Apprenticeships follow the international trend of being shorter, leading to more limited forms of certification and less autonomy on the job. These changes alone mean the New Apprenticeships are in many ways less ‘responsive’ to the objectives of unions and their members who place a priority on high wages, job security, and power and authority on the job.

These same changes make the New Apprenticeships more attractive to the business community. Employers expect to get future benefits of lowered wage costs by hiring the graduates of apprenticeships. But they also get a whole array of benefits up front: financial subsidies for taking on apprentices; wage subsidies as long as apprentices are enrolled; incentives to hire their apprentices on enterprise based agreements rather than the national award wage structure; the promise of a customised program from their choice of private or public training providers; and an administrative process that offers ‘streamlined ... one stop-shopping.’ Collectively, these changes in the organisation of apprenticeships deliver multiple benefits to the business community, in the short term and the longer term. This is the essence of ‘responsiveness.’

When it comes to soft skills training, the issues are a bit more subtle, but there remains a tradition of differing interests. ‘Soft skills’ training mostly refers to communication and problem solving techniques which are being widely used to support the introduction of team work and other forms of ‘high performance’ and ‘flexible’ work organisation. Here as well, communication among co-workers is a terrain traditionally valued and protected by unionists seeking to build solidarity among workers and to foster collective willingness to resist work practices that are unsafe or unjust. Thus, traditions of ‘shopfloor culture,’ (particularly in unionised environments) have promoted a view of workers’ interests as separate and distinct from, and sometimes in opposition to, those of the employer.

Soft skills training has the explicit goal of reversing this situation to ensure that employers, not workers or unions, benefit from the culture of shopfloor. ‘Communication skills’ and ‘problem-solving skills’ are specifically redefined as those which lead team members to overcome their individual and collective resistance and to support/enhance the goals and terms of work defined by the employer. This shift in the flow of benefits from shopfloor communications is a powerful illustration of how re-definitions in the meaning of skill are central to the reform process.

In other words, the concept of skill is not neutral. It is being used to restructure those elements of work over which employers want more control. And the broad consensus about which policy makers like to boast is being forged on terms which are indeed responsive to industry, but at the expense of working people.