Training the Excluded for Work: Access and Equity for Women, Immigrants, First Nations, Youth, and People with Low Income

Abstract

Training the Excluded for Work: Access and Equity for Women, Immigrants, First Nations, Youth, and People with Low Income, Marjorie Griffin Cohen, ed., Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2003, pp. 276.Training the Excluded for Work is an important contribution to debates about the importance and viability of job training policies and programmes that are directed to those who are “excluded” in the Canadian labour market. It is also timely insofar as job training, in contrast to post-secondary education policy, remains somewhat underexamined in Canada. This is particularly ironic, as job training has emerged as a key issue for policy makers, industry, workers and activists. Training is frequently touted as a panacea that will address a host of economic ills including unemployment, low productivity levels and lagging investment. On the one hand, many employer and industry groups view training measures as part of a larger strategy to address the imperatives of a global economy. Here, neoliberal rationales tend to prevail—job training becomes an investment in individual human capital. But on the other hand, job training can also be an important means by which marginalized groups, including youth, women, indigenous groups and racialized minorities, address the terms of their exclusion from (or limited inclusion in) the labour market. In doing so, other rationales come to the fore, most notably the need to address social inequities in the labour market. This edited book addresses this latter aspect of the training policy debate.