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The training gospel and the commodification of skill:some critical reflections on the politics of skillstraining in Aotearoa/New ZealandSteve Jordan a & Robbie Strathdee ba McGill University , Montreal, Canadab Murdoch University , Perth, AustraliaPublished online: 19 Dec 2006.

To cite this article: Steve Jordan & Robbie Strathdee (2001) The training gospel and the commodification of skill: somecritical reflections on the politics of skills training in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Journal of Vocational Education & Training,53:3, 391-406, DOI: 10.1080/13636820100200169

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Journal of Vocational Education and Training, Volume 53, Number 3, 2001

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The Training Gospel and the Commodification of Skill: some critical reflections on the politics of skills training in Aotearoa/New Zealand

STEVE JORDAN McGill University, Montreal, Canada ROBBIE STRATHDEE Murdoch University, Perth, Australia

ABSTRACT In the last two decades the policy context of vocational education and training (VET) has undergone radical change and transformation. This has not been unique nor has it been particular to New Zealand, as can be witnessed by similar reforms in Australia, United Kingdom, Canada and the USA. Despite national and regional variations, and emphasis on the approach adopted by each of these countries, a common agenda has emerged over the aims, content and desired outcomes of VET policy. With reference to recent policy developments in New Zealand, this paper takes issue with some of the implicit assumptions and purposes of the contemporary training agenda. In particular, it will question the high-skill/high value-added orthodoxy that underpins the training policies of the New Zealand state of the last decade.

Introduction

This article is concerned with identifying and exploring the underlying political and ideological processes that are generating policy formation and practice over training in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It stems from a concern that recent developments in vocational education and training, particularly the adoption of a market-led or enterprise approach, has emerged as the dominant paradigm used to construct and implement training policy. We feel that despite the claims made for it, such as preparing a labour force for the global economy of the twenty-first century, this approach expresses a subtly concealed ideological agenda, which is primarily concerned with the subordination of workers interests

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to those of employers. In this respect, we see our research as contributing a critical and alternative approach to understanding not only the implications of what we call the ‘training gospel’, but to the development of a vision of vocational education and training that values community prosperity, democratic citizenship, and social justice over the imperatives of ‘value-added’ production.

We should make explicit from the beginning that the theoretical and political inspiration for our research on training and globalisation draws liberally on the work of a group of Canadian trade unionists and scholars who have, in our opinion, not only attempted to question and systematically critique what they have labelled the new ‘training gospel’, but also advanced an alternative perspective on training that begins from the standpoint of working people rather than capital (Swift, 1995; Swift & Peerla, 1996; Jackson, 1997; Rinehart et al, 1997). While we recognise that there have been other important contributions to the critical analysis of the rise of training systems over the last two decades, particularly in the United States and Britain (Ashton, 1988; Ashton et al, 1989; Ashton & Lowe, 1991; Brown & Lauder, 1992, 1996; Ashton & Sung, 1997), we draw on this Canadian perspective as we feel it charts new ways of conceptualising and understanding training as part of a global neo-liberal strategy aimed at subordinating labour to the social relationships of the market as a commodity. Consequently, our approach views contemporary vocational education and training initiatives as contributing to a political process concerned with re-asserting the hegemony of capital over labour through the deployment of ideological practices centring on skill formation.

The ‘Globalisation, Training and Work’ research project, from which this article arises, is funded by the University of Canterbury. Its purpose is to critically engage with and pose alternatives to the current orthodoxy that contemporary policies on skills training necessarily reflect the interests of workers, trainees and ‘industry’ equally in the name of assuring competitive advantage in the global economy. Our research takes issue with this basic assumption by asking ‘Who benefits?’ from skills training.

To address this question we have adopted a two-stage research strategy. First, we have conducted a detailed analysis of publications, policy documents, and other materials (e.g. public statements by officials) produced by Skill New Zealand (the government agency responsible for training), trades unions and other organisations concerned with training. Our purpose in doing this has been to mark out the defining contours and themes characteristic of the training gospel as it has emerged within Aoteraoa/New Zealand. The argument we develop in this article is drawn primarily from our analysis of this discourse. D

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The second stage of the research focuses on a series of interviews with key ‘stakeholders’ involved in skills training in Aotearoa/New Zealand. To date, the programme of interviews has included:

two senior Skill New Zealand policy-makers; six Skill New Zealand regional managers from four national offices; a senior policy advisor of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority

(NZQA); a senior official of the New Zealand Council of Trades Unions (NZCTU); two training providers.

A programme of individual and focus group interviews with trainees has also been undertaken across several training providers. While we do not report our findings from this part of the research here, a preliminary review of the data supports our contention that the training gospel in Aotearoa/New Zealand has achieved a remarkable degree of acceptance among a diverse range of social groups. As we also point out, this consensus is not restricted to New Zealand, but extends across the globe, particularly to member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Consequently, this article aims to promote critical reflection on whether contemporary skills training, by its very nature, has to benefit those who receive it.

The Training Gospel

The emergence and spread of training systems throughout the advanced capitalist countries has been a phenomenon of the last 25 years. Indeed, it was from the mid-1970s that training came to be seen as a policy tool for addressing increasing levels of youth and then adult unemployment. However, what was initially envisaged by policy-makers as a short-term response to the sporadic vagaries of the business cycle, and its depressing effects on labour market activity has now come to be seen as a central and defining component of macro-economic policy. Whether as vocational education in schools, labour market adjustment policies, workfare or other forms of so called ‘employment assistance’, policies aimed at vocational education and training have combined to effect a new consensus over how labour can be organised, disciplined and made more ‘flexible’ for the emerging global economy.

This consensus is now shared by the OECD and its member states (particularly the Anglophone countries such as Australia, Britain, Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the United States), as well as international agencies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. While the core components of the settlement that has emerged around training have been given different emphases within particular national contexts, they do nevertheless project a fairly consistent set of interrelated themes and arguments that have been most recently popularised by the former

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American Labour Secretary’s book, The Work of Nations (Reich, 1992), as well as in journals such as The Economist (1997) and MacLeans (Dwyer, 1997).

The argument advanced by these institutions and authors on training stems from their respective analyses of the restructuring that has taken place in the world economy over the last quarter century. Two interrelated developments are of particular importance in these analyses. The first is the proliferation and high level of penetration of electronic technologies throughout industrial capitalist societies. The advance of these new technologies within both industrial production and the service economy, it is argued, has rendered obsolete forms of work organisation and production technologies associated with patterns of Fordist accumulation that were dominant throughout the long-boom of the 1960s and 1970s (Aglietta, 1979). Workers in these countries must now adjust to the demands of an accumulation process that has not only restructured the labour market, but also re-organised production relations in ways that require workers to become ‘polyvalent’, ‘multi-skilled’, and ultimately, ‘flexible’. In this way the new technology has implied a major re-evaluation of the expectations that employers have of labour in the workplace and of work itself (Rifkin, 1996).

The second development that underpins these analyses is the growing internationalisation of world production, investment and trade, which has itself been reliant upon the utilisation of these new technologies. The argument here is that the emergence of the global economy has progressively undermined the ability of the nation-state to determine macro-economic policy across a wide range of sectors as decisions about investment and trade are now dependant on international markets. In relation to labour market policy, this implies that nation-states must train and equip their workforces with the requisite knowledge and skills that will enable workers to deploy and utilise the new technologies within production more effectively, thus maintaining national competitive advantage in the global economy.

According to this perspective, both developments require that to compete effectively with the developing countries and Newly Industrialised Countries (NICs), the advanced industrial economies of Europe and North America must adopt policies aimed at creating infrastructures that will support high levels of training and skill formation among their respective workforces. Such a strategy will not only allow workers to prepare for rapid change in the workplace, but also support high levels of skill formation enabling them to produce high value-added commodities for the global market place. The argument that is advanced, therefore, is encapsulated within the simple formula: high skill = high value added = economic growth = high wages and living standards. It is this rather rudimentary equation that underpins the new ‘training gospel’ of late twentieth century capitalism.

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Accordingly, as we approach the twenty-first century, it is now considered to be axiomatic that training should not only be a fundamental part of national economic planning, but that its continued expansion and development will determine national fortunes within the new global economy. It is this argument that has been used to justify and support investment in, and the development of, extensive training systems throughout the advanced capitalist economies. As we have noted above, this is the official view of the OECD and its member states. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, for example, the Education Amendment Act (1990) drew upon this discourse in establishing the Education and Training Support Agency (ETSA) that was to become ‘Skill New Zealand’ in 1999. As well as funding a network of 52 Industry Training Organisations (ITOs) established under the Industry Training Act (1992) that ‘purchase’ training programmes from providers, Skill New Zealand also supports non-labour market initiatives such as school-based pre-vocational schemes or ‘Skill Pathways’. Of equal importance has been the creation of a competency-based system of unit standards accredited and certified by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA), since 1990 (from 1999 NZQA is to be subsumed within a new supra organisation entitled the Quality Assurance Authority of New Zealand or ‘QAANZ’). We will return to the significance of these developments later in our discussion. For the present, we want to draw attention to the fact that this argument has generated a new consensus between different social groups with historically opposed and contradictory interests. Indeed, our own research on policy makers, trainers, and trade unions suggests that this ideology has achieved a wide degree of acceptance as ‘official knowledge’ (Apple, 1993) in relation to the aims and purposes of policy regarding vocational education and training in Aotearoa/New Zealand. For example, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (NZCTU, 1997) has uncritically embraced the primary tenets of the training gospel, as has the Labour Party (1999).

Consequently, in the remainder of the article we offer a critique and re-appraisal of the training gospel. Broadly, we argue that it constructs an ideological discourse, which is aimed at re-asserting the hegemony of capital over labour through the concept and practice of skills training. The New Zealand State is deeply implicated in this process, we suggest, by constructing a policy regime that systematically mediates the ‘needs of industry’ through agencies such as Skill New Zealand and the NZQA/QAANZ. In this respect, the arguments and critique we develop in this article arise from our concern at the acceptance that the training gospel has received in this country from a wide range of constituencies and groups who, historically, have sought to develop forms of education and training that give primacy to the needs and interests of working people and their communities.

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From Faith to Doubt

Ashton & Green (1996) have usefully pointed out that the nexus established between vocational education and training, competitive superiority and capital accumulation in the contemporary period is unparalleled in the history of capitalism. As they indicate, capitalist development has historically relied upon the primitive accumulation of riches, exploitation of human labour, revolutionary technical change in work organisation or the appropriation of raw material wealth. Despite this history, a consensus has emerged among international agencies, national governments, employers and even organised labour that vocational education and training is the key to economic growth and a prosperous future. However, as Ashton & Green and others have argued (Marginson, 1993; Klein, 1996), there are good reasons to doubt that such a strong connection can be made, or that it will have the desired effects on economic growth, unemployment and living standards.

In relation to the above, there are at least four issues that require critical examination. The first relates to the assertion that there is a direct, mono-causal, relationship between investment in vocational education and training, and worker productivity. Borrowed from the ‘new’ human capital theory, this argument asserts that high levels of skill formation within a nation’s workforce will ‘pay-off’ in greater productivity and economic growth. While this argument has been an extremely effective tool in mobilising political support and resources for investments in training, it nevertheless is a primarily theoretical assertion that lacks both adequate historical and empirical evidence (Marginson, 1993). That is, the exact nature of the relationship between education and training, on the one hand, and worker productivity on the other, is much more complex than the training gospel implies. Secondly, there are large sectors of the capitalist economy that make few demands of formal systems for vocational education and training (Field, 1991). This is particularly true of the so-called (and rapidly growing) ‘third sector’ of the economy where much work is either unregulated, casualised or conducted on a voluntary basis (James et al, 1997). Thirdly, systems of vocational education and training are assumed to represent the common interests of employers, government and labour when, in fact, they have created tremendous conflict between all three. As the history of the Mechanics’ Institutes in Britain has shown, conflict over the aims and purposes of workers’ education and training has been an intensely political issue since the beginnings of industrial capitalism (Phillips & Putnam, 1980; Wrigley, 1982, 1986). It is significant in this respect that while the training gospel may have achieved a high degree of ideological legitimacy at the policy level in Aotearoa/New Zealand, our research also reveals a certain unease, if not questioning of its central themes from front-line personnel involved in its organisation and administration.

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Alongside these reservations it is also useful to note Young & Spours’s (1990) observation that employers themselves are not making unequivocal demands for workers with higher levels of technical know-how and skill. As they point out, research on the attitudes of employers toward recruitment of employees suggests that they place high value on basic workplace discipline i.e. punctuality, attendance, and reliability (Young & Spours, 1990). As a recent survey shows, Aotearoa/New Zealand employers also place a high premium on these qualities (Colmar Brunton Research, 1994). The demand for ‘soft skills’ by employers is, therefore, clearly at variance with the high-tech approach advocated by the training gospel. This discrepancy also poses awkward questions concerning the concept of skill and its relationship to economic modernisation. That is, while current orthodoxy asserts that high levels of skill formation among workers is supposed to fuel economic competitiveness and growth, it is nevertheless extremely unclear what kinds of skill are necessary to ensure that this occurs across different national contexts within the global economy.

Perhaps the most telling paradox, however, is that while the policy discourse of the training gospel consistently argues for a high skill/high value-added training strategy, programmes funded by Skill New Zealand are, nevertheless, aimed at developing basic workplace skills, such as communication, self-management, and social and life skills (Education and training Support Agency [ETSA], 1997). The everyday reality for young people participating in these programmes is more concerned with ensuring work discipline among trainees than the capacity to deal with new technology and a rapidly changing work environment. In practice, this has translated into forms of ‘second chance’ skills training for school ‘drop outs’ and the young unemployed, a significant number of whom are drawn from Maori and Pacific Island backgrounds. Seen this way, skills training can be understood as denoting the particular form and methods that the subordination of labour to capital assumes within the contemporary labour process. How this has been effected within vocational education and training through the concept and practice of skill is what we discuss next.

The Commodification of Skill and the Contemporary Subordination of Labour

Traditionally, the concept of skill has been closely connected with a relatively technical, utilitarian and often behaviourist conception of learning. While this understanding of skill is still widely held, particularly among policy-makers, educators and other practitioners, it has nevertheless been subtly recontextualised in recent years. Whereas the older discourses of skill were heavily imbued with historical tensions arising from the relationship of class and gender that denoted, at best, a

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second-class ‘education’, within the discourse of the training gospel the concept of skill is deployed in very different ways.

Our argument in this respect is that as a core component of the training gospel over the last two decades the concept of skill and skills training are deployed in ways that serve the interests of capital, while appearing to ‘empower’ labour. That is, skill has been subtly woven into a neo-liberal political agenda, which has consistently attempted to redefine the needs and interests of working people in terms of the acquisition of individual skills, and competencies that will enable them to compete for jobs in both national and global labour markets. In relation to policy, for example, this tendency has been most clearly expressed by the enactment of The Employment Contracts Act (1991), which has imposed a highly decentralised and ‘contractualist’ system of industrial relations that negates collective bargaining rights for workers (Yeatman, 1997, 1998).

Neo-liberalism has also generated a group of managerial initiatives primarily concerned with workplace education and skills training required for employment. We are referring here to the proliferation of a range of ‘new management’ initiatives within both public and private sectors that together constitute ‘human resources development’ (HRD). Originating in the United States, HRD itself has been part of a ‘wider human resource approach to the management of labour’ in recent years (Wright, 1997, p. 5). Its principal aim has been to induce a ‘sustained sense of fatalism’ among workers concerning the inevitability of continual workplace change and restructuring by ‘teaching employees how to adapt to forces apparently beyond their control’ (pp. 7-8). As Wright notes, skills under these regimes of training are organised less around the traditional principles of skilling derived from the industrial apprenticeship model, than on moulding attitudes, dispositions and behaviour of employees so that they willingly embrace workplace restructuring. Understood this way, HRD emerges as a powerful neo-liberal ideological tool aimed at ‘global’ or ‘institutional’ behaviour modification of entire groups of workers. An indication of how this process has been broadcast through the policy discourse of the new training agenda is provided by a promotional publication of Skill New Zealand, significantly entitled Investing in Skills for Competitive Advantage (Skill New Zealand, 1999). This glossy report contains an extended interview with Price Waterhouse (New Zealand) economist Suzanne Snively, who indicates how workers can contribute to the ‘competency needs of a workplace’. As she notes, workers will require:

... the right attitude, honesty, a tidy appearance, good social skills, enthusiasm, reliability, good communication skills, being computer literate, and being able to work as part of a collaborating/learning network. People who are able to do this,

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and also take a disciplined approach to their work will be employable. (Skill New Zealand, 1999, p. 2)

She goes on to argue that ‘the qualities required for employability’ will necessitate ‘a considerable amount of pre-employment training’ in these skills. As Rinehart et al (1997) and his colleagues show, it is through such ‘soft skills’ that HRD has been so effective in permeating and re-defining the expectations that people have of work/training in the contemporary era.

The new regimes of skilling put in place by HRD at work and in training are paralleled by developments in education and schooling by the new vocationalism (Cohen, 1984; Marshall, 1997) and relatedly, forms of ‘education for enterprise’ (Rees, 1988; Rees & Rees, 1992). Over the past two decades, these developments have been expressive of underlying changes in production relations, which we described in the previous section and to which the training gospel has been a response. As we noted above, the widespread adoption of micro-electronic technologies in the workplace, coupled with the increasing globalisation of production, trade and investment, has re-organised the basis on which capital accumulation occurs in the late twentieth century. Whether this is labelled ‘neo’ or ‘post-Fordism’, or ‘flexible specialisation’, what is abundantly clear is that employers in the present era are seeking out new ways and methods of technology utilisation, re-organising production and altering workplace relationships that are commensurate with the emerging regime of accumulation (Tomaney, 1990; James et al, 1997).

These shifts in the material organisation of production have been marked by a particular vocabulary of change in the workplace expressed through, for example, HRD, workplace flexibility, multi-skilling, and notions such as value-added and quality assurance (as in the new Quality Assurance Authority of New Zealand [QAANZ]). As Jackson has observed of these developments:

... the capacity for these functions is introduced as new skills: communication skills, problem-solving skills, leadership skills, team skills, etc. Within this new regime, the concepts of skills and skills training have a very central place in organising and mobilising consent. Individuals are promised a myriad of new forms of skills training, skills upgrading, multi-skilling, skills-based career paths, and greater access to training and re-training in order to keep their skills up to date and keep a place in the labour market. (Jackson, 1997, p. 124)

Within the contemporary political context, this ‘new lexicon’ of skill, she argues, gives one-sided expression to the needs and interests of employers. While this particular notion of skill has been supported by a range of work-based education initiatives around HRD, it has also characterised State training policy in recent years. Skill New Zealand has

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used it, for example, to implement an ‘enterprise model’ of training that projects skill as a marketable commodity that workers must acquire in order to participate in the labour market.

This approach to training is transparent in Skill New Zealand’s progress reports. The May 1997 report (ETSA, 1997) comprises 18 sections ranging from ‘partnerships’, ‘enterprise’, ‘responsiveness to Maoris’ to ‘empowerment’. A close examination of the contents of each of these areas reveals a consistent representation of how skill is to be understood and what it means for a trainee to be skilled. Section 8 on ‘partnerships’, for example, deals with the case of ‘John’, ‘whose prospects were bleak’ for employment. However, after attending a Training Opportunities agriculture course with a private provider, he was placed with a farmer who eventually offered him a full-time job after 2 years. The report then goes on to quote the farmer who trained and eventually employed John, who says that, ‘John has had an excellent grounding and learned a range of skills. He’ll be able to sell himself after this’ (p. 9, our italics). Section 12 on ‘enterprise’ has a similar refrain. The report notes that, ‘At an enterprise level Skill New Zealand means establishing a training culture within a company as a key to its future success’ (p. 14). Taking a small South Island electricity company as an example of this approach, it then quotes its Human Resource Manager in the following way, ‘We want a highly skilled workforce trained to national and international standards. We are a relatively small company. What we are selling are the skills and services of our people’ (p. 15, our italics).

The discourse of skill constructed in the Progress Report is indicative of the wider training strategy adopted by Skill New Zealand in both policy and practice. That is, it consistently reproduces a particular ideological notion of skill that is generated from within a neo-liberal conception of how trainees/workers are to understand their relationship to the labour market and paid employment. As the examples above illustrate, skills are to be acquired not for the purposes of greater knowledge, understanding, and mastery of a craft or trade, but in order to sell oneself more effectively on the labour market. This is to constitute skill as a commodity, exhibiting the same properties and propensities as any other exchangeable product to be bought and sold on the market.

Such a representation of skill is not peculiar to Skill New Zealand. For example, Cohen’s (1990) research on the new vocationalism in Britain has also noted that national policy over training constitutes skill in similar ways. As Cohen observes, the commodification of skill in this way is a relatively recent phenomenon, which points to the way in which the State has systematically attempted to reduce labour power to its ‘generic commodity form as an interchangeable unit/factor of production’ through skill training. In other words ‘skills have become abstract universal properties of the labour process’ whose key function is to subvert and bring about the demise of traditional craft-based forms of skilling that

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were indigenous to workers organisations and their communities (p. 58). The particular ideological character of skill within this context can be grasped when we consider that what is essentially a process of subordinating labour to the needs of capital is in fact represented as trainee/worker ‘empowerment’. In this way contemporary discourses of skilling are embedded within policies and practices aimed at asserting the property rights of employers ‘over the capacity of the worker to labour’ (Jackson, 1997, p. 125). Note, for example, how the voices of employers (a farmer and human resources manager) are used to define the purpose of training in the Skill New Zealand Progress Report we referred to above.

Concluding Remarks: the training gospel and its discontents

The allure of the high-skill/high wage formula of the training gospel over the last decade has been a particularly powerful ideology. It has mobilised and constructed a broad consensus across a wide range of groups and institutions concerned with vocational education and training, and more broadly work-based learning. As an ideology, it has been particularly adept at infiltrating and organising discourses other than those associated with State provided training in Aotearoa/New Zealand. For example, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions’ document, Building Better Skills: unions and skill New Zealand (NZCTU, 1997), asserts that, ‘The CTU approach has a simple objective: The achievement of a high-skill, high-wage economy in order to achieve a fair, just society whose citizens enjoy a high quality of life’ (p. 5). This position is also endorsed by the Labour Party, as its recently published 21st Century Skills testifies (Labour Party, 1999). The prevalence of the training gospel, and its widespread and often uncritical acceptance by labour organisations gives cause for concern, particularly if we are correct in our assertion that it is part of a broader strategy aimed at the degradation of work within the global economy.

Because of this stance, organisations allied to the labour movement have rarely questioned the politics of the training gospel. Neither have there been sustained attempts to generate an alternative to the high-skill/high-wage approach underlying contemporary training initiatives sponsored by Skill New Zealand and the myriad of other private training providers. Indeed, a passive consensus has emerged over which there appears to be little dissension. As we see it, the pressing issue confronting these groups is how can an alternative vision of training be generated that not only attempts to de-commodify skill, but connects it to a politics aimed at the emancipation of labour from often alienating and meaningless work. Relatedly, what would such a politics of skill look like? We feel that we can make a useful contribution to the latter question, whereas the former will ultimately have to be determined by the labour movement and its partners.

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As we noted at the beginning of this article, some Canadian trade unionists and activists have been critically engaging with the new training gospel for at least a decade. Just as their work has shaped the analysis we present in this article, it also provides some guiding principles that might inform and prefigure an alternative, democratic, vision of skill formation for New Zealanders struggling with these issues. Jackson’s (1997) work on these matters is extremely useful here. As she contends, a democratic approach to skills training ‘starts from a vision of the workplace, industry and society that puts people at its centre’ (p. 127). For example, management skills would have to be revised ‘if real distribution of power and wealth were the common workplace objective’. Indeed, given its historical genesis, the word itself might be expected to disappear from usage if such change were implemented (Williams, 1983). Criteria for the development and evaluation of public policy on training would be based on how well such policy served the purposes of fostering a democratic citizenry. Last, ‘education and training would need to be moved across the ledger and counted as an investment not an expenditure, for governments as well as firms’ (p. 127).

These and other principles, such as community development, have the potential for constituting the basis for a new, democratic vision of vocational education and training that puts people and the needs of their communities first. As Canadian trade unionists and activists have shown, the development of such a democratic vision is not only possible, it is a necessary precondition in the struggle against the apparently unremitting encroachment of economic rationalism that insidiously permeates contemporary life. We believe that the Aotearoa/New Zealand labour movement and its partners need to begin to engage with this democratic vision in order to turn the tide against the neo-liberal onslaught of the last two decades. As Jackson points out, ‘the discourse of skill that we use to guide our action holds within it a powerful vision of the future. It names not only how we will work but how we will live’ (p. 127). Now that we have entered an era of globalised capitalism, such a discourse on skill is urgently needed, not only to reclaim, but to build on the rights of workers and their communities to really useful work and the entitlements that would be expected to flow from it.

Correspondence

Steve Jordan, Faculty of Education, McGill University, 3700 McTavish Street, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1Y2, Canada (steven.jordan@mcgill.ca).

References

Aglietta, M. (1979) Theory of Capitalist Regulation: the U.S. experience. London: New Left Books.

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