IngentaConnect Learning for work: Contested terrain?

Authors: Jackson N.; Jordan S.

Source: Studies in the Education of Adults, Volume 32, Number 2, 1 October 2000 , pp. 195-211(17)

Publisher: National Institute of Adult Continuing Education

Abstract:

This paper explores some common political dynamics and conflicting interests underlying the rise of neo-liberal skills training policies across the OECD throughout the decade of the 1990s. It focuses primarily on recent debates and policy developments in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, drawing on related literature from Canada and Britain. In these and other countries influenced by the OECD, policy makers have forged an apparent consensus across social groups – business, labour, equity seeking groups, individuals – with diverse and sometimes conflicting interests in the structure and purposes of skills training. Such a 'unitarist' approach is built on the presumption of mutual benefit. Yet the resulting reforms have had a remarkably unilateral effect: they move control over and benefits from skill training away from individuals and unions and into the hands of private capital. Where skills development was once seen as a chance for individuals to gain bargaining power in the labour market, in the last decade it has become a means for employers to gain workers whose knowledge and skill is already tightly harnessed to the 'bottom line'.

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