In view of the fact that the majority of jobs held by illiterate adults in Canada are in non-union work environments, a glaring omission here is the failure to mention the standard practice of many employers of hiring only those individuals who have great difficulty in securing employment because of race, education, handicap, age, sex, etc. in order that they can offer substandard pay and working conditions. Certainly this exploitative practice on the part of employers is just as responsible for the dissatisfaction and frustration of employees as the lack of opportunities of upgrading their educations. To reduce their problem to the single dimension is obscure the real relationship of illiteracy to the structure of inequality. As well, it encourages the view that literacy education and academic upgrading are mere instruments for adaptation to that structure.

Technology

At the same conference, a member of the Board of MCL outlined what is becoming an increasingly influential theme in discussions of academic upgrading and Job training--what is called the "new industrial revolution":

There are a tremendous number of adult Canadians in the working and unemployed sector of our society who at this point have a real serious problem with education and...have almost no access to present education opportunities. ...I'd like to add a second point. That is the problem that we are having right now is nothing compared to what we're going to see in the next decade. And there's one particular reason for that and that is the silicon chip microprocessor... the microprocessor is going to have the capacity to eliminate tens of thousands of existing jobs .... What that means ... is that the retraining requirements, not only for the people at the bottom whose needs are not being met at all right now, but for an existing chunk of the existing workforce, in the next decade is going to require a quantum leap in education.21

At the core of this argument is the belief that a massive new provision for education is to help people to adjust to rapidly evolving technological change and the disruptions it will entail. The speaker does not address the implication of the critical perspective that as long as the class structure remains the same in Canada, the most that the poor and unemployed can expect is to trade a shovel on a seasonal construction gang for the keyboard of a video display terminal in a new technologically sophisticated workplace, in a job which is just as stultifying and unremunerative. (That is, if any job exists for them at all.) Furthermore, the critical perspective would seem to imply that the social disruption which the speaker portrays as the inevitable consequence of technological change is in large part the result of an unrestrained push for. private profits having no relationship to 'technological necessity' at all, and that education's primary role should not be as an instrument of adaptation, as the speaker suggests, but rather as a means of helping workers to unite to collectively control and shape the process of technological change.