However, the critical perspective, building on evidence such as has been put forward in the present chapter, leads us to a quite different expectation. Athur Hussain points out the "strange premise" upon which the liberal remediation strategy rests:

It is a common observation that the lowest paid are also those with the lowest education ... and that the well paid are usually also the well educated. From this observation it is deduced, usually implicitly, that educational inequality is one of the main causes of economic inequality. This then leads to the belief that economic inequality can be, at least in part, reduced by widening access to educational institutions and taking positive measures to ... reduce educational differences. However well intentioned and noble the belief may be, it rests on a strange, but unstated, premise that somehow the provision of more education will lead to the disappearance of low paid occupations.62

Hussain's point is that the architects of the remediation strategy failed to take into account the substantial barriers to the elimination of the low wage secondary labour market which are rooted in the economic structure.. Adherents of the critical perspective hold that in the absence of fundamental changes in this structure, merely increasing the education and training attainments of the poor will not eliminate the secondary labour market or enable the poor to cross over in large numbers into the primary labour market.

In fact, this prediction is borne out in the case of both the U.S. and Canadian Manpower programs, as initiated in the 1960's. Surveying the U.S. experience, Howard Wachtel writes:

The failure to construct public programs based on an analysis of the causes of poverty is the reason for the ambiguous accomplishments of public policy in the 1960's. Completers of manpower training programs have become members of the working poor. The median wage for all trainees between 1962 and 1967 was $1.74 per hour--$1.60 for blacks.63

Similarly, in reference to the Canada Manpower Training Program, Pierre Dandurand observes that:

the program serves a clientele which has a very low income and its trainees return to a category having only a slightly higher level of income. For example, according to an estimate of the Economic Council of Canada, about 50 per cent of the trainees were below the threshold of poverty before they started the training program, and, after the training, 40 per cent were below that threshold. The trainees therefore take up low paid jobs, when they find employment at all. 64