The two markets draw on two relatively separate and distinct labour pools, and the barriers to movement between the markets are high---few who begin their work careers In the secondary labour market can ever expect to attain permanent positions in the primary labour market.3 Thus, while the 1950's and 1960's were a period in which the working class as a whole enjoyed unprecedented prosperity, this average rise in living standards concealed what Leo Johnson sees as a pattern of increasing disparity between rich and poor workers and a rapidly declining level of purchasing power among lower income earners. 4

Education

The surplus population was, and still is, overwhelmingly concentrated in the secondary labour market. Adherents of the liberal perspective have emphasized the role of education and training deficiencies in explaining its confinement there. This is the basis of their view that low educational attainment causes poverty. They would point to the fact that in 1971, for example, the job categories accounting for 64.7% of male Canadian workers with grade 8 or less were largely located in the low-wage secondary labour market: services (guards. watchmen, cooks, waiters, kitchen helpers, launderers, janitors, etc.); construction trades, farming and related; processing; sales; and transport equipment operating (taxi drivers, truck drivers, deliverymen, etc.) 5

However, a report of a Canadian organization, the National Council on Welfare, entitled Jobs and Poverty, 6 rejects the liberal contention that the primary obstacle to the movement of workers from the secondary labour market (what the report calls the labour market at "the margin of our economy and society") into the primary labour market (the "normal" one) consists of the personal characteristics of those workers, particularly their lack of education and training:

The reason for the situation of the working poor may seem simple and obvious.... Although it is tempting to seek. an explanation in terms of the deficiencies of Individual workers---their low educational achievement or their lack of skills---the answer doesn't lie here.

Instead we must examine the labor market itself, how it is structured and how it operates....for hundreds of thousands of low-income workers (the) normal labor market is almost completely alien....They work in a distinctly different labor market .... a market on the margin of our economy and society.7