For example, in a 1971 study, Rex Lucas refers to the effects of credentialism on employment in mines, smelters, paper mills, textile mills, sawmills, and fabricating plants in Northern single-industry towns in Canada. He points out that while the content of the average jobs in these industries requires no more than basic literacy--and older employees often lack even this--employers have recently begun to demand proof of attainment of 9, 10 or more years of schooling from prospective employees. Lucas states:

To the outsider, these educational requirements are admitted to be extravagantly high, and to have no relationship with the jobs to be performed... Thus one finds the incongruous situation that sons without a senior matriculation could not be hired despite the fact that their illiterate fathers were employed by the same company.12

Similarly, Harry Braverman quotes the representative of a large U.S. employer who reports that:

"Most factory type jobs require only 6th grade competency in arithmetic, spelling, reading and writing, and speaking," we are told by the personnel director of the Inorganic Chemicals Division of the Monsanto Chemical Company. "Too often." he continues, "business has used the requirement of a high school diploma or certificate as an easy means of screening out job applicants."13

In a study carried out for the Ontario Economic Council on the importance of basic reading, writing, speaking and mathematics skills in an Ontario city, Hall and Carlton present evidence which calls into question widely held views of the functional necessity of these skills in actual work settings. 14 Based on interviews with subjects employed in jobs which require a high school diploma, they found that only the most elementary mathematics is used in bank teller positions (grade 6 competency is sufficient), that the writing done on the job application form may be the most demanding writing assignment that incoming retail clerks will ever be expected to perform, that grade 5 mathematics is all that is used by many office workers, and that reading, writing and mathematics skills are seldom required in many manufacturing jobs in automated plants--and then these can often be avoided. The authors of the study conclude that "talking and listening skills" are more important than the conventional "three R's". They say, "formal language skills are a minuscule component of most of the jobs we have explored".15 In spite of this, employers continue to demand evidence of high levels of competency in language skills--as represented in a high school diploma--for the jobs.

Relaxed Requirements

Consistent with this observation, i.e. that the actual content of many jobs involves only very basic literacy and numeracy skills, the report of the National Council on Welfare suggests that when major corporations have relaxed requirements for educational credentials they have had considerable success in hiring and retaining so-called "problem" and "high-risk" employees.16 For example, sociologist Edward Banfield chronicles the experiment of the IBM corporation in locating an electronic components fabricating plant in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York. The company hired local residents, mainly impoverished Blacks. Little or no emphasis was placed on the credentials or skills of the 195 employees: