In evaluating applications, no importance was attached to lack of schooling. An employee had to be able to read and write (although not necessarily well enough to be able to fill out an application form; assistance was provided for that when necessary), but no on was disqualified for lack of a grade school education.17

The operation of the plant proved to be both efficient and profitable.

Michael Piore, one of the originators of the dual labour market thesis, believes that "a portion--perhaps a substantial proportion" of the more technologically sophisticated and complex work of the primary labour market could be organized in such a way that it could be performed by relatively less well educated and less skilled workers who are presently confined to the secondary labour market. There are no inherent technological barriers to this. As Piore puts it, "the distinction between the primary and secondary jobs is not, apparently, technologically determinant".18 For example, we can point to instances where high-skill work is transferred by employers from high-wage regions to low-wage areas in North America and the Third World, where it is broken down into simpler operations and performed by unskilled, often functionally illiterate, workers.19 Such examples confirm Plore's belief that employers have a considerable degree of latitude in the mixture of skill levels and technology available to them at the same level of efficiency and profitability. Therefore, the denial of access of secondary workers to the primary market cannot be adequately explained through reference to greater inherent technological sophistication of the work.

Summary

To summarize the evidence which has been presented on the nature of education and skill barriers to primary labour market employment, it appears first, that the educational requirements for many jobs are unrealistically high and do not reflect the actual, and often surprisingly unsophisticated, reading, writing and computing tasks that the jobs entail; second, that business and industry have made successful use of workers with low levels of educational attainment in experiments in which they reduced customary qualifications for employment; and third, that much of the work that is presently performed by workers in the primary labour market could be organized for less skilled and less well educated secondary workers at the same level of profitability.

Therefore, even though it must be recognized that a substantial portion of work in Canada remains beyond the capacity of those who lack full mastery of fundamental literacy and numeracy skills, it appears that employers in the primary labour market could make much greater use of less skilled and less educated workers than they presently do, and this includes many workers who are termed functionally illiterate. While low educational attainment is one obstacle to the integration of secondary workers into the primary market, it is not the most important one. This provides confirmation for the conclusion of the National Council on Welfare that: