The conventional wisdom that the working poor are stuck in their unrewarding jobs because they lack the education, work experience, aptitudes and skills that are needed in the normal labour market...may be valid for some individual workers, but it is not sufficient to explain the situation of the working poor as a whole.20

Barriers to Primary Jobs: Non-Marxist and Marxist Views

So far, it has been argued that we cannot adequately account for the confinement of the surplus population to the low-wage secondary labour market as adherents of the liberal perspective have done, i.e. through reference to their low level of education and training. However, if this is true, we are left with the question as to the identity of the non-job-relevant factors which can account for their entrapment. Here we must both explain why skill and education requirements for primary employment have become inflated, particularly as indicated in the phenomenon of credentialism, and identify other structural barriers preventing the movement of secondary workers into the primary market.

Non-Marxist Views

Non-Marxists have offered several explanations for the practice of credentialism. For example, it is thought that employers have increasingly resorted to the use of educational credentials as a screening device for prospective employees, even where the standards are inappropriate for the technical content of the jobs, because they lack a better means of discriminating among a large pool of otherwise equally qualified candidates (in which case education serves as a handy, if arbitrary, sorting tool);21 or because they are convinced that those with higher educational attainment make better employees, regardless of whether the job content requires it;22 or finally, because young people have sought higher qualifications in the belief that it will improve their employment opportunities, and employers have had to raise their educational standards as a defensive maneuver (thus creating an inflationary spiral). 23

Apart from inflated requirements for education and skills, another class of non-job-relevant barriers to primary sector employment identified by many writers are those based upon sex, race and age. In the case of racial and cultural minority groups, for example, it has been suggested that irrational racist sentiments motivate employers to discriminate, either because they themselves are racist, or because many of their employees possess such sentiments, and they must discriminate to avoid negative sanctions.24 Sexism and ageism are seen as similar powerful and prevalent cultural prejudices which operate In much the same way.