A Marxist Outlook

While each of these explanations undoubtedly possesses validity, they offer only partial and ad hoc answers, and taken together, do not address the question of the persistence of the dual labour market as a totality. For their part, Marxists would insist that the problem of the dual labour market in Canada, and the role of racism, sexism, ageism and credentialism in its persistence, can only be understood through reference to a larger political economic process of which It is one manifestation (which was explored above): the production and reproduction of a surplus population by the capitalist economic structure. They would point out that employers in particular, but also unionized primary labour market workers, possess considerable vested economic interests in the relegation of certain jobs to a low-wage secondary labour market and in the perpetuation of a mass of dependent and exploitable "surplus" workers to fill them. For example, Cy Gonick asserts that employers have not allowed secondary workers in primary market jobs since World War II because they "have a vested interest in preserving the prevailing arrangement".25 Similarly, political economist David Gordon argues that "the standard operating procedures for channeling workers among the two markets have ... great utility to both primary and secondary employers". 26

We will now explore the nature of this "great utility" and the means which are employed to perpetuate the secondary labour market. First we will examine the role of employers, and then the role of primary sector employees.

The Benefits For Employers from the Dual Labour Market

The substantial benefits derived by employers from the persistence of the low-wage secondary labour market and the continued existence of a "surplus population" stratum to inhabit it can be placed in two major categories: direct economic gains, and gains from the reduction of working class militancy. As for the first category of gains, economic ones, we have already seen that as many as a third of the job slots in the Canadian economy paid poverty-level wages or lower in 1971. Therefore, the workers disqualified from more desirable primary labour market employment and forced to accept low-wage jobs cannot be considered marginal to the economy--they are integral to it. According to Michael Piore, the poor "have economic value where they are..."27

This value especially accrues to employers in low-wage service industries and in labour-intensive manufacturing, who are able to cut their labour costs to a minimum by hiring "excluded" workers and paying them substandard wages. However, even large, capital-intensive manufacturing employers periodically make use of secondary workers. For example, owing to the vagaries of the business cycle, many such employers depend from time to time on the practice of sub-contracting certain types of work to employers in the secondary labour market as a means of shifting the costs of flexibility in their highly capital intensive operations outside of the company.28 At other times, these employers may find it advantageous (e.g. to avoid union pressures) to close down their operations in high wage areas and move them to underdeveloped regions. in Canada, the U.S. or the Third World, where they hire secondary workers.29 Finally, the large scale petroleum or hydro-electric "mega-projects" organized by the capitalist state in concert with large corporations periodically require small armies of unemployed and underemployed secondary workers who are able to move quickly to inaccessible sites (e.g. in the North), and who need not be retained when the projects conclude.30 Overall, the secondary labour market provides a source of profitability and economic flexibility to employers in Canada.