Maintaining the Divided Labour Market

Given that the secondary labour market is of considerable importance to employers, both in terms of economic benefits and in terms of strengthening their position vis a vis the working class as a whole, it is not surprising to find that they engage in various practices which serve to maintain the status quo. These include the maintenance of high barriers to entry into the primary labour market, resistance to government efforts to ameliorate the condition of secondary workers, and the suppression of efforts to unionize secondary workers.

Discrimination

We have already discussed how the maintenance by employers of arbitrarily high, thus discriminatory, education and skill requirements for entry into better paying and more secure primary jobs serves to perpetuate a divided labour market. To these employment barriers we can add a second set which are often less explicit, but no less powerful--i.e. those of sex, race, ethnic or cultural background and age. According to the Council on Welfare, "accent, appearance, skin color, sex, age--these often serve as the real test of a person's 'employability'.36

Employers benefit in a direct economic sense from discrimination on these bases. or example, the sex-typing of jobs is a case in point. The designation of certain occupations, e.g. clerical jobs, as "women's work" justifies the payment of a low wage.37 According to Piore:

discrimination of any kind enlarges the labor force that is captive in the secondary sector, and thus lowers the wages that secondary employers must pay to fill their jobs. Such employers thus have an economic stake in perpetuating discrimination.38

A second direct benefit of discrimination for employers is a social control of the workforce, i.e. the maintenance of obedience and docility among those in subordinate positions. That is, by exclusively hiring males from the dominant ethnic and racial group who possess substantial (if unnecessary) educational credentials for managerial and supervisory positions, employers appeal to the broad cultural prejudices which say that it is "right" that white, anglo saxon males who are "smarter" (i.e. have substantial educational credentials) should be the ones to exercise authority. In this way, employers add a considerable measure of legitimacy to the higher offices in an organization. That is, subordinates are less likely to question the control and direction exercised over them than would be the case if say women, members of minority groups, or those with adequate, but less substantial, educational credentials were hired for such positions. Thus, racist, sexist and credentialist hiring practices serve as valuable resources for employers in the social control of the workforce.39 At the same time, these practices substantially reinforce racism, sexism and credentialism in the society, and perpetuate the subordinate position of excluded groups.