In their review of workplace training, the Conference Board of Canada (2005) identifies the lowskills equilibrium as one important aspect of the economic context that may considerably limit access to training opportunities for less-educated workers. As this recent report concludes:
“the competitive human resource strategy of many employers is based on a lowcost/low-added-value approach – which perpetuates a low-skill/low-wage equilibrium in which neither employees nor employers demand higher levels of skills. The real impact of poor skills on business becomes evident when employees are asked to go beyond the familiar – a challenge that they are often not able to fulfill. In the end, low-skilled and under-skilled employees avoid taking on extra responsibilities or more demanding roles and as a consequence their skills status remains static, as does their productivity rates, and potential earning power.”
Figure 6.1 provides a graphic illustration of this problem. The three charts in Figure 6.1 are derived from the Canadian Workplace and Employee Survey (WES). As the first chart shows, workers with an initial education of high-school or less represent 68 percent of those who earn less than $12 an hour and 81 percent of those who earn less than $8 an hour. The vast majority, of these workers report that skills requirements of their jobs have not changed since they started in their current job. In contrast, more highly educated workers are much more likely to report that skills requirements have increased. Not surprisingly then, as the second and third charts show, low-skill/low-wage earners are more likely to report that the amount of training available to employees in the workplace has not increased since they began working for their company and they are less unlikely to consider this as a problem given the demands of their job. Taken together these charts suggest that low-skill/low-wage workers may get trapped in a circle of unskilled tasks in their workplace, with limited scope for skill requirements to increase, hence limited need for training and limited training opportunities offered by their employer.