Educational leave provisions, as well as accommodating some of the unemployed, could also give clerical workers, particularly, the opportunity to develop technological qualifications. However, since most of these people are women, they cannot (under present circumstances) save enough money to enable them to enter full-time training or educational institutions. 10 As well, these employees have "the fewest opportunities for educational leave and staff training... They have particular problems upgrading their qualifications because of family and related considerations." 11

We cannot, however, ignore the irony of the situation: "Skills Development" can be, and often is, a hollow advantage for many women because it is often retraining to perform much more tedious and repetitive work than they had done before.

Whilst part of the rationale for recurrent education is rightly phrased in terms of "the need to equip the workforce with new skills ," . . . the trend is for a limited number of workers to develop these new and more sophisticated skills, and for much larger numbers either to be confronted with jobs emptied of their original skill content or to be rendered unemployed.12

Deskilling is very much a part of the current debate on skills development, and this is a bitter realization for women who are essentially undereducated when they enter the workforce.

The problem is that women most vulnerable to job loss, those in the clerical fields, are those least likely to have acquired the basic science skills, particularly mathematics and physics, necessary to gain access to any technological training program.13

While these disadvantages continue to accelerate, women's numbers in the labour force are rapidly increasing: by 1990, over 75% of women aged 25 to 54 will be in the labour force, either employed or seeking employment. The female participation rate will approach that of males by the year 2000.14 This increase is a result of economic need: 60% of women, according to the Dodge Report on "Labour Market Developments in the 1980's," are either living alone, single parents, or are married to someone who earns less than $10.000 a year and so must work outside the home. It is important to keep in mind that these projections are within the context of a current unemployment rate of 13.5%.15

In 1983, the context of women's work in Canada, as we have outlined it, is one of extreme vulnerability. This lack of job security is a direct result of the appropriation of employees' rights to jobs through the application of technological processes: processes women are unable to defend themselves against because of their ghettoization, inadequate training, lack of retraining opportunities, and the widespread discrimination which has made them largely poor and powerless.


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