University of British Columbia Press
Training the Excluded for Work
Access and Equity for Women, Immigrants, First Nations, Youth, and People with Low Income
9780774810074
9780774810067
Distributed for University of British Columbia Press
Training the Excluded for Work
Access and Equity for Women, Immigrants, First Nations, Youth, and People with Low Income
In recent years job training programs have suffered severe funding cuts and the focus of training programs has shifted to meet the directives of funders rather than the needs of the community. How do these changes to job training affect disadvantaged workers and the unemployed? In an insightful and comprehensive discussion of job education in Canada, Cohen and her contributors pool findings from a five-year collaborative study of training programs. Good training programs, they argue, are essential in providing people who are chronically disadvantaged in the workplace with tools to acquire more secure, better-paying jobs. In the ongoing shift toward a neo-liberal economic model, government policies have engendered a growing reliance on private and market-based training schemes. These new training policies have undermined equity. In an attempt to redress social inequities in the workplace, the authors examine various kinds of training programs and recommend specific policy initiatives to improve access to these programs. This book will be of interest to policymakers, academics, and students interested in policy, work, equity, gender and education.
Table of Contents
Figures and Tables Acknowledgments Acronyms Introduction 1. Who Wins, Who Loses: The Real Story of the Transfer of Training to the Provinces and Its Impact on Women / Ursule Critoph 2. Snakes and Ladders: Coherence in Training for Office Workers / Alice de Wolff and Maureen Hynes 3. The Road to Equity: Training Women and First Nations on the Vancouver Island Highway / Marjorie Griffin Cohen and Kate Braid 4. Women’s Training and Equity on the Hibernia Construction Project / Sue Hart and Mark Shrimpton 5. The Culture of Construction: Or, Etiquette for the Nontraditional / Kate Braid 6. Hammering Their Way through the Barriers: Low-Income Women Retrain to Be Carpenters / Margaret Little 7. Training and Retraining Health Workers amid Health Care Restructuring, Downsizing, and Rationalization: The Case of Health Care Aides / Larry Haiven and Liz Quinlan 8. Community Skills Training by and for Immigrant Women / Margaret Manery and Marjorie Griffin Cohen 9. Life Skills Training: "Open for Discussion" / Shauna Butterwick 10. Pathways to Employment for Women: Apprenticeship or College Training? / Robert Sweet 11. Public Policy and Women’s Access to Training in New Brunswick / Joan McFarland 12. Still Shopping for Training: Women, Training, and Livelihoods / Karen Lior and Susan Wismer 13. Youth Employment Programs in British Columbia: Taking the High Road or the Low Road? / Linda Wong and Stephen McBride 14. Training Youth at Risk: A Model Program in Quebec / Sylvain Bourdon and Frédéric Deschenaux Bibliography Contributors Index