Hull, G. (1992). "Their Chances? Slim and None":An Ethnographic Account of the Experiences of Low-Income People of Color in a Vocational Program and at Work (MDS-155). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.

THE CRISIS IN THE WORKPLACE: POLAR PERSPECTIVES

The most recent of several educational crises has to do not with school children, but with American workers. We are told by a variety of commission reports, surveys of employers, and popular articles that increasingly American workers are illiterate and poorly skilled, that literacy demands in the workplace are growing with the advent of new technologies and new ways of organizing work, and that business and industry should make haste to provide the training that people do not get in school and college--or else be prepared to suffer. Here is a sampling of these recent concerns:[1]

More and more, American employers will no longer enjoy the luxury of selecting from a field of workers with strong basic skills. The demand for labor will create opportunities for those who are less skilled; the disadvantaged will move up the labor queue and be hired in spite of obvious skill deficiencies (Carnevale, Gainer, & Meltzer, 1988).

Already the skills deficit has cost businesses and taxpayers $20 billion in lost wages, profits and productivity. For the first time in American history, employers face a proficiency gap in the work force so great that it threatens the well-being of hundreds of U.S. companies. (Gorman, 1988)

Qualifications for today's middle and low-wage jobs are rising even more rapidly than in the past. In 1965, a car mechanic needed to understand 5,000 pages of service manuals to fix any automobile on the road; today, he must be able to decipher 465,000 pages of technical text, the equivalent of 250 big-city telephone books (Whitman, Shapiro, Taylor, Saltzman, & Auster, 1989).

On the basis of such concerns, there has sprung up a new industry of training services and literacy programs designed specifically for the workplace. There are general guides to help employers assess the skills of workers and design training programs--for example, Upgrading Basic Skills for the Workplace (1989); The Bottom Line: Basic Skills in the Workplace, 1988; and Literacy at Work: The Workbook for Program Developers (Philippi, 1991). And there are even guides for particular industries such as Strategic Skills Builders for Banking (Mikulecky & Philippi, 1990) and The American Bankers Association's Survey on Basic Skills in Banking (American Bankers Association, 1989), a series of workbooks inspired by a survey of bank managers concerning the extent of the basic skills problem among their employees. Such guides often recommend basing literacy and skills training on texts or activities from work. The workbooks on banking, for example, provide work-at-your-own-pace lessons on counting cash at home and in the bank, checking catalog order forms, reading bank tickets, finding errors on receipts, and correcting balance sheets.

The popular rhetoric--the positions regularly put forth as fact and the assumptions behind many of the commercially prepared curriculum materials as well as actual workplace literacy programs--is that workers lack skills, that work now requires and will continue to require more and different skills, and that businesses are suffering at the hands of deficient workers, so we had better train those workers. These beliefs do not exist in isolation, of course, but can be seen as part of a dominant discourse on schooling, the now familiar fears that American schools are failing, that American children are not doing as well in the classroom as their counterparts in other industrialized countries, and that, consequently, since our businesses and industries cannot compete globally, we are at the mercy of the Japanese. In this panic-laden atmosphere, educators are urged to get tough and to get back to basics, and these same admonitions are applied to literacy providers and trainers. There is also the frankly expressed desire to connect schooling and work as closely as possible, making sure that whatever is learned in the classroom transfers to the job. Although similar concerns are almost always operative for some students, teachers, and schools, America's current economic recession and worries about competition make these viewpoints particularly potent and widespread.

If this is the dominant rhetoric, there is also a counter-rhetoric. A few people have begun to question the recent, apocalyptic views of America's illiterate workers. For example, Sarmiento (1991; Sarmiento & Kay, 1990) has argued that the real problem in workplaces is not literacy, but outmoded forms of work organization in the mold of Frederick Taylor. Drawing on his ethnographic research in a wire and cable factory and also an electronics firm, Darrah (1990, 1992) has demonstrated that whatever skills workers have or lack, incentives and disincentives in the workplace influence whether workers will employ those skills. In a review of workplace literacy issues, I have argued that the popular rhetoric on literacy and work underestimates human potential and offers literacy as a curative for problems literacy cannot solve (Hull, 1991).

The most developed counter-rhetoric to current views on literacy and work comes, however, not from research on present day workplaces--these perspectives are still relatively rare in print[2]--but from critical educational theorists. Drawing on the work of people like John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Antonio Gramsci, these writers question the wisdom of linking education to marketplace imperatives, looking instead for a moral and civic rationale for schooling. For example, Giroux and McLaren (1989) want an education which "aims at developing critical citizens and reconstructing community life by extending the principles of social justice to all spheres of economic, political, and cultural life" (p. xxii). And they speak of "learning for empowerment" (p. xxiii), whereby education draws upon the diversity of resources that students bring to school, rather than promoting an uncritical adoption of "values consistent with industrial discipline and social conformity" (p. xvii). They especially decry "remedial" education for its implication that students are placed in particular tracks because of their own shortcomings or virtues.

Ira Shor (1989), a critical theorist and teacher (see his Critical Teaching and Everyday Life, 1980, and Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration 1969-1984, 1986), sees a necessity to "de-vocationalize" students, to provide an alternative to narrow skills training for immediate job placement. He wants an education that is "participatory," "critical," "situated," "dialogic," "desocializing," "democratic," "interdisciplinary," and "activist" in orientation. He illustrates a problem-posing, critical approach to education for work as well. For example, he recommends setting up a gallery exhibit about students' communities and the occupations for which they are training. He argues that such exhibits and the questions that would surround them allow education to begin with students' backgrounds and histories and would include global thinking about conditions of work. Shor also recommends having students interview workers, organize the material they collect, and present it for critical discussion. All this would take place in addition to technical job training.

Basic skills--critical skills. Preparation for jobs--preparation for citizenship in a democracy. I see this opposition as one illustration of what Carnoy and Levin (1985; Carnoy, 1989) have called the "reproductive" and "democratizing" forces in American education. On the one hand, there are "attempts by the dominant class to impose its concept of the world on the mass of youth in school," and on the other, "attempts by subordinate groups to shape schools and school expansion to contribute to the development of their cultures in the context of an American capitalist development that serves them and not just the business class" (Carnoy, 1989, p. 3). One of these opposing forces, say Carnoy and Levin, is in ascendancy at any given historical period. The sixties are the most recent example of the ascendancy of democratizing forces, while the present decade and the legacy of Reagan are most certainly instances of the successful imposition of dominant-group or reproductive ideology. But Carnoy and Levin also argue that the opposing forces are always simultaneously present, always both at work, each being able potentially to modify the other. Thus, there is always available an "exploitable political space for those that are willing to engage in the struggle for change" (Carnoy, 1989, p. 6), even change in education at the current moment--particularly, argues Carnoy, if educators align themselves with a potent social movement.

Carnoy and Levin's theory is useful because it provides a historical context for viewing the skills controversy currently raging around the American workforce. It is possible, then, to sort the players in this controversy into one large and one small pile according to whether they seem to favor reproductive or democratizing forces, and perhaps to take some comfort as well, whatever side you favor, in the belief that the potential exists for change. As an educator and researcher, and from a personal as well as professional point of view, I have much more sympathy for the philosophy and goals of the critical theorists of the world than I do for boosters of basic and high tech skills for an illiterate workforce. However, in the research I am reporting in this paper, I have tried to follow a different path. Rather than taking sides and digging in, I have tried to understand how those people who are talked about and referred to in commission reports and theoretical treatises--that is, students and workers--actually experience training programs and their jobs. And I have attempted to let those understandings inform, guide, and temper my evaluation of the skills controversy. Putting aside for the moment Carnoy and Levin's long-range historical forecast for change--I will return to their ideas later, as well as to the related positions of social theorists--I want to set my sights on the present, taking very seriously the aspirations and experiences of a group of African-American women and other minority students who enrolled in a vocational training program in Banking and Finance because, as many of them told me, "You know Mr. Parker? Well, he'll get you a job."

[1]The popular discourse on workplace literacy is reviewed in detail by Hull (1991). The view that unskilled minorities and women will increasingly dominate the workforce while future jobs will require more highly skilled workers is largely based on a widely disseminated report prepared by the Hudson Institute for the Department of Labor, Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century (Johnston & Packer, 1987). For a counter argument, see Mishel and Teixeira's (1991) The Myth of the Coming Labor Shortage. For plans to shape schooling to fit changes thought to be occurring in workplaces, see the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) (1992).

[2]Despite the many and frequent claims concerning the skills, including the literacies, required in reorganized, technologically sophisticated workplaces, as well as what skills workers lack, relatively little is known about the actual skill demands of these workplaces or the kinds of training new jobs might require. There have been studies of the "reading difficulty level" of job-related materials through the application of readability formulas (cf. Diehl & Mikulecky, 1980; Duffy, 1985; Mikulecky, 1982; Rush, Moe, & Storlie, 1986), as well as attempts to differentiate reading at school from reading at work (cf. Diehl & Mikulecky, 1980; Sticht, 1979; Sticht, Armstrong, Hickey, & Caylor, 1987; Sticht & Hickey, 1987). And there have been a handful of projects which examined literacy at work within larger ethnographic studies of knowledge acquisition in real-world settings (e.g., Jacob, 1986; Martin & Scribner, 1988; Scribner, 1985, 1987; Scribner & Sachs, 1991). However, for the most part, complaints about worker "illiteracy" arise, as Darrah (1990, 1992) points out, not from detailed observations of work, but from surveys and anecdotal reports (e.g., American Bankers Association, 1989; cf. Baba, 1991).

Hull, G. (1992). "Their Chances? Slim and None":An Ethnographic Account of the Experiences of Low-Income People of Color in a Vocational Program and at Work (MDS-155). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.