By Peter Boyle
Both the federal and Victorian governments have suggested that the solution to youth unemployment is contained in the Carmichael Report, a document from the Employment and Skills Formation Council named after it author, former ACTU assistant secretary and architect of the Accord, Laurie Carmichael.
Not so, says Simon Marginson, a senior research fellow at Melbourne University's Centre for the Study of Higher Education. The report does nothing to create jobs for the current lost generation of unemployed young people. Worse, it proposes a reactionary direction in national education policy, he told Green Left Weekly.
The report even proposes banning fully paid and full-time employment for 15 to 19 year olds. Everyone in this age group should be in training: at schools, TAFE colleges, private educational establishments or on the job.
The "training wage" concept proposed in the report has a different motivation than the low "youth wage" put forward by the New Right, which claims that jobs for youth are in short supply because youth labour has been priced out of the market. The New Right is simply wrong on the facts, says Marginson. The disappearance of full-time teenage work predates the relative increase in youth wages in the 1970s.
Employers want cuts in youth wages, and the Carmichael training plan is a plan to cut wages, says Marginson. But the purpose is not the provision of more jobs for youth. "The purpose is to abolish the full-time teenage labour market and increase training, thereby fulfilling two purposes — a forced reduction in unemployment and a higher skill level for the work force."
Technology and society
When Laurie Carmichael got up to sell his grand plan to Premier Kirner's June 25 "mini-summit" on youth unemployment, he evoked images of dramatic social change on a scale far greater than that of the Industrial Revolution. Technology and shifts in world markets require dramatic reform of workplace relations and worker training, he said.
While there has been some debate about the trainee wage/youth wage/youth slavery, the most insidious aspect of the Carmichael Report has yet to be raised in the public debate, according to Marginson.
The Carmichael report stridently demands:
"All people are required to meet the demands of a changing technology, the needs of delivering a high quality product or service in the market, social and service expectations and, in particular, organisation."
"Training must be competency-based."
"Training must be responsive to industry and enterprise needs and be industry and/or enterprise driven."
Why? The report's answer could have been written by the New Right-minded Business Council of Australia: "For [Australia's] external payments and debt balances to be redressed effectively in the medium term, there must be a progressive transition to a more internationally open and competitive economy ...
"The training agenda is a necessary part of national micro-economic reforms to make Australia more economically competitive."
So the training system proposed by Carmichael is part of the program of profit-boosting award restructuring, enterprise bargaining, skills-based career structures and changing methods of work organisation.
According to the report, history has dissolved conflicts of interest between boss and worker. "International best practice in developing a cooperative workforce, making best use of the skills and capacity of the workforce, responding to new technology and management techniques must be adopted." Training and education must foster the "right attitude" in workers.
Competency-based training
The report advocates a "competency-based training" (CBT) system — an idea that has already been floated in various governmental committees.
What exactly is CBT? The Carmichael Report is written in the bureaucratese common to official reports produced by the modern "democratic" state. Its pages of fancy words about CBT leave the uninitiated little the wiser. For example:
"A CBT system is about outcomes, what an individual can demonstrate that he or she can do, rather than inputs, in the form of prescribed periods of training."
In plain language, CBT is based on a view of education overly influenced by the behaviourists — that school of psychology which developed into a reactionary trend in the social sciences. CBT envisages education as the subject/rat/worker's competence at accomplishing certain defined tasks. The trained rat jumps when the red light goes on, while the trained worker has a more sophisticated range of competencies.
Carmichael envisages a lifelong, standardised training system which will produce labour units/workers competent in the areas defined by employers. For the employer this would be a dream come true, a chance best work practices" almost as good as a robot — if the price is right. But if part of the training includes the "right attitude" to "cooperative workplace relations" (an essential part of Carmichael's high-tech brave new world) the price will always be right. A few thousand trainee workers on a pittance will help make sure this is the case.
The process of putting CBT in place has advanced rapidly under the federal Labor government. It is one area of micro-economic reform and cooperation between state governments that has developed most smoothly. Employer organisations think it is a great idea.
But won't the unions check this charge? That's unlikely, says Marginson, pointing to the ACTU's policy on "Workplace Reform, Skill Development and a High Competence, Educated Workforce" which was adopted with little discussion at last year's ACTU Congress. It endorses the key ideas behind the Carmichael Report.
The new training system fits well into the ACTU's own vision of its future role as a club of large, bureaucratic and powerful unions providing individual services to members — education, of the right sort, being one of them.
CBT for all?
Laurie Carmichael seems determined to spread CBT to the whole education system. The report regrets that it is limited by its official terms of reference to "vocational education" — the education system traditionally reserved for workers rather than professionals. But it ventures a hope that CBT will spread:
"General and vocational education, and work and learning, are too sharply divided in traditional Australian attitudes and practice. They must in future be seen as closely related, because of changes in the way industry operates."
Marginson believes that it is unlikely that tertiary education will be developed exactly along the same lines, though big business has had a growing say in its curricula. "The ruling class will probably prefer to preserve some avenues of a more liberal education for its sons and daughters. But what the Carmichael Report represents is a determination to reverse the direction of the development of Australia's education system. For most of this century the idea has been to try to open the chance at a liberal education to wider layers of people. But this report says firmly that workers are to be educated to be good workers."
Like any other set of policies, the new training system is sold largely on the perceived or real weaknesses of the existing system. So the Carmichael Report carefully taps real concerns about the current education system.
These include the "alienation" that many students in high schools feel, lack of relevance of studies and authoritarianism. Add a few fine sentiments dressed up in theory designed to seduce some on the academic left, like: "Curriculum is best thought of in terms of a continuum between theory and application, rather than theory and application being opposed". Call for more "contextual learning", more vocational options in years 11-12, provision of year 11-12 courses by some TAFE colleges and the elimination of the "disincentive " that TAFE charges pose, and the package is ready to be sold to some who matter in the bureaucracies.
Real future
Yet if Carmichael's grand plan is put in place, will it be able to guarantee a job to the presumably fully competent and skilled workers emerging at the other end of the system?
Marginson says that this is the question that has been avoided. Papers like the Carmichael and Finn Reports have produced not a skerrick of evidence to say that the jobs will be there. Indeed, the Carmichael Report admits that there are serious doubts about the impact of high unemployment not only on the eventual future of today's youth but even on the viability of workplace training:
"A number of those consulted ... considered that the targets are unrealistic, given the current economic climate, the degree of deskilling in certain occupations, and the high levels of general and youth unemployment. They argued that there could be no benefit in raising education and training levels, and the associated expectations of young people, unless adequate numbers of jobs are available."
In the metal industry, currently employing approximately 50,000 apprentices, "recruitment patterns are changing". The building and construction industry has been a major source of vocational training, but since the downturn "concern has been raised about the capacity of the industry to participate fully in the system". The State Training Board of Victoria thought that the apprenticeship system in the industry "might not recover from the current economic circumstances".
So what confidence can youth — excluded from the work force under Carmichael's plan — have that jobs will be waiting for them after training? The report offers little more than a wish.
It simply "assumes that either the Government will be successful through its economic and employment policies in increasing the numbers of jobs available to young people or alternatives to work based training will be expanded to compensate for any shortfall".
But then, the aim is really "to ensure that young people are equipped for any emerging employment opportunities". That is, they are there to meet the employers' needs when — if — the employers need them. They can spend the rest of their time training to be good employees.