Labour adjustment, a term that has become familiar to many of us in the union movement to describe programs to help laid off workers reintegrate into the labour market. These programs include, among others, needs assessment and employability workshops like resume writing, interview skills, labour market research and so on.

But the term “adjustment” also carries with it a set of assumptions about the labour market that have shaped by decades of government policy and programs.

Beginning with the first FTA agreement the federal government made a fundamental shift in labour market policy. They signalled this shift very openly with a report called “Adjusting to Win”. The report warned that workers would be dislocated because of trade liberalization, but that instead of resorting to previously favoured job creation and economic development programs governments and individuals should focus on building up human capital that could be adapted to the new realities.  In other words, to quote from the report, workers should not passively wait for governments to solve labour market problems: they should retool themselves with new skills and attitudes and view labour market programs not as a safety net, but a trampoline that would bounce them back into the brave new world of work.

The problem, as we all know, is that neo liberal economic policy has resulted not so much in a knowledge economy as an ever sharper divide between good and bad jobs and polarization of incomes. The story of job losses from free trade that began and continues unabated in manufacturing has since cascaded over every other sector imaginable – health, retail, service – is familiar to everyone here, and does not need elaborating.  Nor do the effects.  So let’s talk instead about the types of labour market programs that neo liberal governments have put forward as solutions, including adjustment.

Beginning with Mulroney, and reaching its height under Paul Martin, labour market policy has shifted fundamentally from “adjusting” economies through job creation schemes to “adjusting” individuals no matter how completely impossible it actually is for them to make the transformation from, say, a steelworker or garment worker to a computer programmer or manager.  The great lie was that the good new jobs would be available, if only workers let go of their past expectations and retrained themselves.