For many years now, worker training has been a major issue both in terms of worker employability and company competitiveness, as well as a country's economic performance. Globalization has reinforced this issue, since jobs are now increasingly reallocated between industries and countries. The need to continually adapt the workforce to technological and organizational changes and to the transformation of the labour market is widely acknowledged. However, there still seems to be a huge gap between discourse and reality. For instance, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concludes that important progress on training issues remains to be made in terms of investment, equity for workers and partnerships. (1) The OECD clearly refers to the leadership role of the state in this regard. This raises many questions from a theoretical perspective: What is the role of the state in stimulating training activities in firms? What kind of policies are the most appropriate, from a purely voluntary approach to a compulsory one? What should institutions do to improve partnership in training? Can we expect public policies to really have an impact on the behaviour of employers?
This article will try to answer these questions, at least partly, by considering the case of Quebec. Inspired by the Australian and French experiences, the Quebec government in 1995 adopted a unique law, for North America, An Act to Foster the Development of Manpower Training. (2) This law (also known as the "1% Wage Bill Law") was intended to improve worker qualifications, skills and performance through training. In my research, I focused on three different but complementary impacts of the law. First, we will observe the effect of the law on the level of company investment in training. The data suggest that the law had a specific impact in this regard but that small and medium-sized firms had more difficulties achieving the goals of the law and thus needed more institutional support to structure their training activities.
The second impact of the law is related to its distributional aspect in terms of its capacity to ensure a more equitable investment in training for different categories of workers in firms. Since the law was not designed specifically to improve this aspect, it is not surprising to observe few impacts in terms of distribution of the investment in training. Employers continue to invest in people whom they consider to be the core of the business activity, following the pure logic of human capital theory.
The third impact, which is the structural aspect, is more a "by-product" of the law. Even if the law did not directly address this, we can see many structural spin-offs, especially in terms of the development of partnerships in Quebec. These impacts can be observed at the provincial level (for example, in the establishment of the Labour Market Partners Commission), at the industry level (in the creation of thirty sector councils), and even at the firm level (in collective bargaining agreements). These last impacts are some of the most interesting in terms of development of a training culture, since they involve the actors' gradual appropriation of training issues. Political changes introduced by a neoliberal agenda have nonetheless had an impact on this partnership approach, which is still alive and seeking some adaptations of the law. In this regard, while political power has an influence, it does not totally determine the dynamic of labour-market partners.
Historical and theoretical considerations
In Canada, since the end of the 1980s, numerous studies have diagnosed major weaknesses in the level of company involvement in worker training and have raised the question of the role of public policy in training, especially in the context of free trade and globalization. One study, the DeGrandpre Advisory Council on Adjustment, looked at different strategies for the Canadian economy in the context of free trade. (3) Mandated by the federal government, this commission identified the workforce adaptation as a major goal for the Canadian economy. One of the advisory council's recommendations was a federal law that would foster manpower training by obliging companies to invest one per cent annually in worker training. A Quebec government commission in the early 1980s recommended this measure (the level suggested then was one and a half per cent), as well as the implementation of partnership committees at the company level. Even though the federal government and many provincial governments tried to re-direct training activities through different policy statement in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the policy approach was mainly a soft one that tried to build a partnership and training culture on a voluntary basis.
In a nutshell, the debate In Canada was between employer representatives, who were in favour of a gradual and voluntary approach, and union representatives, who asked for a coercive approach. Both parties recognized that training was a major issue and that there were many weaknesses in terms of practices, investment, behaviour, and so on. On the one hand, employers argued for fiscal incentives, diffusion of information, diffusion of best practices, and partnership-building based on the partners' goodwill. They were also opposed to the idea that the state or unions should intervene in decisions about the allocation of training expenses at the company level. Investment in training was seen as a management prerogative only. On the other hand, unions were arguing that those measures were inadequate, that goodwill was not very common in firms, and that many workers were already hurt by the transformations of the Canadian labour market. The time for voluntary actions was over, and, furthermore, unions were asking to be formally recognized as a decision-maker on training issues at the company level. Unions asked for state intervention, while employers argued for a liberal approach. (4)
Very clearly, we were witnessing a public debate, which was the empirical application of the opposition between the market approach and the institutionalist approach. The works of Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker in the early sixties and onward have suggested that firms will invest in training but training that is specific to their firm (thus, not transferable to other firms). (5) This neoclassical perspective based on market mechanisms as a mode of economic regulation can explain why firms will neglect "qualifying and transferable" training (not all kinds of training) for workers. This behaviour by employers can be explained by the uncertainty of being 'able to receive any return on their investment in training workers who may then …
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