Becoming unequal? Negative biases in receiving labour market training

Workplaces are undergoing substantial transformation owing to automation, offshoring, and the Green Transition. These transformations mean that some workers are more likely to lose out than others. Economically, some workers may face greater unemployment risk, higher incidence of structural unemployment, or interrupted employment biographies. Policymakers and experts have suggested that training would resolve some of these adverse ramifications of transformation. However, the crucial caveat is that training reaches the group of workers who need them most and are thus most vulnerable to such transformations. We focus here on one such group: lower-educated workers who tend to have poor economic prospects that may be exacerbated by these transformations. Specifically, we focus on the ones with the worst prospects, namely primary-educated workers in Finland which has a similarly strong tradition of training like in the other Nordics. Although this group of workers could be expected to be targeted for training, we do not find that they are more likely to receive training than better-educated workers who have upper secondary or vocational qualifications. This finding thus raises a critical question: if training does not reach the least-educated workers and is instead biased towards better-educated workers, would such training measures promote more unequal outcomes that they were supposed to remedy?
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv270kv9x