The Quality of Work: A People-Centred Agenda by Graham S. Lowe, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2000, 213 pp., ISBN 0-19-541479-9.

With the fall in unemployment the attention is shifting from the quantity of jobs to the quality of jobs. Graham Lowe, Professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta, and Director of the Work Network at Canadian Policy Research Networks, has written a very readable well documented non-technical account of quality of work issues in Canada. The objective of the book is “to critically assess the directions in which work seems to be headed, and determine how we can met the aspirations that individual Canadians have for their work life.” Lowe offers a diagnosis of the problem of contemporary work and a prescription for making it better. Lowe argues that debates about the future of work have focused too narrowly on the quantity of jobs available and that we need to think seriously about the quality of the work we create. Indeed, he believes an agenda centred on work quality is essential if we want to ensure Canada’s continued viability both economically and socially. Lowe suggests that high-quality work offers a common ground for employers with an eye on productivity and individuals seeking greater challenge and meaning in their work. The book is very well organized and laid out. It first situates the idea of high quality work in earlier debates about the nature, purpose, and meaning of work and, on the basis of public opinion polls, outlines Canadians’ most persistent concerns about work in the 1990s. It then builds the case that Canadians generally want from paid work personal rewards that derive from the work itself, not just decent pay and economic security. The book next focuses on a number of issues: the gap between the skills and education of the workforce and the actual requirements of jobs, arguing that many jobs do not require high skills and that many workers are in fact overqualified for their jobs; the kind of working life that the next generation of workers can expect; the contradictions and inconsistencies in management rhetoric that people are the key resource; and the role of unions in pursuing a quality-of-work agenda. The book concludes by pulling together the threads of these arguments into a model and action plan of how to create a higher quality of work. I have five major points to raise on the book: the unproven nature of a crisis in the Canadian workplace; neglect of the impact of the macroeconomic environment on the workplace; failure to make the case that quality of work is a priority of Canadians; the limited impact of public policy on workplace issues; and the intrinsic undemocratic nature of the workplace. These points are discussed below. The proposition that there is a crisis in the Canadian workplace is in my view not convincing. It is true that perceptions of job insecurity may have risen in the 1990s, but one can argue that this was not a permanent development but rather linked with high unemployment and downsizing and these fears have since abated with the fall in unemployment. No evidence is presented that objective indicators of job quality, such as work accidents or degree of physical drudgery, have deteriorated. Neither is evidence presented that subjective indicators of job quality, such as surveys on how much workers like/hate their jobs, show a decline. Indeed, I believe that a case can be made that there is a strong long-term upward trend in job quality, although subject to short-to-medium term reversals because of negative cyclical developments. Factors behind this trend include the mechanization of the workplace, which reduced drudgery and industrial accidents, the employment shift from the goods sector to the service …