ABSTRACT
Advanced industrial economies in the 1990s face a work crisis that goes far beyond the crisis in creating wage employment or the crisis of more unequal wage distribution in a changing job market. This crisis resides not just in national labor markets, where an increasingly well-educated labor force is facing increasing difficulties finding steady employment at decent wages and less-educated labor is increasingly marginalized. The crisis is also political, with reactions to the core concept of the welfare state threatening to undermine nations' underlying social institutions — family, community, and public education — just as they come under new pressures from labor markets going through radical change. 1 The highly popular policy focus on more and better education as a solution to the crisis cannot be conceptually separated from this larger politics which surrounds it.
