No More Fighting In The Workplace?

The horror, the horror?
Richard Florida, helping fill in over at Andrew Sullivan's blog, cites a Globe & Mail piece by a woman noting that retraining working class men for 21st century jobs may not work very well.

But no matter how much education and retraining we offer, we are not going to transform factory workers and high-school dropouts into customer-care representatives or nurses' aides any time soon. It's their wives and daughters who will get those jobs ...

Just off the top of my head, I'm of two minds about this.
My first reaction is, what a lot of hooey. Any studies on this? It sounds, especially with Florida's personal experience added in, pretty anecdotal.
Second, I've known plenty of working class men who are eminently capable of empathy, compassion and generosity of spirit. I would argue that they might be relieved to be in an atmosphere where they are no longer expected to prove on a daily basis that they've got balls.
On the other hand, I sort of see the point. Guys with a lifetime of overt machoness (new word!) under their belts may not adjust so well. They may be angry, and fail. But probably not most of them. Money is a great motivator when you don't have any.
Oh, there are a lot of other things wrong with this theory, but it's interesting anyway.
Guess I'll go read the original piece.

UPDATE: Well, I read it and someone more familiar with the writer's work had this to say in the comments:

Wente shows herself, once again, to be out of touch.

She lives in a bubble form the fifties not noticing the changes in the world.

If she had to make a living in the real world she would know that manufacturing changed long ago, largely driven by union education and union struggle for the rights of ALL workers. The image she portrays as ending ended in the 70s.

Why does this person have this pulpit to preach? Her lack of insight and understanding of real Canadians shows in every one of her columns. Just lately she was ASTONISHED that we had Tamils in Toronto!

Wente be gone.

But I'm leaving the post up, because I think it's the sort of thinking the talk radio hacks have permanently imprinted on our culture, and who knows, Charlie Rose may decide to explore it.