Training is not just about jobs. In society, training is conducted by community organizations, unions and others in the voluntary sector to equip people to be active citizens and advocates (see Gordon Selman's chapter "The Imaginative Training for Citizenship" in this volume). Each year, Canada's labour movement provides tens of thousands of members with training so that they might represent their fellow workmates as health and safety monitors, stewards, negotiators and grievance handlers. This kind of adult education-variously called union education, labour education or workers' education—has a long history and a developed infrastructure.1 It aims to build the skills, knowledge and confidence of people elected by their fellow workers to provide a counterweight to the increasingly arrogant and arbitrary power of employers both in the public and private sectors.

People volunteer to be representatives for their unions while, in most cases, working each day for an employer. Because their past experiences in union education generally have been positive, when they are looking for approaches, methods and structures to develop job-related competence, they naturally turn to their union for guidance. As an educator in the labour movement for the past twenty years, I have been one of those called on to respond. This chapter captures some of the experience of a unionist drawn into the public policy debate around job training. It focuses on one province, Ontario, and on one decade, 1986-96. It reviews the "long climb" toward establishing the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board (OTAB), an innovative approach to training that included participation of social partners beyond the workplace. It recounts my learning of, and reflection on, the viewpoints of others as we rode the training rollercoaster. It also records my unions' disappointments and hopes for the future as one part of the ride came to an end.

Before examining the Ontario experience, it might be helpful for readers if the broad principles of a union approach to training are outlined. Unions favour training that is portable, developmental and equitable. By portable, they mean that skills should not be limited to the current equipment and uses or even to the current workplace, but should be broad enough and sufficiently certified that workers can carry their "educational capital" with them. By developmental, unions mean that training courses should not be a dead end but should increase the capacity and desire to learn, so that workers are encouraged and guided toward further study and practice. And by equitable, they mean that training should be a universal right in the same way that Medicare or basic public schooling are, rather than a favour handed out by employers based on their unilateral definition of the needs of the workplace.

In this context, it makes sense that unions advocate:
skills-based agreements that link job classifications to skills and training. This helps create pressure to use higher and broader skills. It constrains employers' attempts to divide training into small segments of job-specific and employer-specific training.

training based on nationally recognized standards that are transportable from province to province. These standards should specify broader skills and prevent use of narrow task-specific training.

negotiated agreements on the availability of training and education opportunities and on the introduction of new technologies and new work practices.

training for the unemployed that is linked to real employment opportunities and not just training for training's sake.

Unions want better and more interesting jobs for their members, they want their members' skills recognized, and they want the above principles entrenched in freely negotiated collective agreements.

Setting Up the Ride
From the start, it looked bumpy. Most employers considered training to be a management right, with management making decisions in hiring, promotion and workplace reorganization without consulting the collective voice of the employees. Historically, in the early part of the century, the construction trades had addressed job skills by providing training for their members, thus giving workers bargaining power with their employers. But this training, in the form of apprenticeships, was limited to those who could integrate into an old-boy's network - an ironic mirror of today's economic elite - that excluded groups such as young workers and women. It was training that kept wages up but ran against the egalitarian culture of the emerging industrial unions.

With the public-policy door on training swung open for the next wave of unions, industrial unions (such as autoworkers and steel-workers) moved through the door. Still left outside the discussion were service unions such as those in hospitals and restaurants, and workers in the public sector.

The first issue about "co-determined" training, i.e., training policy developed through participation of all
stakeholders, is that the employers were there first; and most government officials saw their continuing claim to primacy as legitimate. The second issue is that different parts of the labour movement climbed on board at different times. And the third issue is that the unions themselves had to change in order to accomplish their declared goals:

Some changes are on the surface

And others are profound.

Ways of thinking shift

Along with everything else in this world.

Over the years, the climate changes

Pastures change the herds that they feed.

Since everything else changes,

It shouldn't be surprising that I change.

-Mercedes Sosa

In the dream of economic and social justice that animates union activists lies a deep commitment to democratizing knowledge. Yet, the desire of unionists to have a voice in their work lives requires controlling their job-related skills, both formal and tacit.2 When they try to influence the fragmented and exclusionary structures in Canadian skills training, issues arise particularly because these structures are, on occasion, mirrored within the unions themselves.

The research and education departments of the major unions did have a practice run in which these tensions were well handled. In the early 1980s, the federal government was seriously considering a national Paid Educational Leave (PEL) initiative. Variously called "skill development leave," a "levy-grant system," and a "training tax," this policy area was open to labour's participation.3 Led by Daniel Benedict, the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) nominee on the tripartite task force, labour educators studied the options, polished up their arguments and worked out in caucus their internal differences. Hence, a large and unified labour delegation turned out to a 1983 conference in Hull. From English Canada and Quebec, from building trades and service unions, the labour delegation worked in solidarity.

However, the other three parties in this social negotiation were not willing or able to reach an agreement. The government delegation split along federal-provincial lines; the education providers split among post-secondary, school-board and voluntary-sector educators; and, while the employer delegation held together, it was in order to resist legislation of any kind. The moment passed.

As secretary of the labour delegation, I was frustrated. But when the door opened again at a provincial level, several of us could reach back into our kit bags, pull together the contacts and arguments that had proven solid a few years earlier and return to the debate. In each province it played out differently, but my own involvement was largely in Ontario, and I will restrict myself to that province in the remainder of this article.4

Climbing the OTAB Hill

The political culture of Ontario shifted decisively during the 1980s. The Conservative Party's stranglehold on power at Queen's Park, tightened over decades, was loosened by an alliance of Liberals and the New Democratic Party, who shared government on the basis of an accord. When the Liberals won a majority government in the mid-1980s without NDP support, they were sensitive to pressure from the left. One indication of this sensitivity was the decision by then-Premier David Peterson to invite three labour leaders into his main strategy think-tank, the Premier's Council. With Leo Gerard of the Steelworkers, Fred Pomeroy of the Communications Workers and Gord Wilson of the Autoworkers (at the time, president of the Ontario Federation of Labour), Peterson had three capable and articulate union advocates on his hands, rather than in his pocket.

The Council's first major policy document on technology and economic restructuring came out with little labour flavour; however, $5 million was provided by government for labour-led research on the impacts of technological change. The "Technology and Adjustment Research Program" (TARP), became the focal point of labour-positive social research outside the academy until funding was cut off by the resurgent Conservatives in 1995 (Anderson, 1995).

As drafting began for the Council's second major report on the "people side of the issue" (Government of Ontario, 1995) as compared to the technology side, the three labour representatives moved to influence the content. In successive drafts, they pushed to broaden access, to require employer funding and to recognize and support a public rather than privatized delivery structure When John O'Grady and I took the final draft to then-Opposition Leader Bob Rae, he commented that the report recommendations gave labour a stronger voice than an NDP government could. When the NDP, to everyone's surprise, won the election in the fall of 1990, his words proved prophetic.

Parallel to the process in the Premier's Council, the labour movement was building capacity to address training issues. A subcommittee on training was formed at the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) to provide a forum for the increasing number of union staff involved in sectoral-training initiatives,5 in workplace-training agreement, and in labour-provided programs such as the Basic Education and Skills Training (BEST) literacy initiative.6 By the 1989 convention of the Ontario Federation of Labour, a policy statement on training had been developed with full input from the subcommittee. The statement was strongly endorsed by the leadership of the labour movement and supported by delegates during the floor debate.7 Training was now officially part of Ontario labour's agenda as a priority item.

Of course, getting training on the agenda as a priority also was the outcome of internal struggles. Increasingly, local unions and affiliates were being presented with "packages" of workplace reorganization in which new technologies, production teams and training plans were combined. In each, there were elements attractive to unionists - less hazardous work, more scope to make decisions on the job, and opportunities to learn. Yet management's version was naturally enough aimed at increasing productivity and overall control. For unionists, it was essential to work through the package piece by piece in order to see which elements could form the basis of a positive and unified proposal for improving the dignity and security of the members.8

The OFL training policy document was one step in this process. Yet the labour movement had to sort through the ways of implementing it in practice - in collective bargaining, in sectoral initiatives, at the provincial level where an Ontario Training and Adjustment Board was emerging, and at the federal level with the Canadian Labour Force Development Board.9 This new set of structures constituted as important an advance organizationally as the OFL policy signified ideologically. From collective bargaining at the local level—the North American tradition - the labour movement was now engaged in "open field bargaining," whose participants and scope varied with the issue being addressed. Open-field bargaining includes participation from social movements, community groups and other interests outside the workplace.

I got an interesting glimpse into this new terrain in the spring of 1993 when I was nominated by the Ontario Federation of Labour as one of two labour participants in a panel organized to hear community views about training and adjustment. Erna Post, of the Canada Employment and Immigration Union (a component of the Public Service Alliance of Canada) and myself heard a thousand formal presentations and many informal comments about the suitable structure, mandate and process by which the users of training might have a voice in the delivery of training at the community level.10

The biggest shock for me was the breadth of animosity toward unions. The idea that unions might have a central voice in skill training, equal with that of employers, simply enraged many people. From my perspective, snug inside the union culture, workers co-determining their job skills made perfect sense. But not all the hostile comments came from business representatives. Erna and I were showered with many criticisms of unions from groups we would have expected to support us. Once again, the negative images of "labour bosses" haunted us.11

A second unexpected lesson was the intricacy of the interests involved in the issue of training. This was not a straightforward face-off between business and labour, of the sort involved in collective bargaining. The boundaries of collective bargaining are fairly clearly delineated in Canada, and introducing new items such as maternity leave, occupational health or, indeed, training does not alter its basic dynamics. In the public process around the training issue, however, labour faced the employers, largely as antagonists; as well they had to address a bewildering array of explanations for the failure of the current training system and consider proposals for restructuring that system. Frequently, labour representatives were at a loss about whether to support or resist a suggestion; in short, they were obliged to learn.

Throughout the hearings, labour advocated training as a universal social right, like basic formal education and health care. Several labour participants supported the concept that education and training must "develop and enhance" because "a mind is a terrible thing to waste"12 Training should be more equitable and accessible, of better quality, more relevant, and employers should assume a far greater share of the funding. Some presenters urged that training should include the unemployed as well as the employed and be linked to an industrial strategy. For example, in Cornwall, many of the unemployed had been trained in welding and held welding certificates: "If Mulroney wants to build frigates in Cornwall," Mike Oliver of the Cornwall Labour Council said in his presentation, "we're ready!"13 Training people for jobs that did not exist was seen as a waste of training resources and was a source of discouragement and cynicism among trainees.

Employers, especially in the private sector, asserted that training should be "needs-driven," rather than perceived as a right of citizenship. Learning that did not directly and expediently lead to employment and increase productivity could not legitimately be called training, and employers were best situated to make this judgment. Business representatives spoke of the need for economic renewal, reduced government regulation and taxes and training that enhanced the competitiveness of Ontario employers. They proposed that the mandate for the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board (OTAB) and local boards be "to increase and enhance the productivity and effectiveness of people by establishing a training culture."14

However, labour and business viewpoints were just the beginning of the conversation. Women's representatives forcefully advocated change to their marginalized position in society. Women earned only 65% of men's wages and had the added burden of housework, childcare, sexual harassment, sex discrimination in hiring, promotion, job assignments and performance evaluations. As well they faced the pressures of token status in non-traditional occupations. This opened up discussion of the full range of social relationships around training: "Children form many of their opinions and attitudes about the world of work/education/training from their parents' experiences," presenter Mary Lynch Taylor stated. "If their mothers are excluded from high-paying jobs, are victims of discrimination and harassment, are tired and frustrated from too much work for too little money, are crushed by poverty and lack dreams, hope, vision, they cannot form a good view of the world of work ¼ "15

As the discussions proceeded, most participants came to agree that the new training system should be grassroots, bottom-up, inclusive, simple, co-ordinated and integrated. This consensus was very encouraging to labour, linking smoothly to our policy positions. However, the myriad of other concerns raised were rather overwhelming.

By challenging employer-driven training, the union movement was plunging into a set of cross-currents. Among those groups that felt they were not represented by the traditional labour market partners as defined in the proposal were small unaffiliated business, non-profit agencies, the unemployed, the poor, racial minorities, rural areas, youth, unorganized labour and the franco-Ontario communities.16 These presenters requested that their voices be part of the local board and that their training needs be addressed. Different levels of government, old community rivalries, a range of equity advocates, turf wars among education providers - this was the terrain on which "open-field bargaining" occurred. New information and skills were required to engage in this process. This certainly was more complex than simply presenting grievances to management; yet it was a natural extension of the challenge to arbitrary power the grievance procedure embodies.

The local board hearings acted like a pause button on the community video. They highlighted the differences in communities in the relationships among labour market partners and reaffirmed people's desire to control new processes at a local level as much as possible. For the labour movement, they indicated the scale of the challenge undertaken to actually implement the broad generalities of the OFL policy document on training. And they provided warning that any attempt to meet all these groups' expressed needs by an institutional structure, whether at the community level or provincially, would inevitably bog down. Some hard choices would have to be made in priorities, by labour and by the pro-labour elements in the NDP government, or the delays would mean that this opportunity, too, would pass.

I remember vividly one meeting between the Ontario Federation of Labour and the senior government bureaucrats involved in establishing the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board. I had only one point to make during the meeting: that any delay in moving forward with this process was reactionary. Nevertheless, these and other players stubbornly hung on to their positions, so it took the NDP three years to set up OTAB. The local boards were just being established when the NDP lost power in 1995.

A shared-power model of training had no legs. It was quickly abandoned by business and swept aside in the Conservative storm that followed. While protests sprouted over cuts to health care, formal education, culture and public service jobs, few voices were raised to mourn the passing of this remarkable and innovative public-policy initiative. It had yet to become anchored enough in people's lives that they mourned its passing.

When Unionists Compare Notes

With the gradual undermining and ultimate demolition of OTAB, the unionists engaged in training issues found the rollercoaster hurtling downwards.17 A broader range of internal interests were also now at play. Some unions, the Food and Commercial Workers, for example, had set up major retraining programs for displaced workers. Some labour-led providers, such as the Metro Labour Education Centre, had expanded their staff to the extent that their education departments were larger than that of the Canadian Labour Congress or any affiliate. The OFL's BEST program was extending its initial definitions of literacy while continuing to reach those members least well-served by established labour educators. The key people in such initiatives - Janet Dassinger, Trish Stovell and Jean Connon Unda - now met continually with labour representatives in joint training councils in sectors such as steel-making and electrical/electronic manufacturing. They worked with Kevin Hayes and Ursule Critoph to clear the way. By then, the three hottest potatoes were shifts in political jurisdiction over training, job losses in public education, and strategy for dealing with the employers.

New jurisdictions. Since the Charlottetown Constitutional Accord, the federal government had been devolving to the provinces at an accelerating rate the financing, planning and delivery of training. Apart from Quebec and British Columbia, most provincial governments were passing the fiscal squeeze along to both providers and trainees. As a result, there was increasingly a patchwork situation, where labour's perspective on training as a right was de facto being undermined by employer-driven schemes of training for immediate and narrowly defined job requirements.

In 1995, the federal government moved decisively to transform Unemployment Insurance, creating instead Employment Insurance, and to turn over jurisdiction for training to the provinces. This indeed was a "sea change in approach and practice" (Critoph, 1997), which profoundly altered the pressure points for training politics in Canada.

Job losses. As public-sector budget cuts reached the education sector, a new intensity could be felt in
labour-training debates. The community college locals of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, for example, had rarely participated in labour councils. Now, they entered more fully as OTAB assigned power to the labour councils for naming representatives to local boards that would affect college funding. As changes in Employment Insurance pulled the rug out from under college funding, wholesale closures began. Pubic-sector unionists mobilized to have the CLC include in its definition of privatized training the initiatives so carefully built by private-sector unions to address workplace needs unmet by the colleges. This was no longer a policy discussion in a context of increasing labour influence; it was a survival discussion, with labour overall on the defensive. Predictably, the plenaries in the CLC Training Conference of June 1997 returned to this conflict again and again without a satisfactory conclusion.18

Strategy with employers. Traditional business came to the table with the forming of the Canadian Labour Market and Productivity Centre and the Canadian Labour Force Development Board. And, they have stayed at the table as long as government is footing the bill, and neither the Centre nor the Board has any power. The individual representatives at the table are often very progressive and capable, but they can't hide the fact that business isn't willing to share power on the issue of training. As public funds are pulled from sectoral training councils, most employers are backing away. And in some instances, notably the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board, they sow salt in the earth before abandoning the fields.

In the private sector, then, unionists can feel bitter about the shallowness of employer commitment to "training partnerships." But feelings are more mixed with public sector and third sector (voluntary and community-based) employers.

The glacial pace of change among managers in the public-sector training providers in regard to Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition, or PLAR is quite striking. The basically democratic impulse behind PLAR has been to assign credit to people for experiential learning and for learning acquired in other cultures so they can have easier access to the educational capital tied up in colleges and universities (see the chapter "The Tolerable Contraditions of Prior Learning Assessment" by Alan Thomas in this volume). A revealing debate occurred during 1995-1996 at the Canadian Labour Force Development Board. The management of English Canadian post-secondary institutions fought against inclusion of the word "Recognition" in the title. By only calling it "Assessment," the balance of authority in conferring credit would rest squarely in their hands. After some ridicule, based on the fact that their own literature always translated the concept as Reconnaissance des Acquis, or recognition of acquired knowledge, they finally agreed to add an R to PLA. Such turf protection by public-training providers and their inertia in connecting to the needs of any but the young, full-tuition, full-time student have been frustrating for all unionists. They have made it difficult to sustain labour's defence of public over private education, our principled opposition to privatization and contracting out of training.

While the attack on the public sector and the ruthlessness of the traditional market sector are being carefully monitored, the third sector continues to pitch up new economic initiatives. Among them are the community-based training providers, with whom unions have had shaky relations at best. Unorthodox, entrepreneurial community organizations are growing rapidly.19 They are characterized by social vitality, youth, and ethnic diversity - in short, the qualities needed by the labour movement in order to move ahead. But because they are not unionized and, in some cases these organizations compete directly with unionized producers, they are kept at arm's length. Clearly, unions need to negotiate with third-sector, community-based employers in order to strengthen the movement and improve the training available to workers.

After a decade of work with traditional business, public sector employers and the third sector, unions are developing the subtle skills required for open-field bargaining. Even in direct dealings with management, the process is more fluid and diverse than it was a decade ago.

The job training issue has moved to the centre of union policy discussions, just as employment equity did a decade ago and occupational health and safety did the decade before that. For unionists, adult learning is of high value both for remedying injustices in the distribution of educational capital and for building a social movement for struggle. The focus on training and other emerging issues suggests that the Canadian labour movement is alive and kicking, an effective resource for progressive adult education in the years to come.

Endnotes

1
For more information, see my material in The Foundations of Adult Education in Canada, Second Edition, by Gordon Selman, Michael Cooke, Mark Selman and Paul Dampier. Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 1998.

2
These tensions are comprehensively mapped in Dassinger, 1997.

3
See Employment and Immigration Canada, 1983.

4
A concise and clear summary is available for the Quebec experience in Miller, 1997.

5
Four of these deserve particular mention: in the health care sector, the HSTAP; in steelmaking the CSTEC; in autoparts the APSTC; and in electrical/electronics the SSC. Each of these is a story in itself.

6
For a provocative analysis of the BEST program, see Connon Unda and Clifford, in M.C. Taylor, Ed., 1997.

7
The document "Education and Training" is available from the OFL, 15 Gervais Drive, Suite 202, Don Mills, OntarioM3C 1Y8 (phone 416-441-2731). It is also reprinted as Appendix I in the excellent issue "Training for What? Labour Perspectives on Skill Training," in Our Schools/Our Selves, November 1992. More widely circulated has been a brochure summarizing the policy, entitled "Training: A Labour Perspective," available in bulk from the OFL.

8
This was hotly debated within the labour movement and formed the basis of several projects within the TARP initiative. My own union's perspective is summarized in Groff, 1993, and in Jorge Garcia-Orgales, 1995.

9
While the CLFDB has only had advisory status at the federal level, it has accomplished much in influencing public debate. See, for example, its "Training Standards" released in September 1995 and its subsequent work in "Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition."

10
For a summary of the public consultations, see Ontario and Federal governments/CLFDB, 1993.

11
For a thoughtful summary of public-sector union views in the late 1980s, see Rose, 1991. Some reflections on the "union culture" and its public image can be found in Chapter 3 of my book, Martin, 1995.

12
Marg Harbert, Local 51 of the Communications and Electrical Workers of Canada (CWC), presentation to the Ottawa hearing, April, 1993.

13
Mike Oliver, Cornwall Labour Council, presentation to the Cornwall hearing, April, 1993.

14
Barry Spilchuk, business presentation to the North Bay hearing, May, 1993.

15
Mary Lynch Taylor, Women's Training, presentation to the Peterborough hearing, April, 1993.

16
The Franco-Ontarian community made a strong case for guaranteed access to training in their own language. The socio-economic realities of the francophone population (family income ranking 28th of 29 ethno-cultural groups), the illiteracy rate (in the order of 50% in certain areas), the high drop-out rate, and the low sense of self-esteem were underscored. "On n'est même pas dans le jeu ¼ " (Serge Arpin, Cornwall hearing, April 1993).

17
This pattern was, of course, much broader. See Beaudet et al., 1997.

18
An interesting compromise was proposed in Anderson, 1997.

19
See Wayne Roberts et al., Get A Life.

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