By D'Arcy Martin, 1997
**The material in this section was prepared for this book by D'Arcy Martin, a leading educator in the Canadian labour movement. The principal authors are grateful for his contribution.
Far too many Canadians, including many union members, assume that the labour movement consists of a few men with flashy suits and big salaries, sitting behind desks in sumptuous offices. Certainly many unions now have a sizable full-time staff, but a few highly publicized leaders—villains like Hal Banks or heroes like Bob White—overshadow the small army of committed men and women who have taken time out after work to keep their unions going, without any expectation of material reward for themselves.
**Craig Heron, The Canadian Labour Movement: A Short History, 2nd ed. (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1996) p.x.**
The nerve and voluntary effort of working people, so essential in building their labour movement, have long been nurtured by adult education, both informal and non-formal. Today, courses run by unions are the most significant non-vocational adult education to which working people have access, involving directly over 100,000 Canadians a year.
**Bruce Spencer, "Educating Union Canada." Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, 8, 2 (1994) pp.45-64.**
Often both the instructor and the participant are donating their time and, in most instances, their only material reward is a couple of meals while using a paid leave from regular employment in order to learn together. And unions are vital partners in workplace and community education initiatives on issues such as occupational health and safety, literacy, violence against women, anti-racism and the arts.
It is testament to the strength of anti-union views in our society that many otherwise-informed adult educators know little about the scope and richness of this work. On any weekend, there are literally dozens of courses underway in union halls, community centres and hotel rooms. The walls are covered with flip chart paper, videos are playing, role plays are moving from heated argument into laughter, instructors are steering the group back into the session objectives ¼ in short, lively, practical and innovative adult education is happening. Yet this activity is usually invisible to the educators in the community-based literacy centre around the corner, and even more so to the electronics teacher at the local college, or the professor of accounting in the nearby university extension program.
Nonetheless, the educators hired with the dues of unionized workers have become increasingly effective in producing original videos,
**Some of these are produced internally, as with "It's Not a Game," a collective bargaining tape done by the Canadian Labour Congress. Others are done in co-operation with outside producers, such as "Who Wants Unions?" a documentary on union-busting consultants co-produced by the CLC with the National Film Board. **
in contributing to policy debates on issues such as Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition,
**Unions participated actively in the process leading to the Canadian Labour Force Development Board. (1997), Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition. Ottawa: CLFDB. **
and in adapting to their culture the tools developed elsewhere in the field, from role plays to on-line Internet courses.
**For example, the Labour College correspondence course is now conducted by Athabasca University on a distance education basis, including telephone coaching. During the fall of 1996, Jeff Taylor and Bruce Spencer from Athabasca University led a course over the Internet entitled "Labour Education and the Internet." **
To look at labour education in Canada is to open a vibrant, volatile and significant chapter of adult education history.
The Development of Adult Education in Canada's Labour Movement
The lessons of collective action by workers have traditionally been learned on the job and in the streets. By contesting management rights in the workplace, by withdrawing labour power in a strike, by joining allies in political action, union activists continue to develop their knowledge, confidence and skills. Any non-formal, structured education programs remain, even today, secondary to the learning that members gain through voluntary engagement in action. Struggle is a teacher, working in the head, heart and feet of workers who have decided to stand up for themselves. Thus, it is no accident that a gripping account of a fishermen's strike in Nova Scotia is entitled The Education of Everett Richardson
**Silver Donald Cameron, The Education of Everett Richardson: The Nova Scotia Fishermen's Strike, 1970-71 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977). **
and traces the changes in consciousness of a worker, the spiral of action-reflection-action which renews social movements from the grassroots up.
At times dramatically public, and at other times masked by the daily routines of work, this action can be traced far back in Canadian history. Contemporary Aboriginal leaders have emphasized the differences between union practice and their own approaches to decision making. Yet certainly early producers of fish and fur, both Aboriginal and colonial, faced issues of work and learning about work. By the early 1800s, associations of workers in the canals, crafts people in the print shops and workshops, took on cultural and educational roles with their members as well as public advocacy. Public campaigns like the Nine-Hour Day Movement of the early 1870s were led by printers, whose work required both literacy and mobility, two keys to spreading the word of unionism.
**Rob Kristofferson, "The Downtown Tour," first of three walking tours, The Workers City (Hamilton, Ontario: Ontario Workers Arts and Heritage Centre, 1995) pp.2-8. **
Labour councils, even before being legalized, ran reading rooms for workers. Later, broad public mobilizations like the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 drew upon the organizational and writing skills picked up by organizers in the increasingly broad public school system. Yet formal courses run by unions were yet to come. Indeed, they required some sustained mobilization of a type difficult to find in early Canadian labour.
This was, for long periods of our history, an inert culture. For all of the cultural inertia of the working class, however, its apparent fragmentation, acquiescence and accommodation could change with the drop of a hat or, more precisely, the drop of a wage, the demise of a skill, or the restructuring of a job.
**Bryan D. Palmer, Working Class Experience: Re-thinking the History of Canadian Labour, 1800-1991 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992) p.21. **
During the 1920s and 1930s, the Workers Educational Association (WEA) was a major source of knowledge for union activists. In its heyday, the WEA organized a wide range of inexpensive, non-credit night classes for workers, taught by university professors. By the late 1930s, led by Drummond Wren, it had grown to twenty-four associations in Ontario, fifteen in the rest of the country, and was reaching out to thousands of farmers as well as the urban working class. Typical of its stance was a commitment to social and collective action, tempered by academic caution and a desire to maintain broad support from the government and the public.
**Ian Radforth and Joan Sangster, "`A Link Between Labour and Learning': The Workers Educational Association in Ontario, 1917-1951" Labour/Le Travailleur, No.8/9 (Autumn/Spring, 1981-82)
pp.41-78. **
Meanwhile, the social movements of the 1930s and the industrial organizing drives of the 1940s relied on links between labour activists and their community and political counterparts. While pushed back during the Cold War, these links were often strengthened in study groups and cultural activities.
**See, for example, the stories in Susan Meurer and Charlie Angus eds., Carved from the Rock: Stories from our Union's Past. Toronto: Miners' History Project, National Office, United Steelworkers of America, 1995. **
In the mid-1950s, the Canadian Association for Adult Education pulled together a meeting with the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) to develop a basis of co-operation between educators inside the labour movement and those outside, particularly in universities.
**Canadian Labour Congress—Canadian Association for Adult Education, Conference Report: Labour University Co-operation on Education (Ottawa: Canadian Labour Congress, 1956) p.11.**
By this time, the growing industrial unions had developed an internal capacity to do much of the basic training of union representatives. People like Howard Conquergood and Gower Markle had come from the Y.M.C.A. into full-time positions as labour educators, while people like Max Swerdlow and Bert Hepworth moved into similar jobs from a background of internal union action. Hence the unions had either taken educators and turned them into unionists, or vice versa. Either way, there was a nucleus of increasingly experienced and knowledgeable adult education practitioners in the unions who operated independent of the formal adult education institutions.
**For this and other parts of the story, I draw on years of conversation with Alan Thomas, one of the very few professional adult educators in Canada who was known and trusted by union educators in those years. See Alan Thomas, "How Labour Education Developed in English Canada," unpublished presentation to the Labour Education course, Adult Education Department, OISE, March 6, 1997.**
The independent capacity of labour to teach its own activists was reaffirmed at a 1975 conference which drew nearly 150 delegates from the labour movement, educational institutions and government.
**Brian Pearl (Ed.), Labour Education in Canada: Report of the National Conference on Labour Education (Ottawa: Labour Canada, 1975) pp.3-17.**
The keynote speech was given by Roby Kidd, then Secretary-General of the International Council for Adult Education, and the policy statement at the end called on governments to balance their contributions to management education with financing for labour education. This was in tune with the interest in policy circles in "tripartism," an approach to developing public policy by direct involvement of business and labour in the government process. Union leaders simply said that they didn't have the internal capacity to staff such processes, and required public subsidy to develop it—particularly since unionists paid far more in taxes than was ever recompensed by their participation in publicly funded adult education programs. Shortly afterwards, Labour Canada set up a program to provide direct funding to labour centrals and independent unions, co-ordinated by the former Steelworkers education director, Gower Markle.
This grant was used mostly to develop formalized instructor manuals for the courses being taught across the country, to establish an audio-visual production arm for the unions, and to provide scholarships so that smaller affiliates could participate fully in the available courses.
**Alan Thomas, David Beatty, and Dorothy MacKeracher, Labour Canada's Labour Education Program: The First Four Years (Ottawa: Labour Canada, 1982) pp.182-237. **
Discussions about use of the funds became a fixture on the agenda of education committee meetings in the central labour bodies, the provincial federations of labour and the Canadian Labour Congress. There, they jostled for space with items like job training, labour history in the school system, and sharing of content and method to improve the weekend and week-long courses that are the bread and butter (also the bread and roses) of union education. For nearly two decades, with the steady and committed work of CLC staff such as Larry Wagg, Jean Bezusky and Danny Mallett, this funding was used to support innovation and build capacity within labour education. When it was cut in the mid-1990s, most unions returned to their core programs, funded from dues or from funding negotiated from the employers in some form of Paid Educational Leave program. Of these, by far the most developed is that of the Canadian Auto Workers, whose Family Education Centre in Port Elgin, Ontario, is one of the finest adult education facilities in the country.
The history of labour education in Canada, then, is entwined with the social action current of adult education. The bias towards action, the impatience with academic theory, the resistance to professionalism, the shortage of resources—these are characteristic of other parts of the field such as literacy and human rights education. Yet there is a particular feel to education within the labour movement, a union culture, which is distinct.
**D'Arcy Martin, Street Smart: Learning in the `Union Culture'. Unpublished Ed.D. Thesis, Department of Adult Education, OISE, pp.22-52.**
Those seeking written reference material will be drawn to the broader literature of Canadian labour history to tease out the learning dimension from the experiences of telecommunications work, industrial work, union history and working class communities.
**Joan Newman Kuyek, The Phone Book: Working at the Bell (Toronto/Kitchener: Between the Lines, 1979); David Sobel and Susan Meurer, Working at Inglis: The Life and Death of a Canadian Factory (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1994); Sam Gindin, The Canadian Auto Workers: The Birth and Transformation of a Union (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1995); Franca Iacovetta, Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993).**
However, understanding will emerge best in conversation with those who teach and learn in this largely oral part of Canada's adult education tradition.
The Face of Canadian Unionism
Many Canadians picture unions as narrow, mechanistic, shrinking and somehow anachronistic. For adult educators outside the unions, it is important to understand how misleading these stereotypes are, and how deeply they are resented by those whose passionate personal convictions build and sustain the movement.
The involvement of labour in social coalitions, around human rights, gender equity and economic development, is in fact very broad. It starts from the community level, as with the Days of Action that mobilized hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of London, Hamilton, Peterborough, Kitchener and Toronto in 1995-96. And it reaches the national level, in structures like the Action Canada Network and the Women's March for Jobs and Justice.
The creative activity of unions, in defence of Canadian culture and in celebration of working-class culture, is extending through music and visual arts, reflected in events like the annual Mayworks Festival of Workers and the Arts.
**See Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge, First Contract: Women and the Fight to Unionize (Toronto: Between the Lines Publishing, 1986).**
Such initiatives, while valuable, do little to stem the tide of negative imagery from the mass media, both in Canada and the United States. Most union activists spend more time watching American television than thinking about unionism or fine arts. The resulting media invisibility today is a form of disenfranchisement, the modern equivalent of lacking the right to vote.
**Carole Corbeil, in "Documenting Dangers on the Job Not a Time to Pull Artistic Punches," her review of the first Mayworks Festival, The Globe and Mail, May 1, 1986.**
American television has played a central role in undermining the personal and collective confidence of Canadian workers and replacing it with an envy whose base is in class and nation. When the Machinists union in the United States monitored prime-time television, they discovered that workers in unionized occupations are portrayed as clumsy, uneducated fools who drink, smoke and have no leadership ability. Unions themselves are almost invisible on television, and when they appear, it is as a violent, degrading and obstructive presence. The majority of workers in unionized occupations are the "nameless, personality-less people who take orders, do their jobs and disappear."
**Summarized in Catherine Macleod, "How Television Portrays Workers," one in a series of handouts called "Decoding the Media," used in the course manual Labour's Access to the Media (Toronto: Canadian Labour Congress, 1985).**
Because the economic and political control "the tube" exercises is so enormous, television is the main long-range target for labour arts work. Yet the financial cost of entering this level of competing imagery is beyond the reach of most unions. Working in a smaller scale, arts-positive unionists have come to rely on two sets of claims—access to cultural resources and dignity in representing workers and their organizations.
**A labour critique of class bias in the arts is "expressed in terms of the twin measures of accessibility (or the democratic right of workers to participate in activities which they pay for as taxpayers) and portrayal (or the right of working people to see themselves reflected and respected in the media)." Susan Crean, "Labour Working With Art," Fuse Magazine, No.44 (1987) p.30.**
The issue of access is clear enough. Most public arts funds and practically all commercial investments in the arts and media are channeled to production in which workers have no stake. Securing a share of resources to portray labour's own realities makes sense both in terms of the taxes workers pay and the market share they represent.
The issue of representation is more subtle. Workers and their organizations are practically invisible in mainstream media, and when they do appear it is not usually in positive roles. Over time, however, unions have come to realize that glamourizing workers and unions has its own set of problems. For labour to challenge its negative public image, unions are beginning to develop an arts theory that respects workers' experience.
**The "labour aesthetic" raises the possibility of actually shifting taste, intervening directly in the process by which the arts evolve. This is the scale of thinking engaged in by the protagonists of Serge Guilbaut's book, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Those people actually developed an aesthetic, abstract expressionism, coded it into arts criticism and linked it to an institutional base (in the Guggenheim Museum), a shift in the art market and an intervention in politics.**
The development of this "labour aesthetic" can unearth and display the jewels of creativity, talent and will in the working class.
The movement in Canada is not only creative; it is gaining in strength. A generation ago, about 30 percent of workers belonged to unions in both the United States and Canada. By the early 1990s, the proportion in the United States was down below 15 per cent, while in Canada it was over 35 per cent. In other words, Canadian labour has twice the depth and presence of American labour, which is reflected in our political culture by gains such as Medicare, and the commitment to preserving those gains in the face of government cuts and employer pressure to privatize. With a recent change in leadership at the AFL-CIO, American labour, too, seems to be reversing its decline and moving to a more activist stance, an "organizing model" rather than a "service model." This should help create a more receptive climate across North America to unions.
Far from being outmoded, unions are rising to the challenge of economic restructuring and cuts to social programs in an open-minded and skillful way. This includes approaching progressive employers with an offer of intelligent co-operation, a value added to their mission, while using on arrogant employers the tactics of union judo—taking their momentum in order to bring them down to a level of equality. In celebrating and struggling, Canadian unions are more inclusive and dynamic than at any time since the 1930s.
**Mary Cornish and Lynn Spink, Organizing Unions (Toronto: Second Story Press, 1994); Julie White, Sisters and Solidarity: Women and Unions in Canada (Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 1993).**
This is not to suggest that labour educators are working in a perfect world. There are tensions and setbacks, a frustrating distance between rhetoric and the reality of internal practices, a pattern of internal rivalries that is wasteful and weakening. Yet the potential is great for participatory process, socially critical content and increased dynamism among working-class learners. This potential was recognized by the 450 labour educators who assembled in Toronto for an "Educ-Action" conference in early April, 1997. While a third of the participants came from the United States and Latin America, the majority were practitioners within Canada, either directly employed by unions or working in allied organizations such as associations of homeworkers, or workers information and action centres.
The goal of such educators is to equip workers to meet employers, allies and adversaries with creativity and skill. Courses can be broadly classified in the following three categories: (a) skills courses like grievance handling, designed to give members the tools they need to do their work as union activists; (b) issues courses like human rights, designed to keep members current on issues affecting the workplace and labour-management relations; and (c) labour studies courses like labour economics, designed to help members understand the rich history and complex social and political dynamics of the labour movement in Canada and internationally.
**Bruce Spencer, "Labour Education for 2001." Paper prepared for Proceedings of the 37th Annual Adult Education Research Conference, University of South Florida, 1996, 288-294. Posted as a core reading in the Solinet Web Site, as part of the course "Labour Education on the Internet," Athabasca University, 1996, p.4.**
In each, the issues of democracy and effectiveness are worked through by the educators who work within the movement, and their allies in the adult education field.
Some of these allies are to be found in the universities, but less so than in countries like Britain
**John Field, "Labour Education in Canada" Northern College, Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Report on a British Council Study Tour, 1983.**
or the United States.
**In the United States, major universities established Labor Studies Programs with active union involvement, and often drew union activists there even for basic "tools" courses. Hence, the University and College Labor Educators Association has been a dynamic force for many years, and continues to publish regularly the Labor Studies Journal.**
While sympathetic individuals in the university have been drawn into labour courses, from Rick Williams in Halifax to Kate Braid in Vancouver, the major organic link in Canada is the protocol between Quebec unions and the universities, especially the Université du Québec à Montréal. Informal links in English-speaking Canada are maintained through the Learned Societies, including since 1995 the Canadian Labour Education and Research Association.
The face of Canadian labour education then, is rarely to be found in prime-time television or in university departments. It is more likely to shine in a modest social action project, when a socially committed adult educator connects in some way with a labour activist as both try to put into practice a genuine pedagogy of the oppressed.
**Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971).**
The Function and Culture of Adult Education in the Labour Movement
"No training—no strength."
**A worker in a paint factory, discussing the courses offered by his union. See Peter Sawchuk, "Report on Learning to Local 200-O of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada." Occasional Paper of the Working Class Learning Strategies Project, directed by David Livingstone, OISE, 1996.**
In a unionized workplace, employees have a right to representation. They may want support in an individual clash with management or effectiveness in asserting a collective need such as vacations, job training or workplace health. To exercise their right effectively will involve learning, either by themselves or by fellow workers.
In a healthy union, they will be encouraged to take a course themselves or to select the fellow worker whom they most respect, with confidence that the union will enhance that person's knowledge, confidence and skill as needed. Their representative will be entitled to time off the job to learn, will have any lost wages replaced, and will attend a two-to-five-day session with ten or twenty other people whose learning needs are similar. On returning to the workplace, the representatives will apply what they have learned, and many will have had their appetite whetted for other adult learning.
Implied in this general sketch is a whole culture of adult education. Labour education is based more on collective than on individual rights, more on social dedication than on professional credentials, more on advocacy than on implementation, more on political vision than on measurable competencies. For these reasons, it may seem strange at first to those steeped in the professional, institution-based side of adult education practice.
**See Mechthild U. Hart, Working and Educating for Life: Feminist and International Perspectives on Adult Education (London: Routledge, 1992).**
These are the dynamics of adult education within a social movement. While unions here are considered as educational agents for their members, they are primarily representative and advocacy organizations, engaged in collective bargaining and in mobilization for social change. Any educational programming takes place within this context, and must create an environment for learning by adults who usually have had little luck with the formal educational system.
Union courses can be initiated and sponsored at different levels of a central labour body (organized geographically at the municipal, provincial and federal level to bring together workers with a common experience of region regardless of the work they do) and at different levels of an "affiliate" (organized sectorally, to bring together workers with some common experience in the workplace regardless of geography).
Within an "affiliate" union, such as the United Food and Commercial Workers or the Canadian Union of Public Employees, there are essentially three levels of decision making, the local, the region or district, and the national (perhaps in consultation with an international headquarters). At the local level, participants for courses are selected, and the costs of participation covered. At the region or district level, requests for courses are handled by staff, who in turn are often assigned to teach. At the national level, courses are designed, videos are produced, and scheduling is co-ordinated. While this pattern differs among unions, in all there is some form of consensus required before courses really get off the ground.
Some affiliates are too small, or too scattered, to handle educational needs internally. And larger affiliates have found it valuable to have their members mix with others and to join forces for more specialized courses. For this reason, courses are often put on at a municipal level by labour councils, at a provincial level by Federations of Labour, and on a national level by the Canadian Labour Congress.
Two points might be noted here about the work of the labour centrals, the education that links up affiliates. The Quebec labour movement, for over a decade, has handled its financing and organization of courses independently, including use of federal and provincial grants. In effect, there is a form of "sovereignty-association" already operating within labour education. Secondly, while the affiliates have often protected their turf by keeping the central labour bodies relatively weak and underfunded, public funding has sustained their capacity to do innovative and substantial work nonetheless. Hence we find workplace literacy, health and safety, pay equity, anti-racism, tech change, skills training and adjustment addressed educationally by the labour councils, provincial federations and the Canadian Labour Congress. As education providers, the central labour bodies play a significant role, but those familiar with unions in other countries may overestimate the role, not realizing how the relative weakness of central labour bodies in Canada is also a product of Canada's geographical dispersion and history. As Craig Heron has said:
We have never really had a single national labour movement that grew steadily from humble origins in the nineteenth century to its current healthy size ¼ Rather, a long series of often independent, locally or regionally based movements rose and declined, depending on the opportunities for organizing that were created within the economy, class relations and the state.
**Heron, The Canadian Labour Movement, p.16.**
For those readers interested in following up this discussion, a wealth of material is available, on top of sources already mentioned.
**Of particular interest are a collection of essays on feminism and unionism by Linda Briskin and Patricia McDermott, Women Challenging Unions: Feminism, Democracy and Militancy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); a study of young workers by Thomas W. Dunk, It's a Working Man's Town: Male Working-Class Culture in Northwestern Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991); and an interpretation of the effects of "re-structuring" in two Ontario communities by Jamie Swift, Wheel of Fortune: Work and Life in the Age of Falling Expectations (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995).**
CHAPTER 6
Power Dynamics: The Labour Movement
By D'Arcy Martin
**This the second of three sections on adult education in the labour movement written by D'Arcy Martin for this edition of the book. See also Chapters 2 and 12.**
In adult education, respect for the learner is a basic guiding principle. This means that the educator is encouraged, and often exhorted, to act democratically, to work from people's lived experience rather than simply lecturing them. And in social movements like unions, participants simply demand respect, and hold the educator immediately accountable in a way unimaginable in a college, university or other formal environment.
Workers often run for union office because they are critical of the incumbents or impatient with passivity among their fellow members. This means that the people who show up in union courses usually have definite views and the spunk to express them. To do adult education in the labour movement, then, is to deal with an empowered and articulate part of the working class, often newly awakened to the potential of a collective, enlightened self-interest as a path of personal development.
For union participants, the goal in a short (two-to-five-day) intensive course is usually very practical and workplace-based. They may want to know how to identify and remove a hazardous substance from the workplace, or how to write out a proper grievance, or how to calm an angry fellow worker. For the educators, their goal is usually tied to convictions about justice, a sense of the values of fairness and dignity for workers on the job and in the society. For the union as an organization, the goals usually include building loyalty to the collective, and even to the incumbent leaders, as well as encouraging people to take on broader responsibilities within the structure. At times, these goals are shared by all, but often it is the tension among them which gives energy and colour to the program itself.
An example would be the activity called "Politics of Furniture," which explores non-verbal dynamics. This evolved as a part of the Facing Management course, taught across Canada's labour movement since 1981, which aims to equip union representatives to better understand management thinking and develop strategies to respond to workplace change. During the course, participants engage in role plays of labour-management meetings, and the issue of "body language" is usually brought up. The course leader needs to judge whether a change of pace will improve the energy levels. If so, the course leader might begin by moving in close to a couple of participants, essentially invading their space bubble to the point where they become uncomfortable. By inviting them to say how they feel, the course leader essentially invites them to name and hence resist a use of power. This opens the exploration of how physical layout can affect the power dynamics of meetings, both with management and within the union. Alternatively, the course leader might move to the back of the room, take a seat, and invite people to discuss "what's wrong with this picture." This leads easily into discussion of how managers use desks, chairs and other tools to establish their power in meetings.
This exploration is best done in a way that brings out people's "street-smart" knowledge of intimidation tactics in a way that validates the people and encourages them to have some fun. By asking participants to describe the course leader's actions, it moves critical scrutiny off them and makes the course leader "uncomfortable." This can be deepened by asking if people have noticed any other ways that room layout and furniture have affected the course leader's authority/power during the week. These can be recorded on a flip chart without comment. Then people can be asked to look at the items already listed in regard to the course and to describe ways that these same tactics have been or could be used in their encounters with management in the workplace. This should generate some funny stories about past experiences, which people can be asked to act out in a short skit.
At this point, the activity moves into a "stop drama," where other participants can interrupt such a skit and propose different ways that the interaction could be played out. For example, they might suggest moving a steward's chair closer to the manager's desk, or having a steward stand throughout the meeting, or having a second person writing quickly to transcribe the manager's comments. These and other tools of non-verbal power playing can be exposed.
The catch in this for the course leader, however, is that once participants have a common language for naming such power plays, they are likely to use it in the course. In other words, the reward for doing this activity well is that the course leader will be challenged. It is apparently perverse, unless one pauses to think that the job of the labour movement is to build resisters to the arbitrary use of power. This exercise, by exposing "under the table" forms of manipulation, has the effect of neutralizing these forms even in the classroom. From this point on in the course, when the course leader sits on the desk or moves among the participants, or uses markers and chalk to emphasize a point, or stands with the window light behind their head, he or she should simply expect a participant to say "Aha, gotcha, you're using non-verbal cues to enhance your authority." Indeed, it is precisely such a challenge that would indicate successful teaching of the concept. From this point on, participants will see desks and chairs and lights differently, and hopefully will use this understanding both to neutralize any intimidation by management and to improve access to union events like monthly meetings by all members. By moving to tips for using space democratically, a course leader can also model inclusive behaviour in a way that doesn't challenge directly any existing power hierarchies within a local union, but gently surrounds those participants who may feel tense and insecure about the discussion.
In a movement based on winning respect in the workplace, any tendency to "talk down" to participants would be met with resistance in a form that is vocal, angry and organized! Consistently, activities like "politics of furniture" have worked to unveil power dynamics in the workplace and in the union, with the result that it encourages the most vocal participants to exercise their power to re-shape agendas and positions, rather than in passive-aggressive undermining of the course leader.
In such a context, much of the "program planning" process used by institutional providers of adult education simply won't work. The pattern of planning, design and facilitation is much closer to a popular education perspective.
**See Rick Arnold, Bev Burke, Carl James, D'Arcy Martin and Barb Thomas, Educating for a Change. (Toronto: Doris Marshall Institute and Between the Lines Publishing, 1991), p.34.**
This means maintaining respect for participants' experience, posing questions in a way that encourages critical dialogue, and committing to share the individual and collective consequences of putting the learning into action.
In the courses themselves lies the richness of group dynamics and spontaneous dialogue. Much of what happens is shaped on the spot by the questions and debates that arise. Like any democratic adult educator, a unionist needs to keep basic objectives in mind rather than sticking rigidly to an outline. Hence, if a discussion of workplace health starts on a particular toxin, and a participant has had experience of identifying and removing that toxin from the workplace, the agenda will wait until the story has been shared.
Indeed, the course itself may be in response to the discovery of a toxin, or an incident involving harassment in the workplace, or a heated round of collective bargaining. In these cases, the course is not publicized in a course schedule like continuing education programs at a school board, college or university. It is requested in addition to the regular "tool" courses, usually in response to a heavy-handed initiative from management. Hence the accountability of the educator is immediate: if the course goes badly, the educator cannot "fail" the participants, as in formal schooling. Instead, the participants would have complained to the national leadership of the union about the educator's failure to meet their needs in a time of need.
Labour education, then, is highly practical in orientation. It is often designed in reaction to particular problems. Its outcomes rarely advance an individual participant's career, but rather equip that person better to contribute voluntarily to collective progress. And its power dynamics are such that the educator must respect participants, not merely as an ethical guideline but as a practical imperative.
CHAPTER 12
Adult Education in the Labour Movement
By D'Arcy Martin
**This is the last of three sections on adult education in the labour movement written by D'Arcy Martin for this edition of the book. See also Chapters 2 and 6.**
Myles Horton, who founded the Highlander Center in Tennessee and gave his long and productive life to grassroots education in the labour and civil rights movements, said, "Our job as a gardener or as an educator is to know that the potential is there or will unfold. People have a potential for growth; it's inside, it's in the seeds."
**Myles Horton, The Long Haul: An Autobiography. With Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl (New York: Doubleday, 1990) p.133.**
That is part of the faith of most adult educators. Faith is what built the labour movement. Nobody would start a union based on a feasibility study. For that faith to be rekindled in a new generation requires careful attention to the union culture. Mike Newman of Australia emphasizes the differences among unions, but draws out five factors that are common:
1. Unionists own their union, and feel a right to control it.
2. Unionists unite, especially against management.
3. Unionists care beyond their immediate interests.
4. Unions deal with wages, which make them important to members, employers and governments.
5. Unionists often feel beleaguered, or under attack.
**Michael Newman, The Third Contract: Theory and Practice in Trade Union Training (Sydney, Australia: Stewart Victor Publishing, 1993) p.16-20.**
Union culture doesn't just vary across unions, it changes over time. And it needs to change significantly in the years ahead. A key issue to be addressed again among labour educators is the balance among the three main political traditions: ideological, social and business unionism. Each current should be assessed critically, to see what it still has to offer workers in the future.
In ideological unionism, a broad social reform movement, such as social democracy or Marxism or Catholic social action, establishes a working-class wing. The function of this wing, a union structure, is to anchor the wider social vision in a working-class constituency. While viable in some countries like Nicaragua, such unionism in Canada has proven slow to respond to changes in the economic and social environment, and of limited value to members in their daily battles for dignity and fairness on the job.
In business unionism, a broad social consensus is assumed. Here, the union fixes problems and keeps its membership ahead of the game in wages and benefits. While still strong culturally, particularly in the construction trades, this perspective is eroded by the downsizing and re-engineering of the secure, high-waged jobs on which it is based.
In social unionism, a balance is struck between the social passion of the ideological current and the opportunistic ethos of the business current. Yet, as co-ordinated bargaining is attacked by the employers and unions are pressed to defend their members, social unionism risks being ambivalent and failing to inspire and mobilize its members in the face of a new employer offensive.
These approaches, then, need to be re-examined in the light of new conditions. For many union activists, the approach of popular education, with its participatory and creative power, is very attractive. Implied in it is a commitment to organize the unionized, to revive the social vision that launched the movement in the first place. Such a revival will oblige some truth telling about the ways that racist, anti-democratic and cowardly behaviour are still rewarded in parts of labour life. And it will mean re-committing to inclusion, to internal democracy, to celebration and to outreach.
Inclusion. Unions are being called on to include women, young people and people of colour to an unprecedented degree. Since the latter two are not dominant in numbers of votes in most unions, this requires some vision, some sense of where the movement's future lies. The combination of layoffs by seniority, political reaction and economic fear works against such vision.
A perspective of inclusion means the full menu of employment equity, such as hiring and promotion in the workplace and the informal practices of the union. But the front line of such battles is harassment and abusive behaviour among members. With the escalation of stress in many workplaces,
**Robert Karasek and Tores Theorell, Healthy Work: Stress, Productivity and the Reconstruction of Working Life (New York: Basic Books, 1990). **
incidents of tension and violence are on the increase. A union commitment to address these issues up-front is needed. But an active commitment to unlearning past habits of dominance and exclusion is also required, and the pain and delicacy of this process needs to be more carefully and compassionately shared.
**See Bell Hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994) esp. Chapter 4.**
Internal Democracy. Within labour itself, the skills of participatory decision making, of democratic communication, of productive problem solving, of simple good listening, are spread thin. These are process politics, not the kind of positional and electoral politics traditionally valued by the "players" in the labour leadership. Bad processes result in bad treatment of staff, in dodging creative ideas because of overload and in treating challenges as attacks.
This is particularly important given the rapidly changing nature of work. With new technologies that de-skill, with re-engineering processes that provoke anxiety and use it as a tool, the labour movement must put its own house in order. Genuine unity is needed to negotiate funding from employers for the educational programs labour promotes. As public funding for education declines, and dues dollars shrink, bargaining for a form of paid educational leave from the employers becomes increasingly important.
Celebration. Workers need to create, as well as to fight. In fact, it is in celebration that people recover their hope, without which struggle is pointless. Union members engage in community building outside the union. And they know that apparently closed doors are not a barrier when there is a window open somewhere. As educator and artist dian marino used to say, "Look for the cracks in consent." Unevenly across the country, unionists have developed arts, heritage and media initiatives that blow our own horn and use the power of laughter to open doors or go around them.
Outreach. Labour educators need to link up with others who share a vision of adult education for democracy. Here there are opportunities to share tools, to learn from the experience of other social sectors, and to draw nourishment for dealing with the large number of vocal adversaries. In this way, the profile of genuine, problem-posing adult education can also be increased. Networks are needed that are capable of sharing lessons across sectors and helping both individuals and organizations to keep balance in stormy weather. As the organizational core of the social resistance to fragmented, top-down, corporate-style education, the labour movement has a responsibility here.
In these areas, labour educators face very practical choices. It takes time in courses to help people learn to listen critically; it takes nerve to argue that it isn't just for quantifiable goals that people are attracted to union life but because it gives them a taste of a better way of being together; it takes imagination to value the creative streak in course participants and the commitment of labour-positive artists by building both into our educational events. And it takes stamina to keep seeking common ground with people whose reflexes are different.
**Craig Heron, The Canadian Labour Movement: A Short History, 2nd ed. (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1996) p.x.**
The nerve and voluntary effort of working people, so essential in building their labour movement, have long been nurtured by adult education, both informal and non-formal. Today, courses run by unions are the most significant non-vocational adult education to which working people have access, involving directly over 100,000 Canadians a year.
**Bruce Spencer, "Educating Union Canada." Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, 8, 2 (1994) pp.45-64.**
Often both the instructor and the participant are donating their time and, in most instances, their only material reward is a couple of meals while using a paid leave from regular employment in order to learn together. And unions are vital partners in workplace and community education initiatives on issues such as occupational health and safety, literacy, violence against women, anti-racism and the arts.
It is testament to the strength of anti-union views in our society that many otherwise-informed adult educators know little about the scope and richness of this work. On any weekend, there are literally dozens of courses underway in union halls, community centres and hotel rooms. The walls are covered with flip chart paper, videos are playing, role plays are moving from heated argument into laughter, instructors are steering the group back into the session objectives ¼ in short, lively, practical and innovative adult education is happening. Yet this activity is usually invisible to the educators in the community-based literacy centre around the corner, and even more so to the electronics teacher at the local college, or the professor of accounting in the nearby university extension program.
Nonetheless, the educators hired with the dues of unionized workers have become increasingly effective in producing original videos,
**Some of these are produced internally, as with "It's Not a Game," a collective bargaining tape done by the Canadian Labour Congress. Others are done in co-operation with outside producers, such as "Who Wants Unions?" a documentary on union-busting consultants co-produced by the CLC with the National Film Board. **
in contributing to policy debates on issues such as Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition,
**Unions participated actively in the process leading to the Canadian Labour Force Development Board. (1997), Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition. Ottawa: CLFDB. **
and in adapting to their culture the tools developed elsewhere in the field, from role plays to on-line Internet courses.
**For example, the Labour College correspondence course is now conducted by Athabasca University on a distance education basis, including telephone coaching. During the fall of 1996, Jeff Taylor and Bruce Spencer from Athabasca University led a course over the Internet entitled "Labour Education and the Internet." **
To look at labour education in Canada is to open a vibrant, volatile and significant chapter of adult education history.
The Development of Adult Education in Canada's Labour Movement
The lessons of collective action by workers have traditionally been learned on the job and in the streets. By contesting management rights in the workplace, by withdrawing labour power in a strike, by joining allies in political action, union activists continue to develop their knowledge, confidence and skills. Any non-formal, structured education programs remain, even today, secondary to the learning that members gain through voluntary engagement in action. Struggle is a teacher, working in the head, heart and feet of workers who have decided to stand up for themselves. Thus, it is no accident that a gripping account of a fishermen's strike in Nova Scotia is entitled The Education of Everett Richardson
**Silver Donald Cameron, The Education of Everett Richardson: The Nova Scotia Fishermen's Strike, 1970-71 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977). **
and traces the changes in consciousness of a worker, the spiral of action-reflection-action which renews social movements from the grassroots up.
At times dramatically public, and at other times masked by the daily routines of work, this action can be traced far back in Canadian history. Contemporary Aboriginal leaders have emphasized the differences between union practice and their own approaches to decision making. Yet certainly early producers of fish and fur, both Aboriginal and colonial, faced issues of work and learning about work. By the early 1800s, associations of workers in the canals, crafts people in the print shops and workshops, took on cultural and educational roles with their members as well as public advocacy. Public campaigns like the Nine-Hour Day Movement of the early 1870s were led by printers, whose work required both literacy and mobility, two keys to spreading the word of unionism.
**Rob Kristofferson, "The Downtown Tour," first of three walking tours, The Workers City (Hamilton, Ontario: Ontario Workers Arts and Heritage Centre, 1995) pp.2-8. **
Labour councils, even before being legalized, ran reading rooms for workers. Later, broad public mobilizations like the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 drew upon the organizational and writing skills picked up by organizers in the increasingly broad public school system. Yet formal courses run by unions were yet to come. Indeed, they required some sustained mobilization of a type difficult to find in early Canadian labour.
This was, for long periods of our history, an inert culture. For all of the cultural inertia of the working class, however, its apparent fragmentation, acquiescence and accommodation could change with the drop of a hat or, more precisely, the drop of a wage, the demise of a skill, or the restructuring of a job.
**Bryan D. Palmer, Working Class Experience: Re-thinking the History of Canadian Labour, 1800-1991 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992) p.21. **
During the 1920s and 1930s, the Workers Educational Association (WEA) was a major source of knowledge for union activists. In its heyday, the WEA organized a wide range of inexpensive, non-credit night classes for workers, taught by university professors. By the late 1930s, led by Drummond Wren, it had grown to twenty-four associations in Ontario, fifteen in the rest of the country, and was reaching out to thousands of farmers as well as the urban working class. Typical of its stance was a commitment to social and collective action, tempered by academic caution and a desire to maintain broad support from the government and the public.
**Ian Radforth and Joan Sangster, "`A Link Between Labour and Learning': The Workers Educational Association in Ontario, 1917-1951" Labour/Le Travailleur, No.8/9 (Autumn/Spring, 1981-82)
pp.41-78. **
Meanwhile, the social movements of the 1930s and the industrial organizing drives of the 1940s relied on links between labour activists and their community and political counterparts. While pushed back during the Cold War, these links were often strengthened in study groups and cultural activities.
**See, for example, the stories in Susan Meurer and Charlie Angus eds., Carved from the Rock: Stories from our Union's Past. Toronto: Miners' History Project, National Office, United Steelworkers of America, 1995. **
In the mid-1950s, the Canadian Association for Adult Education pulled together a meeting with the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) to develop a basis of co-operation between educators inside the labour movement and those outside, particularly in universities.
**Canadian Labour Congress—Canadian Association for Adult Education, Conference Report: Labour University Co-operation on Education (Ottawa: Canadian Labour Congress, 1956) p.11.**
By this time, the growing industrial unions had developed an internal capacity to do much of the basic training of union representatives. People like Howard Conquergood and Gower Markle had come from the Y.M.C.A. into full-time positions as labour educators, while people like Max Swerdlow and Bert Hepworth moved into similar jobs from a background of internal union action. Hence the unions had either taken educators and turned them into unionists, or vice versa. Either way, there was a nucleus of increasingly experienced and knowledgeable adult education practitioners in the unions who operated independent of the formal adult education institutions.
**For this and other parts of the story, I draw on years of conversation with Alan Thomas, one of the very few professional adult educators in Canada who was known and trusted by union educators in those years. See Alan Thomas, "How Labour Education Developed in English Canada," unpublished presentation to the Labour Education course, Adult Education Department, OISE, March 6, 1997.**
The independent capacity of labour to teach its own activists was reaffirmed at a 1975 conference which drew nearly 150 delegates from the labour movement, educational institutions and government.
**Brian Pearl (Ed.), Labour Education in Canada: Report of the National Conference on Labour Education (Ottawa: Labour Canada, 1975) pp.3-17.**
The keynote speech was given by Roby Kidd, then Secretary-General of the International Council for Adult Education, and the policy statement at the end called on governments to balance their contributions to management education with financing for labour education. This was in tune with the interest in policy circles in "tripartism," an approach to developing public policy by direct involvement of business and labour in the government process. Union leaders simply said that they didn't have the internal capacity to staff such processes, and required public subsidy to develop it—particularly since unionists paid far more in taxes than was ever recompensed by their participation in publicly funded adult education programs. Shortly afterwards, Labour Canada set up a program to provide direct funding to labour centrals and independent unions, co-ordinated by the former Steelworkers education director, Gower Markle.
This grant was used mostly to develop formalized instructor manuals for the courses being taught across the country, to establish an audio-visual production arm for the unions, and to provide scholarships so that smaller affiliates could participate fully in the available courses.
**Alan Thomas, David Beatty, and Dorothy MacKeracher, Labour Canada's Labour Education Program: The First Four Years (Ottawa: Labour Canada, 1982) pp.182-237. **
Discussions about use of the funds became a fixture on the agenda of education committee meetings in the central labour bodies, the provincial federations of labour and the Canadian Labour Congress. There, they jostled for space with items like job training, labour history in the school system, and sharing of content and method to improve the weekend and week-long courses that are the bread and butter (also the bread and roses) of union education. For nearly two decades, with the steady and committed work of CLC staff such as Larry Wagg, Jean Bezusky and Danny Mallett, this funding was used to support innovation and build capacity within labour education. When it was cut in the mid-1990s, most unions returned to their core programs, funded from dues or from funding negotiated from the employers in some form of Paid Educational Leave program. Of these, by far the most developed is that of the Canadian Auto Workers, whose Family Education Centre in Port Elgin, Ontario, is one of the finest adult education facilities in the country.
The history of labour education in Canada, then, is entwined with the social action current of adult education. The bias towards action, the impatience with academic theory, the resistance to professionalism, the shortage of resources—these are characteristic of other parts of the field such as literacy and human rights education. Yet there is a particular feel to education within the labour movement, a union culture, which is distinct.
**D'Arcy Martin, Street Smart: Learning in the `Union Culture'. Unpublished Ed.D. Thesis, Department of Adult Education, OISE, pp.22-52.**
Those seeking written reference material will be drawn to the broader literature of Canadian labour history to tease out the learning dimension from the experiences of telecommunications work, industrial work, union history and working class communities.
**Joan Newman Kuyek, The Phone Book: Working at the Bell (Toronto/Kitchener: Between the Lines, 1979); David Sobel and Susan Meurer, Working at Inglis: The Life and Death of a Canadian Factory (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1994); Sam Gindin, The Canadian Auto Workers: The Birth and Transformation of a Union (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1995); Franca Iacovetta, Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993).**
However, understanding will emerge best in conversation with those who teach and learn in this largely oral part of Canada's adult education tradition.
The Face of Canadian Unionism
Many Canadians picture unions as narrow, mechanistic, shrinking and somehow anachronistic. For adult educators outside the unions, it is important to understand how misleading these stereotypes are, and how deeply they are resented by those whose passionate personal convictions build and sustain the movement.
The involvement of labour in social coalitions, around human rights, gender equity and economic development, is in fact very broad. It starts from the community level, as with the Days of Action that mobilized hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of London, Hamilton, Peterborough, Kitchener and Toronto in 1995-96. And it reaches the national level, in structures like the Action Canada Network and the Women's March for Jobs and Justice.
The creative activity of unions, in defence of Canadian culture and in celebration of working-class culture, is extending through music and visual arts, reflected in events like the annual Mayworks Festival of Workers and the Arts.
**See Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge, First Contract: Women and the Fight to Unionize (Toronto: Between the Lines Publishing, 1986).**
Such initiatives, while valuable, do little to stem the tide of negative imagery from the mass media, both in Canada and the United States. Most union activists spend more time watching American television than thinking about unionism or fine arts. The resulting media invisibility today is a form of disenfranchisement, the modern equivalent of lacking the right to vote.
**Carole Corbeil, in "Documenting Dangers on the Job Not a Time to Pull Artistic Punches," her review of the first Mayworks Festival, The Globe and Mail, May 1, 1986.**
American television has played a central role in undermining the personal and collective confidence of Canadian workers and replacing it with an envy whose base is in class and nation. When the Machinists union in the United States monitored prime-time television, they discovered that workers in unionized occupations are portrayed as clumsy, uneducated fools who drink, smoke and have no leadership ability. Unions themselves are almost invisible on television, and when they appear, it is as a violent, degrading and obstructive presence. The majority of workers in unionized occupations are the "nameless, personality-less people who take orders, do their jobs and disappear."
**Summarized in Catherine Macleod, "How Television Portrays Workers," one in a series of handouts called "Decoding the Media," used in the course manual Labour's Access to the Media (Toronto: Canadian Labour Congress, 1985).**
Because the economic and political control "the tube" exercises is so enormous, television is the main long-range target for labour arts work. Yet the financial cost of entering this level of competing imagery is beyond the reach of most unions. Working in a smaller scale, arts-positive unionists have come to rely on two sets of claims—access to cultural resources and dignity in representing workers and their organizations.
**A labour critique of class bias in the arts is "expressed in terms of the twin measures of accessibility (or the democratic right of workers to participate in activities which they pay for as taxpayers) and portrayal (or the right of working people to see themselves reflected and respected in the media)." Susan Crean, "Labour Working With Art," Fuse Magazine, No.44 (1987) p.30.**
The issue of access is clear enough. Most public arts funds and practically all commercial investments in the arts and media are channeled to production in which workers have no stake. Securing a share of resources to portray labour's own realities makes sense both in terms of the taxes workers pay and the market share they represent.
The issue of representation is more subtle. Workers and their organizations are practically invisible in mainstream media, and when they do appear it is not usually in positive roles. Over time, however, unions have come to realize that glamourizing workers and unions has its own set of problems. For labour to challenge its negative public image, unions are beginning to develop an arts theory that respects workers' experience.
**The "labour aesthetic" raises the possibility of actually shifting taste, intervening directly in the process by which the arts evolve. This is the scale of thinking engaged in by the protagonists of Serge Guilbaut's book, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Those people actually developed an aesthetic, abstract expressionism, coded it into arts criticism and linked it to an institutional base (in the Guggenheim Museum), a shift in the art market and an intervention in politics.**
The development of this "labour aesthetic" can unearth and display the jewels of creativity, talent and will in the working class.
The movement in Canada is not only creative; it is gaining in strength. A generation ago, about 30 percent of workers belonged to unions in both the United States and Canada. By the early 1990s, the proportion in the United States was down below 15 per cent, while in Canada it was over 35 per cent. In other words, Canadian labour has twice the depth and presence of American labour, which is reflected in our political culture by gains such as Medicare, and the commitment to preserving those gains in the face of government cuts and employer pressure to privatize. With a recent change in leadership at the AFL-CIO, American labour, too, seems to be reversing its decline and moving to a more activist stance, an "organizing model" rather than a "service model." This should help create a more receptive climate across North America to unions.
Far from being outmoded, unions are rising to the challenge of economic restructuring and cuts to social programs in an open-minded and skillful way. This includes approaching progressive employers with an offer of intelligent co-operation, a value added to their mission, while using on arrogant employers the tactics of union judo—taking their momentum in order to bring them down to a level of equality. In celebrating and struggling, Canadian unions are more inclusive and dynamic than at any time since the 1930s.
**Mary Cornish and Lynn Spink, Organizing Unions (Toronto: Second Story Press, 1994); Julie White, Sisters and Solidarity: Women and Unions in Canada (Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 1993).**
This is not to suggest that labour educators are working in a perfect world. There are tensions and setbacks, a frustrating distance between rhetoric and the reality of internal practices, a pattern of internal rivalries that is wasteful and weakening. Yet the potential is great for participatory process, socially critical content and increased dynamism among working-class learners. This potential was recognized by the 450 labour educators who assembled in Toronto for an "Educ-Action" conference in early April, 1997. While a third of the participants came from the United States and Latin America, the majority were practitioners within Canada, either directly employed by unions or working in allied organizations such as associations of homeworkers, or workers information and action centres.
The goal of such educators is to equip workers to meet employers, allies and adversaries with creativity and skill. Courses can be broadly classified in the following three categories: (a) skills courses like grievance handling, designed to give members the tools they need to do their work as union activists; (b) issues courses like human rights, designed to keep members current on issues affecting the workplace and labour-management relations; and (c) labour studies courses like labour economics, designed to help members understand the rich history and complex social and political dynamics of the labour movement in Canada and internationally.
**Bruce Spencer, "Labour Education for 2001." Paper prepared for Proceedings of the 37th Annual Adult Education Research Conference, University of South Florida, 1996, 288-294. Posted as a core reading in the Solinet Web Site, as part of the course "Labour Education on the Internet," Athabasca University, 1996, p.4.**
In each, the issues of democracy and effectiveness are worked through by the educators who work within the movement, and their allies in the adult education field.
Some of these allies are to be found in the universities, but less so than in countries like Britain
**John Field, "Labour Education in Canada" Northern College, Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Report on a British Council Study Tour, 1983.**
or the United States.
**In the United States, major universities established Labor Studies Programs with active union involvement, and often drew union activists there even for basic "tools" courses. Hence, the University and College Labor Educators Association has been a dynamic force for many years, and continues to publish regularly the Labor Studies Journal.**
While sympathetic individuals in the university have been drawn into labour courses, from Rick Williams in Halifax to Kate Braid in Vancouver, the major organic link in Canada is the protocol between Quebec unions and the universities, especially the Université du Québec à Montréal. Informal links in English-speaking Canada are maintained through the Learned Societies, including since 1995 the Canadian Labour Education and Research Association.
The face of Canadian labour education then, is rarely to be found in prime-time television or in university departments. It is more likely to shine in a modest social action project, when a socially committed adult educator connects in some way with a labour activist as both try to put into practice a genuine pedagogy of the oppressed.
**Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971).**
The Function and Culture of Adult Education in the Labour Movement
"No training—no strength."
**A worker in a paint factory, discussing the courses offered by his union. See Peter Sawchuk, "Report on Learning to Local 200-O of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada." Occasional Paper of the Working Class Learning Strategies Project, directed by David Livingstone, OISE, 1996.**
In a unionized workplace, employees have a right to representation. They may want support in an individual clash with management or effectiveness in asserting a collective need such as vacations, job training or workplace health. To exercise their right effectively will involve learning, either by themselves or by fellow workers.
In a healthy union, they will be encouraged to take a course themselves or to select the fellow worker whom they most respect, with confidence that the union will enhance that person's knowledge, confidence and skill as needed. Their representative will be entitled to time off the job to learn, will have any lost wages replaced, and will attend a two-to-five-day session with ten or twenty other people whose learning needs are similar. On returning to the workplace, the representatives will apply what they have learned, and many will have had their appetite whetted for other adult learning.
Implied in this general sketch is a whole culture of adult education. Labour education is based more on collective than on individual rights, more on social dedication than on professional credentials, more on advocacy than on implementation, more on political vision than on measurable competencies. For these reasons, it may seem strange at first to those steeped in the professional, institution-based side of adult education practice.
**See Mechthild U. Hart, Working and Educating for Life: Feminist and International Perspectives on Adult Education (London: Routledge, 1992).**
These are the dynamics of adult education within a social movement. While unions here are considered as educational agents for their members, they are primarily representative and advocacy organizations, engaged in collective bargaining and in mobilization for social change. Any educational programming takes place within this context, and must create an environment for learning by adults who usually have had little luck with the formal educational system.
Union courses can be initiated and sponsored at different levels of a central labour body (organized geographically at the municipal, provincial and federal level to bring together workers with a common experience of region regardless of the work they do) and at different levels of an "affiliate" (organized sectorally, to bring together workers with some common experience in the workplace regardless of geography).
Within an "affiliate" union, such as the United Food and Commercial Workers or the Canadian Union of Public Employees, there are essentially three levels of decision making, the local, the region or district, and the national (perhaps in consultation with an international headquarters). At the local level, participants for courses are selected, and the costs of participation covered. At the region or district level, requests for courses are handled by staff, who in turn are often assigned to teach. At the national level, courses are designed, videos are produced, and scheduling is co-ordinated. While this pattern differs among unions, in all there is some form of consensus required before courses really get off the ground.
Some affiliates are too small, or too scattered, to handle educational needs internally. And larger affiliates have found it valuable to have their members mix with others and to join forces for more specialized courses. For this reason, courses are often put on at a municipal level by labour councils, at a provincial level by Federations of Labour, and on a national level by the Canadian Labour Congress.
Two points might be noted here about the work of the labour centrals, the education that links up affiliates. The Quebec labour movement, for over a decade, has handled its financing and organization of courses independently, including use of federal and provincial grants. In effect, there is a form of "sovereignty-association" already operating within labour education. Secondly, while the affiliates have often protected their turf by keeping the central labour bodies relatively weak and underfunded, public funding has sustained their capacity to do innovative and substantial work nonetheless. Hence we find workplace literacy, health and safety, pay equity, anti-racism, tech change, skills training and adjustment addressed educationally by the labour councils, provincial federations and the Canadian Labour Congress. As education providers, the central labour bodies play a significant role, but those familiar with unions in other countries may overestimate the role, not realizing how the relative weakness of central labour bodies in Canada is also a product of Canada's geographical dispersion and history. As Craig Heron has said:
We have never really had a single national labour movement that grew steadily from humble origins in the nineteenth century to its current healthy size ¼ Rather, a long series of often independent, locally or regionally based movements rose and declined, depending on the opportunities for organizing that were created within the economy, class relations and the state.
**Heron, The Canadian Labour Movement, p.16.**
For those readers interested in following up this discussion, a wealth of material is available, on top of sources already mentioned.
**Of particular interest are a collection of essays on feminism and unionism by Linda Briskin and Patricia McDermott, Women Challenging Unions: Feminism, Democracy and Militancy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); a study of young workers by Thomas W. Dunk, It's a Working Man's Town: Male Working-Class Culture in Northwestern Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991); and an interpretation of the effects of "re-structuring" in two Ontario communities by Jamie Swift, Wheel of Fortune: Work and Life in the Age of Falling Expectations (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995).**
CHAPTER 6
Power Dynamics: The Labour Movement
By D'Arcy Martin
**This the second of three sections on adult education in the labour movement written by D'Arcy Martin for this edition of the book. See also Chapters 2 and 12.**
In adult education, respect for the learner is a basic guiding principle. This means that the educator is encouraged, and often exhorted, to act democratically, to work from people's lived experience rather than simply lecturing them. And in social movements like unions, participants simply demand respect, and hold the educator immediately accountable in a way unimaginable in a college, university or other formal environment.
Workers often run for union office because they are critical of the incumbents or impatient with passivity among their fellow members. This means that the people who show up in union courses usually have definite views and the spunk to express them. To do adult education in the labour movement, then, is to deal with an empowered and articulate part of the working class, often newly awakened to the potential of a collective, enlightened self-interest as a path of personal development.
For union participants, the goal in a short (two-to-five-day) intensive course is usually very practical and workplace-based. They may want to know how to identify and remove a hazardous substance from the workplace, or how to write out a proper grievance, or how to calm an angry fellow worker. For the educators, their goal is usually tied to convictions about justice, a sense of the values of fairness and dignity for workers on the job and in the society. For the union as an organization, the goals usually include building loyalty to the collective, and even to the incumbent leaders, as well as encouraging people to take on broader responsibilities within the structure. At times, these goals are shared by all, but often it is the tension among them which gives energy and colour to the program itself.
An example would be the activity called "Politics of Furniture," which explores non-verbal dynamics. This evolved as a part of the Facing Management course, taught across Canada's labour movement since 1981, which aims to equip union representatives to better understand management thinking and develop strategies to respond to workplace change. During the course, participants engage in role plays of labour-management meetings, and the issue of "body language" is usually brought up. The course leader needs to judge whether a change of pace will improve the energy levels. If so, the course leader might begin by moving in close to a couple of participants, essentially invading their space bubble to the point where they become uncomfortable. By inviting them to say how they feel, the course leader essentially invites them to name and hence resist a use of power. This opens the exploration of how physical layout can affect the power dynamics of meetings, both with management and within the union. Alternatively, the course leader might move to the back of the room, take a seat, and invite people to discuss "what's wrong with this picture." This leads easily into discussion of how managers use desks, chairs and other tools to establish their power in meetings.
This exploration is best done in a way that brings out people's "street-smart" knowledge of intimidation tactics in a way that validates the people and encourages them to have some fun. By asking participants to describe the course leader's actions, it moves critical scrutiny off them and makes the course leader "uncomfortable." This can be deepened by asking if people have noticed any other ways that room layout and furniture have affected the course leader's authority/power during the week. These can be recorded on a flip chart without comment. Then people can be asked to look at the items already listed in regard to the course and to describe ways that these same tactics have been or could be used in their encounters with management in the workplace. This should generate some funny stories about past experiences, which people can be asked to act out in a short skit.
At this point, the activity moves into a "stop drama," where other participants can interrupt such a skit and propose different ways that the interaction could be played out. For example, they might suggest moving a steward's chair closer to the manager's desk, or having a steward stand throughout the meeting, or having a second person writing quickly to transcribe the manager's comments. These and other tools of non-verbal power playing can be exposed.
The catch in this for the course leader, however, is that once participants have a common language for naming such power plays, they are likely to use it in the course. In other words, the reward for doing this activity well is that the course leader will be challenged. It is apparently perverse, unless one pauses to think that the job of the labour movement is to build resisters to the arbitrary use of power. This exercise, by exposing "under the table" forms of manipulation, has the effect of neutralizing these forms even in the classroom. From this point on in the course, when the course leader sits on the desk or moves among the participants, or uses markers and chalk to emphasize a point, or stands with the window light behind their head, he or she should simply expect a participant to say "Aha, gotcha, you're using non-verbal cues to enhance your authority." Indeed, it is precisely such a challenge that would indicate successful teaching of the concept. From this point on, participants will see desks and chairs and lights differently, and hopefully will use this understanding both to neutralize any intimidation by management and to improve access to union events like monthly meetings by all members. By moving to tips for using space democratically, a course leader can also model inclusive behaviour in a way that doesn't challenge directly any existing power hierarchies within a local union, but gently surrounds those participants who may feel tense and insecure about the discussion.
In a movement based on winning respect in the workplace, any tendency to "talk down" to participants would be met with resistance in a form that is vocal, angry and organized! Consistently, activities like "politics of furniture" have worked to unveil power dynamics in the workplace and in the union, with the result that it encourages the most vocal participants to exercise their power to re-shape agendas and positions, rather than in passive-aggressive undermining of the course leader.
In such a context, much of the "program planning" process used by institutional providers of adult education simply won't work. The pattern of planning, design and facilitation is much closer to a popular education perspective.
**See Rick Arnold, Bev Burke, Carl James, D'Arcy Martin and Barb Thomas, Educating for a Change. (Toronto: Doris Marshall Institute and Between the Lines Publishing, 1991), p.34.**
This means maintaining respect for participants' experience, posing questions in a way that encourages critical dialogue, and committing to share the individual and collective consequences of putting the learning into action.
In the courses themselves lies the richness of group dynamics and spontaneous dialogue. Much of what happens is shaped on the spot by the questions and debates that arise. Like any democratic adult educator, a unionist needs to keep basic objectives in mind rather than sticking rigidly to an outline. Hence, if a discussion of workplace health starts on a particular toxin, and a participant has had experience of identifying and removing that toxin from the workplace, the agenda will wait until the story has been shared.
Indeed, the course itself may be in response to the discovery of a toxin, or an incident involving harassment in the workplace, or a heated round of collective bargaining. In these cases, the course is not publicized in a course schedule like continuing education programs at a school board, college or university. It is requested in addition to the regular "tool" courses, usually in response to a heavy-handed initiative from management. Hence the accountability of the educator is immediate: if the course goes badly, the educator cannot "fail" the participants, as in formal schooling. Instead, the participants would have complained to the national leadership of the union about the educator's failure to meet their needs in a time of need.
Labour education, then, is highly practical in orientation. It is often designed in reaction to particular problems. Its outcomes rarely advance an individual participant's career, but rather equip that person better to contribute voluntarily to collective progress. And its power dynamics are such that the educator must respect participants, not merely as an ethical guideline but as a practical imperative.
CHAPTER 12
Adult Education in the Labour Movement
By D'Arcy Martin
**This is the last of three sections on adult education in the labour movement written by D'Arcy Martin for this edition of the book. See also Chapters 2 and 6.**
Myles Horton, who founded the Highlander Center in Tennessee and gave his long and productive life to grassroots education in the labour and civil rights movements, said, "Our job as a gardener or as an educator is to know that the potential is there or will unfold. People have a potential for growth; it's inside, it's in the seeds."
**Myles Horton, The Long Haul: An Autobiography. With Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl (New York: Doubleday, 1990) p.133.**
That is part of the faith of most adult educators. Faith is what built the labour movement. Nobody would start a union based on a feasibility study. For that faith to be rekindled in a new generation requires careful attention to the union culture. Mike Newman of Australia emphasizes the differences among unions, but draws out five factors that are common:
1. Unionists own their union, and feel a right to control it.
2. Unionists unite, especially against management.
3. Unionists care beyond their immediate interests.
4. Unions deal with wages, which make them important to members, employers and governments.
5. Unionists often feel beleaguered, or under attack.
**Michael Newman, The Third Contract: Theory and Practice in Trade Union Training (Sydney, Australia: Stewart Victor Publishing, 1993) p.16-20.**
Union culture doesn't just vary across unions, it changes over time. And it needs to change significantly in the years ahead. A key issue to be addressed again among labour educators is the balance among the three main political traditions: ideological, social and business unionism. Each current should be assessed critically, to see what it still has to offer workers in the future.
In ideological unionism, a broad social reform movement, such as social democracy or Marxism or Catholic social action, establishes a working-class wing. The function of this wing, a union structure, is to anchor the wider social vision in a working-class constituency. While viable in some countries like Nicaragua, such unionism in Canada has proven slow to respond to changes in the economic and social environment, and of limited value to members in their daily battles for dignity and fairness on the job.
In business unionism, a broad social consensus is assumed. Here, the union fixes problems and keeps its membership ahead of the game in wages and benefits. While still strong culturally, particularly in the construction trades, this perspective is eroded by the downsizing and re-engineering of the secure, high-waged jobs on which it is based.
In social unionism, a balance is struck between the social passion of the ideological current and the opportunistic ethos of the business current. Yet, as co-ordinated bargaining is attacked by the employers and unions are pressed to defend their members, social unionism risks being ambivalent and failing to inspire and mobilize its members in the face of a new employer offensive.
These approaches, then, need to be re-examined in the light of new conditions. For many union activists, the approach of popular education, with its participatory and creative power, is very attractive. Implied in it is a commitment to organize the unionized, to revive the social vision that launched the movement in the first place. Such a revival will oblige some truth telling about the ways that racist, anti-democratic and cowardly behaviour are still rewarded in parts of labour life. And it will mean re-committing to inclusion, to internal democracy, to celebration and to outreach.
Inclusion. Unions are being called on to include women, young people and people of colour to an unprecedented degree. Since the latter two are not dominant in numbers of votes in most unions, this requires some vision, some sense of where the movement's future lies. The combination of layoffs by seniority, political reaction and economic fear works against such vision.
A perspective of inclusion means the full menu of employment equity, such as hiring and promotion in the workplace and the informal practices of the union. But the front line of such battles is harassment and abusive behaviour among members. With the escalation of stress in many workplaces,
**Robert Karasek and Tores Theorell, Healthy Work: Stress, Productivity and the Reconstruction of Working Life (New York: Basic Books, 1990). **
incidents of tension and violence are on the increase. A union commitment to address these issues up-front is needed. But an active commitment to unlearning past habits of dominance and exclusion is also required, and the pain and delicacy of this process needs to be more carefully and compassionately shared.
**See Bell Hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994) esp. Chapter 4.**
Internal Democracy. Within labour itself, the skills of participatory decision making, of democratic communication, of productive problem solving, of simple good listening, are spread thin. These are process politics, not the kind of positional and electoral politics traditionally valued by the "players" in the labour leadership. Bad processes result in bad treatment of staff, in dodging creative ideas because of overload and in treating challenges as attacks.
This is particularly important given the rapidly changing nature of work. With new technologies that de-skill, with re-engineering processes that provoke anxiety and use it as a tool, the labour movement must put its own house in order. Genuine unity is needed to negotiate funding from employers for the educational programs labour promotes. As public funding for education declines, and dues dollars shrink, bargaining for a form of paid educational leave from the employers becomes increasingly important.
Celebration. Workers need to create, as well as to fight. In fact, it is in celebration that people recover their hope, without which struggle is pointless. Union members engage in community building outside the union. And they know that apparently closed doors are not a barrier when there is a window open somewhere. As educator and artist dian marino used to say, "Look for the cracks in consent." Unevenly across the country, unionists have developed arts, heritage and media initiatives that blow our own horn and use the power of laughter to open doors or go around them.
Outreach. Labour educators need to link up with others who share a vision of adult education for democracy. Here there are opportunities to share tools, to learn from the experience of other social sectors, and to draw nourishment for dealing with the large number of vocal adversaries. In this way, the profile of genuine, problem-posing adult education can also be increased. Networks are needed that are capable of sharing lessons across sectors and helping both individuals and organizations to keep balance in stormy weather. As the organizational core of the social resistance to fragmented, top-down, corporate-style education, the labour movement has a responsibility here.
In these areas, labour educators face very practical choices. It takes time in courses to help people learn to listen critically; it takes nerve to argue that it isn't just for quantifiable goals that people are attracted to union life but because it gives them a taste of a better way of being together; it takes imagination to value the creative streak in course participants and the commitment of labour-positive artists by building both into our educational events. And it takes stamina to keep seeking common ground with people whose reflexes are different.
Marge Piercy speaks to the beauty of work, including the work of the labour educator in the title poem of
her collection "To Be of Use":
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
May union courses have a shape that satisfies, and may all Canadians have work that is real.