Thinking Union

A. INTRODUCTION

"Street Smart: Learning in the Union Culture" presents my reflections on fifteen years of experience as an adult educator in the Canadian labour movement. In this chapter, I will consider the potential and limits of my perspective, in order to open dialogue with others on the issues of class, learning and political change addressed in this text.

At one level, the basis of this study is straightforward. Asked to describe her father's work by a primary school teacher, my daughter Nyranne replied "He teaches workers how to talk back". No better job description has been provided to me during my practice as a union educator. Yet the issues raised, both practical and theoretical, have proven complex.

Nyranne's older sister, Danielle, was three when I started work in the labour movement, and she wanted the union to be a thing. Concepts are always elusive, for adults as well as children, and she shared with many adults the desire to pin down a social relation, to reify it.1

When she came to my office, she would put the question, and I would reply no, that the office was a support to the union, but not the union itself. When she came to courses and meetings, she would put the question, and I would answer no, that education was just one of the ways to build the union. When we drove past the steel plants in Hamilton, she would put the question. Impatiently, I would answer no, that the members in the workplace worked for the employer.2

Then it was November, 1981, and we had stopped for a hot chocolate before walking to join the demonstration against high interest rates on Parliament Hill. I was tired from the drive to Ottawa, and she insisted that I carry her, even though she was six now and heavy on my shoulders.3

I lurched grouchily around the corner, ready for a normal turnout on a chilly Saturday, and I stopped short. There were 100,000 people on the lawn outside the Parliament Buildings. It was the biggest crowd I had ever seen in Canada, and it took my breath away.

I felt her bounce forward on my shoulders, and suddenly her nose was almost touching mine. "Papi, this must be the union." I hugged her ankles gleefully, and said yes, it was.

In my dreams, it still is. I see a strong, unified labour movement, willing to fight the employers and the state on issues that affect all Canadian workers; a movement based on collective, enlightened self-interest; a movement that knows how to struggle and how to create. For most of my adult life I have worked in union education, one of many trying to build such a movement. In the process, I have developed a stance, as an educator and as a communicator, which will be explored and tested in this study.

This stance is tentative, since my times of certainty and prescription around learning and politics are long past. Rather, I will be gathering from the attics and basements of my experience the people and situations that have inspired me, and trying to arrange them in a form that invites others to compare notes:

"Those needed to teach, advise, persuade, weigh arguments
those urgently needed for the work of perception
work of the poet, the astronomer, the historian, the architect of new streets
work of the speaker who also listens
meticulous delicate work of reaching the heart of the desperate woman, the desperate man
-- never-to-be-finished, still unbegun work of repair -- it cannot be done without them
and where are they now?"4

My goal in this text is to probe, without reification, the relations of learning and power, politics and culture, introspection and outreach, which have shaped my work. These interconnections are complex and subtle. To capture them on paper, I will move from anecdote to analysis, from specific incidents to broad social processes. To present these findings in "stereo", the right side of the page will emphasize my practical conclusions from experience, while on the facing left page are notes related to the academic literature. Hence the reader can weave at will between these two channels of thought. By encouraging and modelling this dialectical reading of my experience as a union educator,5 I hope to explore the limits and possibilities of Canada's labour movement as an adult learning environment. Throughout, I will try to treat learners as responsible actors rather than as raw data.6

By engaging with this study, the reader's own motives and values will be of decisive importance:

"Knowledge is not produced in the intentions of those who believe they hold it, whether in the pen or in the voice. It is produced in the process of interaction, between writer and reader at the moment of reading, and between teacher and learner at the moment of classroom engagement. Knowledge is not the matter that is offered so much as the matter that is understood."7

Early in the process of writing this text, I showed a draft chapter to my friend and colleague, Paul Keighley, to get from him the matter that is understood. He returned it with a number of useful suggestions, and a note across the top: "What gives you the right to draw back from our situation and write about it?"8

At first, his question triggered my insecurities about the kind of privilege that I experience within the labour movement. The defensiveness had at least three sources of which I'm consciously aware. One was the touchiness of an educator working in a social movement where education is often only a secondary part of the vision. A second source was the inference I drew that union staff (labour bureaucrats or "pork choppers" to many) are insulated from the time demands and political pressures of elected officers. A third source was the defensiveness of a professional from a middle class background, engaged in a working class organization.9

After some internal struggle, I began a dialogue with him which gradually separated into three streams of thought.

First, this study addresses a need of the labour movement. Because staff are assigned to work day by day with members, and yet need not court their votes,10 we have a particular contribution to make to internal discussion and debate. The elected leadership is central to the movement, but isn't the sole repository of wisdom about its dynamics. Unless staff too take responsibility for our role, within its limits, we will limit the effectiveness of our social movement in today's complex and volatile society. My particular position as an education staffer helps me see how a learning perspective can strengthen the movement as an instrument through which workers can have a hand in shaping the future.11 At this first level, Paul's question makes me ask: "How can I help him to record his own truth, knowing that others in the movement could learn from his voice?"

Second, this study addresses a need of the adult education field. While trade union education is a major field of practice, it is almost invisible in the professional literature of adult education.12 To fill this gap, practitioners need to generate "inside-out" research. This can balance the contribution of traditional university-based researchers, as in David Hunt's stinger that "there is nothing so theoretical as good practice".13

Third, this study meets a personal need. Union education is central to my life, and I have a creative urge, a passionate desire to talk about it. I want to express what I have learned in years of work... from picket lines at dawn to contract ratification meetings in the late evening. It would be dishonest to present my motivation only as social service. In this text is also a calm, defiant message to those with whom and against whom I have struggled over the years: I won't opt out, I won't be pushed out, and I won't be silenced.14

Whether based on the needs of the labour movement, the adult education field or my personal journey, this text has not been shaped in a vacuum. My account should be contextualized critically and historically, so that people of other social identities, in other times and places, might make their own use of what I have learned.

This study, then, takes some reflective distance, in order to re-engage with a deepened commitment and less waste motion.15 This is the path of the politically engaged intellectual, "solitaire et solidaire", apart and united.16 Along this path, there has been a profound shift in me, as a politically committed educator. In Gramsci's terms, I was a "traditional intellectual" at the beginning of my trade union work, engaging with the "organic intellectuals" of the working class through my courses. The process of my learning shifted my social identity and loyalty to the point where I now function myself as an organic intellectual of the union movement -- although on occasion, I can still be silenced within union debates by reference to my class origins.

The stance underlying this study draws on four main theoretical traditions. Two have been of central importance in my practice: the principles of popular education, and Gramsci's analysis of cultural hegemony.17 Two others have influenced the form of reporting on my practice here: the historical approach of conjunctural analysis, and the methodology of participatory research.18

Each of these intellectual currents has produced an extensive literature. The conceptual umbrella under which my own synthesis would best be sheltered from academic storms is the six point definition of political education developed by Williams:

"(i) a conscious pursuit on the part of professional educators of the progressive transformation, humanization and/or democratization of social situations through work with the least powerful groups;

(ii) the development of educational content with the learners in their situation (rather than the `importing' of curricula);

(iii) the focus upon the learners' shared consciousness of their situation, and critical analysis of their understandings in the light of shared experience;

(iv) the `problematization' of specific ideological elements in social consciousness, aiming towards their displacement by forms of `critical awareness';

(v) the integration of educational activities with ongoing, practical struggles by the learners for change in their situations;

(vi) through the analysis and strategy of the educators, acting as a `lucid vanguard', and through their praxis and that of the learners, the linking of concrete, localized struggles to transformative processes affecting the political, economic, social and cultural totality."19

This approach has yet to be applied in critical academic reflection on Canadian trade union education by a practitioner.20 The record of union education in Canada has been transmitted from one generation of educators to another mostly by stories and examples. While practitioners constantly exchange stories and tools, little of this richness finds its way into the written record. This is consistent with the oral traditions of the union movement, but limits the sharing of knowledge in the field.21

The practitioners' record of Canadian trade union education is oriented mostly to policy and administration, not to the experience of teaching and learning. This record is prepared primarily for union convention delegates,22 or government funding agencies.23 Occasionally, at adult education conferences, or in policy briefs to government, union educators are required to write out the trade union stake in issues of the formal educational system.24 In recent years, formalized manuals have been published for leading many of the basic courses in the union movement, and hence are available to outside researchers.25 But most of the texts of union education remain recognized only in the institution where they were generated.26

The motors of contemporary Canadian union education, then, have yet to be taken apart and reassembled on paper. As a result, the Canadian adult education field has lacked insight into one of its most innovative and widespread areas of practice.27 This study aims explicitly at this gap in the professional literature. It also asserts that the significance of unions is not only in their economic clout or political stands, but in the site they provide for working people to learn:

"We need to say what many of us know in experience: ...that the struggle to learn, to describe, to understand, to educate, is a central and necessary part of our humanity.

This struggle is not begun at second hand, after reality has occurred. It is, in itself, a major way in which reality is continually formed and changed. What we call society is not only a network of political and economic arrangements, but also a process of learning and communication."28

This process of learning and communication will be traced within the courses by which some unionists teach others how to stand up for their rights more effectively.29 Its stance can be summarized in a brief statement, which will be analysed in detail through the rest of this chapter: