Thinking Union

H. OF EXPERIENCE

I came into the trade union movement from years of work in development education. We studied the international power system, and educated Canadians on our stake in it.174 From time on the road in Latin America, I had a sense of urgency about the dignity and wisdom of the formally "uneducated", and of frustration at the smugness and political illiteracy of so many Canadians.175

Moving from a close-knit, committed group of independent radicals into the largest industrial union in the country, it took a while to get my bearings. It was like learning to drive a car. At first there seemed to be too many elements to handle at once-- shifting gears, signalling turns, watching for pedestrians and other drivers. But after a while, the jumble of traffic took on predictable patterns, and a sixth sense for trouble seemed to develop. From participants in trade union education, I learned which turns should be signalled beforehand, and when to slow down.

At the Steelworkers, my first six months on the job were spent listening. There was a string of meetings with local union leaders. We spoke of the accomplishments and shortcomings of the past and our hopes for the future. The recurring theme was the need to revive the enthusiasm and strengthen the knowledge of the shop stewards. That had been the starting point of the "formateurs" program in our union in Quebec. And it became the heart of the "back to the locals" program in English Canada.176

The richness of that period for me was outside the formal meetings:

......In the bar of an Ottawa Valley motel, one of the organizers from the 1950's told of snowshoeing into a mining camp because the company wouldn't let a Steelworker in on their private train line.....

......At a Chinese restaurant on the Prairies, a steward explained the real politics within a local-- how one of the officers had twisted a rumour about a potential opponent and skipped several rungs in his climb to the top.....

.......On an early morning bus from Halifax a co-worker explained how the change from irregular work on the lake boats to a steady job in the steel mill had stabilized his life...177

These were the themes around which I learned-- fighting the companies, handling the internal politics, and relating to the lives of the members outside the union meeting. It all helped to ground my political sympathy in personal friendships.

This process crystallized when I taught my first week-long course. It was in Trail, B.C. and everything seemed to be going wrong. The airport was fogged in, my luggage was lost and the teaching manuals and films had not arrived. But somehow I managed to "wing it" through the first day.

That evening, several of us were watching hockey on T.V. in a hotel room, when I got word that one of the course leaders wanted to go home a day early.178 I was worried that he might be dropping out because of the classes themselves, but it turned out that he was on strike and was afraid of running out of cash before the week's end. During a commercial the hat passed around and he suddenly had enough for meals and hotel and then some.

He got flustered: "I want everybody's name so I can pay you back after the strike is over."

"Why don't you have a beer and stop interrupting the game!"
It was so matter-of-fact. Only later did it sink in that this incident had as much to do with the success of the course as the study materials which finally arrived the next morning. The solidarity seemed "natural" -- like driving a car.

It's clear that nobody really learns about the heart of unionism in a course. Formal union education is just a chance to compare notes on the lessons of solidarity and conflict learned through experience -- on the job, in union meetings, and in the ebb and flow of internal politics. Courses are one moment in the learning process of the union culture, a moment that should be taken seriously, handled with rigour and dedication, and subjected to intense critical analysis.

Engaging in this learning process can carry a high price- for our personal lives and for our vision of what the union and the country could be like. But there is no better environment in which Canada's working class adults can learn. And there could no more intense and exciting environment for me, as a teacher of adults, to test and develop my own street smarts.

The term "experience" is central to this study. It is the ore from which some conclusions are to be milled and refined. Like "common sense", it should be treated with respect but scrutinized carefully and critically. Some questions concerning my own social identity have already been posed, since my social identity has conditioned both my experience and my reflections upon it. Some comments have also been made on the decade under study, the historical forces at play which shaped my experience.

The question at hand now is the quality of that experience itself. By focusing attention directly on this, value is imputed. In other words, it is implied that the experience is of some significance. The habit by which direct experience is considered to be inferior thinking is thus set aside.179 In this regard, it is useful to consider John Dewey:

"The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. Experience and education cannot be directly equated to each other. For some experiences are mis-educative... It is not enough to insist upon the necessity of experience, nor even of activity in experience. Everything depends upon the quality of the experience which is had."180

My experience of the union culture has been basically positive, or I would not still be working within the movement. This study distils the learning I have done during this period of educational practice, and its elaboration has itself been an intense learning experience. From the inside, as it were, the period 1978-1992 would fall into five distinct phases.

First is "initiation time", from 1978-81, when the Steelworkers were engaged in struggles like the Inco strike. This was a productive period for me as an educator, best symbolized in the slide-tape program for stewards, "What Am I Getting Into?", and the film about Radio Shack "We Won't Live Like That".181

The second phase is "Testing time", from 1981-83, when the membership of the Steelworkers in North America fell from 1.3 million to 700,000, a level from which it has never since recovered. This was an extremely productive time for me as an educator, best symbolized in the course "Facing Management" and the film "Moving Mountains".182

The third phase is "Civil War time", from 1983-85, when the Steelworkers focused energy on the issues of union democracy and Canadian autonomy, with the result that education became an internal partisan battleground. This had its productive moments educationally, particularly in the film "Tech Change: The Challenge", and in the wider educational initiatives on women's rights and technological design.183

The fourth phase is "Information Age time", from 1986-89, when I moved to the Communications and Electrical Workers of Canada. My work was focused educationally by the "Grassroots Campaign" in the Bell locals, and the "Working Classes" campaign in the industrial sector. It also engaged me in a major organizing drive and the Bell strike of 1988.184

The fifth phase is "policy time", from 1990-93, when I became involved in issues of training and workplace reorganization on temporary assignment with CWC president Fred Pomeroy. This time was highlighted educationally by the development of the Sectoral Skills Council and the "Facing Training" course developed for local union leaders engaged in it. And it ended with the "Facing Work Reorganization" course, conducted with staff and local officers in workplaces undergoing drastic structural change.185

From this brief sketch, the reader can gather that the range and pace of situations in which I have worked has been at times dizzying. For a start, the thematic range of my work has been extremely broad. In the first "time", I concentrated almost exclusively on role-based courses, such as steward training, collective bargaining, local union officer training and development of course leaders for "tool" courses. In my second phase, by initiating with Rick Williams the course "Facing Management", I began to design courses of interest to a range of union roles. In my third phase, the courses on women's rights, tech change and internal communications have developed. In my fourth phase, because of my involvement in a major organizing drive and strike, I focused on short, introductory courses for rank and file members, to introduce new members and to refresh uninvolved rank and file unionists to the union culture. In my fifth phase, I was assigned to "special projects" with Fred Pomeroy, CWC president, which centred on policy work around job training and work reorganization.

The process of conceiving, designing, testing and diffusing any one of these initiatives has taken me at least two years. In the conditions of over-extension that union staff carry, it is hard to concentrate for long on one project, and in any case it takes time to build internal curiosity, support and pride. If a union educator stays too long on any one topic, the risk of personal stagnation and ego control begins to grow. If a course concept is good, it must be handed over to the movement to teach, not kept as private stock.

Similarly, the geographical range of my work in Canadian labour has been wide. In every province, I have taught at least one union course. From Labrador to the Yukon, I have worked in mining communities. From Trail B.C. to Bathurst, New Brunswick, I have taught workers who process raw materials. From Winnipeg to Pictou County, Nova Scotia, I have held sessions with industrial workers. From Rimouski, Quebec to Calgary, Alberta, I have encountered office workers. And in Ontario, I have conducted one-day, weekend and week-long courses in nearly every major community, engaging with workers from paper mills, telephone centres, airlines, hospitals and factories.

The thematic and geographical scope of my work, then, is being presented in terms of these five "times". Of course these phases of my experience have been constituted in retrospect, rather than perceived as such at the time. In fact, it has taken considerable struggle with my own internal resistance to focus on my own experience in this systematic and assertive way. Such resistance plagues any of us trained to work professionally from "outside-in" and yet committed to working "inside out". As David Hunt recounts:

"When I first thought about `going public' with this autobiographical chapter, I felt uneasy. Then I realized that most of us feel this way at the prospect of disclosing our own ideas and beliefs... I became aware of several specific reasons for my resistance: defensiveness, unwillingness to trust myself, limited awareness of my feelings, and lack of know-how about personal and professional reflection."186

At times, the demands of this work have strained me, and damaged my family. What has kept my momentum is openness to the pressing need of workers for access to the knowledge, confidence and skill needed to defend their rights. What has rewarded me is the insight, decency and warmth of participants in the courses, and their willingness to share with me their knowledge and their dreams.

Along the way, I have paused to reflect. Particularly in 1984-85, I took a ten-month leave of absence from the Steelworkers in order to return to graduate studies. In 1988-89, a second unpaid leave allowed me to read and travel in ways that enriched my perspective on union work. Hence it would be misleading to dichotomize the moment of teaching and the moment of reflection, to suggest that I spent a decade of activism and suddenly halted in my tracks in order to study the experience. Rather, my experience included moments of study, and much of this thesis has been written during pauses in practice.

These pauses have been used primarily to improve my understanding of the craft of helping adults learn. And this craft is demanding:

"The adult educator must intensively study both what the `students' know (the subjective dimension), and the world that they know about (the objective dimension), and then critically comprehend the dialectical interrelation of the two (i.e., social reality). It is on the basis of such an approach that, in Freire's terms, a committed, change-oriented, yet `dialogic' and learner-centred adult education practice becomes a practical possibility."187

In the United States, formally assessing experiential learning by trade unionists has been addressed more extensively in academic life than in Canada.188 For example, the State University of New York has developed a system for granting college credit for college-level learning gained outside accredited programs, in the life of the trade union movement.189 For this purpose, applicants describe and document their unique learning in a "life experience portfolio".

In a sense, the present study is my "life experience portfolio", being submitted in the same way, to be assessed and credited by academic evaluators as a way to validate the street smarts of a student. My doctoral studies at O.I.S.E., and the process of writing this thesis, have moved me from the Learning Domain to the Education Domain.190

It carries the limits of my experience with it, and makes no claim to be an "objective" or comprehensive overview of Canadian union education.191 This is in the spirit of critical pedagogy work, based on the social organization of knowledge:

"Beginning with experience means the exploration of society from within, as it is known by ourselves as those who are active in the social processes within which our daily/nightly lives are lived. We know our world not as an objectively ordered system of relations, but from where we are and from within the acts and practices that are articulated to and articulate its organization."192