A. INTRODUCTION
B. "STREET SMART"
C. LEARNING
D. IN THE UNION CULTURE
E. PRESENTS
F. MY REFLECTIONS
G. ON FIFTEEN YEARS
H. OF EXPERIENCE
I. AS AN ADULT EDUCATOR
J. IN THE CANADIAN
K. LABOUR MOVEMENT

G.ON FIFTEEN YEARS

The time span covered by this study is fifteen years, from 1978 to 1993, a period of hard times for labour.159 On March 1, 1978, I began work as the Canadian Education Director of the United Steelworkers of America. This job ended exactly eight years later, and I began on March 1, 1986 as National Representative (Education) for the Communications and Electrical Workers of Canada, a position I occupy today in the merged Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada.

At the time of hiring at the Steelworkers, I was thirty years old, and at the time of writing I have just turned forty-five. Roughly speaking, then, this study is located personally in my thirties.

To start directly from my experience does not mean ending with it. To situate my personal experience, we would need to "name the moment" within which it was historically located.160 This means tracing the shifting balance of political forces within Canada, within the labour market and within the trade union movement.

I entered the labour movement early in the period 1975-89, which has been defined as "The Counter-Attack", the effort of employers and governments to weaken unions permanently.161 These years have included wage (and price) controls from 1975-78, the depression of 1981-84 and the New Right package of privatization, de-regulation and free trade implemented by the Mulroney government from 1984-89.162 In each of these periods, the labour movement was subject to economic and political attack. By keeping unions on the defensive, the establishment has had the whip hand economically and politically during the period of my work in the labour movement.

While feeling the influence of these broader processes, I lived this period as a series of projects, each with an educational dimension. These will be sketched as five periods below, in part H of this chapter, and narrated in some detail in the next chapter. While my own clock was of course not fully synchronized with the timing of the wider labour movement, the two were certainly connected. In educational terms as well as trade union terms, this was a significant period.

Influencing my own work in adult education was the wider political struggle about schooling. In educational terms, the right-wing offensive moved in two currents. One was the linking of educational reform to the immediate imperatives of big business, while the other was the rise of a "culturalist" wing, which saw education as a guardian of Western Civilization:

"Although these positions defend various aspects of the conservative agenda for schooling, they share a common ideological and political thread. That is, they view schools as a particular way of life organized to produce and legitimate either the economic and political interests of business elites or the privileged cultural capital of ruling-class groups. More importantly, both positions represent an attack on the notion of culture as a public sphere where the basic principles and practices of democracy are learned amid struggle, difference, and dialogue. Similarly, both positions legitimate forms of pedagogy that deny the voices, experiences, and histories through which students give meaning to the world and in doing so often reduce learning to the dynamics of transmission and imposition."163

At the same time that unions were dealing with the New Right, educators were dealing with the New Right. Yet the ease of contact and solidarity that one might expect to result were not in evident. Partly that is because of the specific way that the shifts in the economy sketched by Heron affected union life. And partly it's because of the hesitancy of the labour movement to link up in coalitions with its social allies.

In the early years of the industrial unions, in sectors like steel and communications, labour was actively involved in the political and social life of communities. During the 1930's and 1940's, the linkage of the labour movement into the CCF and the Communist Party in Canada were taken as given. During the Cold War, of course the Communist wing of the labour movement was smashed and many of the links with educators, artists and community groups were smashed along with it.164 Rebuilding these links in a new form started in the seventies and eighties and showed up for example in the experience of the Solidarity Coalition in British Columbia.165

Starting from the early 1980s in Ontario, there has been an increased understanding in the labour movement of the potential value of coalitions. As a part of that process, there has been increased communication and mutual assistance between educators facing the New Right and unionists facing the same conservative agenda. With increased contact and trust, the range of issues addressed has been broadened for both, and the tasks divided up more clearly and appropriately. Gradually, trust has been built. With the very diverse organizational cultures inside social coalitions, it should not be surprising that this did not emerge easily. Yet cooperation between popular educators in the labour movement and critical pedagogues in the formal education system is obviously an idea whose time has come.166

While the emergence of coalitions is a positive response to pressure on labour and its allies, the cumulative effect of developments from the depression in the early 1980's to the adoption of the Free Trade Agreement in the late 1980's has been deeply damaging.167 The political and economic offensive against labour has extended importantly into the educational life of the movement, as one would expect. In recovering from the many setbacks involved, Canadian union education has had to unveil this conservative agenda with the members.168 The challenge of union education, then, was to re-integrate socialist insights into the thought of workers. As New Right ideology was rising to ascendancy,169 unions were beginning to reach out to social allies, to build coalitions that could keep a critical distance from hegemonic thought as well as mount a challenge to it in practical politics.

Despite the setbacks, trade unions in Canada, during the period of this study, have been on the move. In the early 1960's, about 30% of non-agricultural workers in Canada and the United States belonged to unions. By 1986, the share in the U.S. had dropped to 19%, while the Canadian figure was 39%. In other words, the Canadian movement now has proportionately double the social presence of its counterparts to the south.170 This dynamism has affected all aspects of labour relations, including those which touch adult learning.

During this decade, union education became more professionalized. Instructor manuals were printed and videos were produced, particularly by the Canadian Labour Congress. This shift had much to do with government subsidy. The government's objective in funding labour education during the late 1970s was to encourage the organized" labour movement" to take a larger role in the management of the economy. Given the climate of wage controls at the time of this decision, it is hard to credit the government with a desire for increased union effectiveness in major decisions. Receptivity to government economic initiatives was among the expectations. Further, the assumption is widespread that more skills in industrial relations would promote responsible, predictable behavior among union leaders at all levels, i.e. would assimilate them rather more to the pace of change and the type of discourse of the other major economic actors, namely government and business.

This sketch of motives should be situated in the context of the wider debate on "tripartism".171 From this beginning to the alignment of union educators against the North American Free Trade Agreement at the end of the period, the political climate was a key variable.

The hegemony of capital and the state during this time did not go unchallenged. On October 14, 1976, a million workers stayed off the job in protest against wage and price controls, the largest general strike in Canadian history. In 1981, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, fully 100,000 gathered on Parliament Hill to protest the federal economic policies which were engineering a depression. During the 1988 federal election, labour took an unprecedented scale of public profile, in protesting the free trade agreement. And subsequently, in coalition with churches, women's groups and other social allies, labour has evolved a program of action to resist the New Right, focused on the Action Canada Network.172

At the same time as union leaders were fending off the messages from the economic and political establishment, they were also challenged to renew the unions from within.173 It was at this point of encounter, intellectually fertile and politically volatile, that my union courses were designed and administered.