France Laurendeau and D'Arcy Martin
"All I know about the phone industry, I learned through my employer. The next wave of union leaders won?'t have to say that."
René Roy, General secretary, FTQ
René Roy, General secretary, FTQ
Background
This chapter is an initial report on a pilot for training full-time union officers and staff within the Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec (FTQ), the largest union central in Québec. It sets out the background for the initiative, explains the context, outlines the objectives and rhythms for the eight-week program, and sketches some implications for labour educators.
The idea of a Québec labour college had been discussed for years. Once they reached the senior level of union activism, the thousand "opinion leaders" within the FTQ felt they had no educational support, that they were on their own (FTQ, 2000). It?s not as though trade unionists had never received good union education. On the contrary, at the grassroots level, the FTQ is an educational powerhouse. Hundreds of local union activists are trained as worker educators and lead basic courses within their affiliates on topics ranging from steward training and safety and health to pre-retirement and promotion of French as the language of work. Similarly, those who become involved at any level in community economic development receive sophisticated training through the Solidarity Fund, the labour-sponsored investment fund whose $3.7 billion in assets have spawned an economic education program without parallel in North America. As the most heavily unionized major jurisdiction in the continent, Quebec had developed a substantial labour education system, but within it the FTQ had one gaping hole at the senior level.
This impetus to establish a Quebec labour college was tied intimately to the development of progressive thinking in Quebec nationalism. In the mid-197's, the FTQ withdrew from the Labour College of Canada, with certain specific concerns about the program and a broader commitment to chart its own path in labour education. During the 1980s, a structure of "sovereignty-association" was put in place whereby the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) set its own priorities and programs, including administration of federal grants in English-speaking Canada, while the FTQ conducted its own affairs autonomously (Gagnon, 1998; Rouillard, 1989).
By the early 1990s, a wider separation of union responsibilities was established whereby the FTQ took over responsibility for issues of union jurisdiction, political action, and other areas that traditionally had been carried by the CLC. At the same time, the Quebec experience in areas including labour-sponsored investment funds and popular education received increasing interest and respect in English-speaking Canada. A defensive, subordinate attitude towards the union experiences of English-speaking Canada was no longer necessary or appropriate. Of course, irritants between the FTQ and CLC remained, but the balance had shifted. One indicator of this shift was the decision by the first director of the Collège FTQ-Fonds, France Laurendeau, to make her first research trip from Montreal to Ottawa, to draw on the experiences of the Labour College of Canada as a starting point for designing the Collège. A second indicator was the decision to involve D'Arcy Martin, a bilingual union educator from Toronto, as part of the initial foursome that comprised the Coordinating Committee who were to design and pilot the program.
The funding for the initiative was a delicate matter, since the Solidarity Fund's Economic Education Foundation had strict limits on the work it could support. Yet the will to support a Collège was clear. At a meeting, the Fund's vice-president Jean Martin asked the four members of the coordination team two questions: "Are you serious this time, so that if we commit funds they will actually be used in this fiscal year?" and: "Can you assure me that the Collège will build collective capacity, and not just enlighten individuals?" These were sobering questions, requiring responsible answers, and they were put by a former local union president whose antennae for empty rhetoric were highly developed. The four members of the Coordinating Committee, along with Jean Sylvestre who took Johanne's place after the first session, have struggled to rise to this and other challenges from leaders within the Quebec labour movement.
Context
New initiatives in union education don't occur in a political and economic vacuum. Inside the FTQ, there were four specific triggers for action:
·A new leadership team
·The maturity of the Solidarity Fund as a financial base
·Staff ready to carry out the project
·Linkage to capable and sympathetic university professors.
Let us look at each in turn. At the 1998 convention of the FTQ, a new president, and a new general secretary were elected. Both were personally familiar with FTQ courses and with the struggles and politics of the movement. By that time, the Solidarity Fund of the FTQ had passed $3 billion in assets, with over 400,000 Québecois as shareholders, and mobilized fully 25 per cent of the venture capital not just in Quebec but in all of Canada. The Education Director of the Fund, a former education director of the Steelworkers, was in tune with the leaders of the FTQ and its Fund. Both the Education Director and the Research Director had expressed their view to the leadership that it was time to move on the idea of a Collège. Through the protocol established between the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and the three union centrals, three decades of experience had built trust and mutual respect. As a result, there was no difficulty in establishing an "Academic Committee," with some of Québec's most respected progressive professors in social sciences related to labour issues.
Before the initial program was drafted, the Education Director and the Research Director met for two days with a focus group of union staff to discuss the learning needs of this specific constituency. In addition to working with the committee structure, the Research Director met with a wide range of professors. Officers of the FTQ travelled to Harvard University and to McMaster University to learn from their trade union programs. All the informal channels of input characteristic of the union culture fed into the program development process.
With these conditions in place, adequate supports for learning could be provided. For example, all participants were provided with identical top-quality laptop computers and skilled coaching in using them. The participants in the pilot phase, all union staff, had 75per cent of their salaries reimbursed to the affiliates that employed them, so that replacements could be hired. Thus the two most common excuses for mediocrity in labour education were removed: lack of resources for the educators and lack of time for the participants.
In January 2000 the first group of 13 union staff turned up for the first meeting of the Collège. The eight-week program alternated between time in residence, time at home and time back on the job, spread over a period of six months. At that time, the Collège had no logo, and the name was provisional. The administrative staff person was on a week-by-week contract. The computers were all screwed up. But a magic did occur, and the Collège began to earn its place as an incubator for the next generation of union leadership.
Objectives
There was nothing modest in the conception of the Collège. The welcoming words to the first group included: "Here at the Collège you will be at the leading edge of your knowledge and your capabilities, in order to build the labour movement of the future. You will take a break from the daily grind of union activism to reflect on the needs of our members, of our movement, of our communities. You will have access to good computers, to good food, to good reading material, to good teachers. We have done our best here. This is the maximum of which we are now capable" We are giving you a beautiful gift: treat it well. Use it to benefit the workers? (Rene Roy).
The objectives of the Collège reflect the passionate belief of its initiators in the need to develop capacity to influence the social, economic and political transformations underway in Quebec. For this lofty goal to be realized, participants were to be supported in three main areas: knowledge (savoir), method (savoir-faire), and personal/ community development (savoir- être).
A sense of how these three objectives are woven into a program might be drawn from the initial outline of the first five days. Day 1 begins with collective discussion of the role of union staff, and the challenges participants experience in that role. In Day 2, the morning involves a lecture on the changing Quebec labour market, while afternoon workshops deal with how to read statistics. Day 3 opens with the politics of unemployment, while afternoon workshops coach people with computers. Day 4 opens with a lecture on community economic development, with the afternoon spent in a historical and political tour of the region where the session is being held. An evening social with family members is followed in Day 5 by a discussion on the stresses of life as a union representative. "The Collège has been a place to open myself to other ideas, and to develop approaches for the future." (participant comment)
Each evening included "homework" of assigned and optional readings, and each morning opened with a summary of the readings by two participants. Some of the technical texts are challenging, to the point where an improvised workshop was needed on "How to read academic articles"! But a decision was made to expose participants to the best the academy had to offer, and then to support them in drawing on this educational capital effectively. This cannot be done by watering down difficult texts or by facilitating superficial debate.
"Now I understand better how decisions are made around me, and how to analyse situations" (comment of a participant)
In its pilot phase, the Collège's participants have been union staff with a sprinkling of full-time local union officers. Continuing education programs are being designed to keep participants updated on new developments and to strengthen their individual and collective capacity. The first of these, in October 2000, brought Ricardo Petrella of the Lisbon Group to speak on ways of responding to globalization and was followed by workshops related to the People`s Summit of the Americas, in Québec City in April of 2001.
Program Design
Each participant in the Collège is responsible for a major research project, supported at every stage by individual and collective tutorials. The intent is that they will produce a solid piece of intellectual work, based on their own choice of topic, in a form that can be shared with their families, their colleagues, and the wider labour movement. This is consistent with the FTQ worker educator program, which became a generator of knowledge, not just a transmission belt for the thinking of the leadership. Over time, the Collège should produce original material, at a depth difficult for servicing representatives to achieve in the course of their regular work. Among the topics chosen in the pilot group were:
·The history of labour relations in the Quebec construction industry
·The current situation of Quebec?s pulp and paper industry
·The impact of mergers on municipal employees
·Working conditions in private retirement homes
·The pressures on white-collar workers in the manufacturing sector.
These projects embody the "street smarts" of union activism. The process of producing such work has the potential of creating new links between seasoned unionists and the community activists, university professors, statisticians and journalists with whom they come in contact.
"From this experience, I had my personal values questioned, and I got the energy and desire to try new ways of working" (participant comment)
In the Collège, a serious effort has been made to accommodate the rhythms of adult learning amongst working people. The first 10 days in residence include a weekend to which the partners and children of participants are invited free of charge, so that they might better understand and support the climate of learning. This is followed by 10 days at home, during which the participants have specific assignments. While at home, they may access support by teleconference and e-mail, to strengthen study habits in their personal living space.
The first bloc is followed by several weeks back on the job, so that learning can be shared with colleagues and applied in practice. The same rhythm is maintained in the second bloc, so that the seven weeks of intensive work is spread over a reasonable period of time, avoiding what is called "bourrage de crâne" or "stuffing of the brain". After all, the test of success in the Collège is not passing some external exam, but rather equipping people to think, work and live better. This is not helped by cutting people off surgically from working and living. While this distributed rhythm is more costly and less convenient to the affiliates who send participants, it is essential to the human model of learning that underlies the Collège.
"If we are more efficient, we can do more for more people, without burning ourselves out. We can push further in making change." (participant comment)
The first bloc of the Collège takes an economic and historical perspective, while the second bloc takes a social and forward -looking perspective. The workshops of the first bloc are more introductory, while the second bloc works in more depth. Along the way, participants experience alternative processes such as Open Space Technology, and spread their creative wings by selecting and discussing music and art.
Another layer of rhythm is the alternation of popular education approaches, typical of Quebec union education, with academic and corporate tools. The diet is rich, but the process design poses questions and problems and does not indoctrinate people. Role-plays and activity methods are used, but so are formal lectures and the case study methods from the Harvard Business School. The effort of the Collège is to be broad in its sources without compromising its clarity of purpose. Indeed, as a matter of policy, participants are challenged to reflect on their assumptions, rather than simply reinforced in their current convictions.
"I have learned to explore many ways of resolving issues, and to reflect on ways of changing the climate inside unions" (participant comment)
The Labour Educators
The educators in the College experience a different set of rhythms. Those who start a new labour education program often find it difficult to pass it on to others, or even to make explicit the values and habits with which they have begun. For the four who designed and piloted the Collège, this challenge came quickly, since the success of the first round of courses caused the labour leadership to want greater frequency of sessions, well beyond the capacity of the initial team.
In briefing new members, several assumptions were made explicit, of which the following might be familiar to readers elsewhere with experience in union education teams:
·Spending time on the "personal" among us is necessary and efficient.
·The diversity of learning styles is infinite, and discovering them among participants is our job.
·If participants end up thinking the resource people are intelligent and they are stupid, the program will have failed.
·The responsibility for the Collège lies with the elected leadership of the FTQ and its affiliated unions.
The fourth of the above assumptions is of special significance for the future of the Collège. In early 2001, a week-long program was set up for the FTQ Executive Council to expose them to several of the most effective and provocative resource people. This helped to include the leadership in the learning dynamic to which they assign their staff. In these and other ways, the habits and insights of the Collège are being extended to other parts of union life, and the rhythms of learning sustained beyond the sessions themselves.
Implications
"I'm glad my union sent me here. I feel privileged." (comment of a participant)
After discussion with the "academic committee" of the Collège, university equivalencies were calculated for the program. The total turned out to be well over 250 hours of structured study, with 73 hours of theoretical work, 60 hours of practical skill development, 13 hours of historical and workplace visits and 87 hours of independent supervised study.
For the coordination team, an ongoing evaluation process helped to bring design and facilitation improvements, for the group at hand and for designing the future. This feedback encouraged the team to shift the order of topics and resource people for a more logical flow; to integrate better the theoretical and practical dimensions; to link discussions more to current issues facing the labour movement; to name a few changes.
"The Collège lets you step back from day-to-day union work, to take a fresh approach." (participant comment)
For the participants, regular daily evaluation forms and periodic collective assessments of the program helped to bring together themes; to consolidate learning and to integrate new information and insights; to better transfer knowledge and skill to their roles as full-time union representatives. Of particular importance are the "welcome back" sessions after periods outside the residential setting. Here participants return from their home and work environments, with the ?reality checks? of conversation with families, friends and colleagues.
For the union leadership, evaluation is needed to ensure that the considerable investment of money and staff time in the Collège is worth the trouble. After all, an intensive and future-oriented program is bound to cause trouble to the union leadership in the short term. First of all, members and colleagues are likely to complain about the absence of a seasoned union representative for a period of eight weeks; further, the participants return to their union with new ideas and skills, which will de-stabilize their work environment; and finally, a satisfied participant is likely to encourage colleagues to request assignment for future Collège sessions, so that the trouble will be repeated!
The union leadership, who hold in each affiliated union the authority to authorize or withhold participation in the Collège, are a key constituency for evaluation, both informal and formal. They are invited to the closing day of the Collège in order to observe what participants have learned and to question participants publicly and privately about the process and content of the program. Over a longer period, it is these ranking officers of affiliated unions who will see the effects of the Collège on the will, skill and knowledge of their representatives.
What participants learn, and what they say about what they learn, will be the most powerful force in shaping the future of the Collège. In this respect, it is much like the introductory steward courses and the basic health and safety courses that are the bread and butter of labour education. The test of these courses is in whether workers are better represented in their workplaces. When we compare the quality of representation at the leadership level of the FTQ and its affiliated unions a decade from now, the real report card on the Collège can be written.
In this program, the daily practices of union staff are questioned, sometimes reinforced and other times revised or even transformed. The more subtle and long-term effects will be felt in the relation of participants with the membership. In that spirit, we leave the last word to a participant:
"We can get too caught up in our technical work, and lack the time to think broadly about the labour movement. Yet we're an important link in the union chain. This has restored my energy to push forward, instead of complaining and criticizing all the time. We need to get past a static, mechanical way of working, to keep our militancy, and for that the Collège has been a big help."
References
Blondin, M. (1980). Une formation syndicale faite par les travailleurs eux-mêmes, Community Development.
Blondin, M. (1997). La formation économique des employés, facteur de changement dans les milieux de travail. In Gestion, Revue des Hautes Études Commerciales, 22(3), automne.
Gagnon, M-J., Ed. (1998). Un syndicalisme en crise d'Identité. Sociologie et Sociétés. XXX (2).
FTQ (2000), Programme d?éducation, 2000-2001.
Rouillard, J.(1989). Histoire du syndicalisme québecois. Montréal: Boréal.
This chapter is an initial report on a pilot for training full-time union officers and staff within the Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec (FTQ), the largest union central in Québec. It sets out the background for the initiative, explains the context, outlines the objectives and rhythms for the eight-week program, and sketches some implications for labour educators.
The idea of a Québec labour college had been discussed for years. Once they reached the senior level of union activism, the thousand "opinion leaders" within the FTQ felt they had no educational support, that they were on their own (FTQ, 2000). It?s not as though trade unionists had never received good union education. On the contrary, at the grassroots level, the FTQ is an educational powerhouse. Hundreds of local union activists are trained as worker educators and lead basic courses within their affiliates on topics ranging from steward training and safety and health to pre-retirement and promotion of French as the language of work. Similarly, those who become involved at any level in community economic development receive sophisticated training through the Solidarity Fund, the labour-sponsored investment fund whose $3.7 billion in assets have spawned an economic education program without parallel in North America. As the most heavily unionized major jurisdiction in the continent, Quebec had developed a substantial labour education system, but within it the FTQ had one gaping hole at the senior level.
This impetus to establish a Quebec labour college was tied intimately to the development of progressive thinking in Quebec nationalism. In the mid-197's, the FTQ withdrew from the Labour College of Canada, with certain specific concerns about the program and a broader commitment to chart its own path in labour education. During the 1980s, a structure of "sovereignty-association" was put in place whereby the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) set its own priorities and programs, including administration of federal grants in English-speaking Canada, while the FTQ conducted its own affairs autonomously (Gagnon, 1998; Rouillard, 1989).
By the early 1990s, a wider separation of union responsibilities was established whereby the FTQ took over responsibility for issues of union jurisdiction, political action, and other areas that traditionally had been carried by the CLC. At the same time, the Quebec experience in areas including labour-sponsored investment funds and popular education received increasing interest and respect in English-speaking Canada. A defensive, subordinate attitude towards the union experiences of English-speaking Canada was no longer necessary or appropriate. Of course, irritants between the FTQ and CLC remained, but the balance had shifted. One indicator of this shift was the decision by the first director of the Collège FTQ-Fonds, France Laurendeau, to make her first research trip from Montreal to Ottawa, to draw on the experiences of the Labour College of Canada as a starting point for designing the Collège. A second indicator was the decision to involve D'Arcy Martin, a bilingual union educator from Toronto, as part of the initial foursome that comprised the Coordinating Committee who were to design and pilot the program.
The funding for the initiative was a delicate matter, since the Solidarity Fund's Economic Education Foundation had strict limits on the work it could support. Yet the will to support a Collège was clear. At a meeting, the Fund's vice-president Jean Martin asked the four members of the coordination team two questions: "Are you serious this time, so that if we commit funds they will actually be used in this fiscal year?" and: "Can you assure me that the Collège will build collective capacity, and not just enlighten individuals?" These were sobering questions, requiring responsible answers, and they were put by a former local union president whose antennae for empty rhetoric were highly developed. The four members of the Coordinating Committee, along with Jean Sylvestre who took Johanne's place after the first session, have struggled to rise to this and other challenges from leaders within the Quebec labour movement.
Context
New initiatives in union education don't occur in a political and economic vacuum. Inside the FTQ, there were four specific triggers for action:
·A new leadership team
·The maturity of the Solidarity Fund as a financial base
·Staff ready to carry out the project
·Linkage to capable and sympathetic university professors.
Let us look at each in turn. At the 1998 convention of the FTQ, a new president, and a new general secretary were elected. Both were personally familiar with FTQ courses and with the struggles and politics of the movement. By that time, the Solidarity Fund of the FTQ had passed $3 billion in assets, with over 400,000 Québecois as shareholders, and mobilized fully 25 per cent of the venture capital not just in Quebec but in all of Canada. The Education Director of the Fund, a former education director of the Steelworkers, was in tune with the leaders of the FTQ and its Fund. Both the Education Director and the Research Director had expressed their view to the leadership that it was time to move on the idea of a Collège. Through the protocol established between the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and the three union centrals, three decades of experience had built trust and mutual respect. As a result, there was no difficulty in establishing an "Academic Committee," with some of Québec's most respected progressive professors in social sciences related to labour issues.
Before the initial program was drafted, the Education Director and the Research Director met for two days with a focus group of union staff to discuss the learning needs of this specific constituency. In addition to working with the committee structure, the Research Director met with a wide range of professors. Officers of the FTQ travelled to Harvard University and to McMaster University to learn from their trade union programs. All the informal channels of input characteristic of the union culture fed into the program development process.
With these conditions in place, adequate supports for learning could be provided. For example, all participants were provided with identical top-quality laptop computers and skilled coaching in using them. The participants in the pilot phase, all union staff, had 75per cent of their salaries reimbursed to the affiliates that employed them, so that replacements could be hired. Thus the two most common excuses for mediocrity in labour education were removed: lack of resources for the educators and lack of time for the participants.
In January 2000 the first group of 13 union staff turned up for the first meeting of the Collège. The eight-week program alternated between time in residence, time at home and time back on the job, spread over a period of six months. At that time, the Collège had no logo, and the name was provisional. The administrative staff person was on a week-by-week contract. The computers were all screwed up. But a magic did occur, and the Collège began to earn its place as an incubator for the next generation of union leadership.
Objectives
There was nothing modest in the conception of the Collège. The welcoming words to the first group included: "Here at the Collège you will be at the leading edge of your knowledge and your capabilities, in order to build the labour movement of the future. You will take a break from the daily grind of union activism to reflect on the needs of our members, of our movement, of our communities. You will have access to good computers, to good food, to good reading material, to good teachers. We have done our best here. This is the maximum of which we are now capable" We are giving you a beautiful gift: treat it well. Use it to benefit the workers? (Rene Roy).
The objectives of the Collège reflect the passionate belief of its initiators in the need to develop capacity to influence the social, economic and political transformations underway in Quebec. For this lofty goal to be realized, participants were to be supported in three main areas: knowledge (savoir), method (savoir-faire), and personal/ community development (savoir- être).
A sense of how these three objectives are woven into a program might be drawn from the initial outline of the first five days. Day 1 begins with collective discussion of the role of union staff, and the challenges participants experience in that role. In Day 2, the morning involves a lecture on the changing Quebec labour market, while afternoon workshops deal with how to read statistics. Day 3 opens with the politics of unemployment, while afternoon workshops coach people with computers. Day 4 opens with a lecture on community economic development, with the afternoon spent in a historical and political tour of the region where the session is being held. An evening social with family members is followed in Day 5 by a discussion on the stresses of life as a union representative. "The Collège has been a place to open myself to other ideas, and to develop approaches for the future." (participant comment)
Each evening included "homework" of assigned and optional readings, and each morning opened with a summary of the readings by two participants. Some of the technical texts are challenging, to the point where an improvised workshop was needed on "How to read academic articles"! But a decision was made to expose participants to the best the academy had to offer, and then to support them in drawing on this educational capital effectively. This cannot be done by watering down difficult texts or by facilitating superficial debate.
"Now I understand better how decisions are made around me, and how to analyse situations" (comment of a participant)
In its pilot phase, the Collège's participants have been union staff with a sprinkling of full-time local union officers. Continuing education programs are being designed to keep participants updated on new developments and to strengthen their individual and collective capacity. The first of these, in October 2000, brought Ricardo Petrella of the Lisbon Group to speak on ways of responding to globalization and was followed by workshops related to the People`s Summit of the Americas, in Québec City in April of 2001.
Program Design
Each participant in the Collège is responsible for a major research project, supported at every stage by individual and collective tutorials. The intent is that they will produce a solid piece of intellectual work, based on their own choice of topic, in a form that can be shared with their families, their colleagues, and the wider labour movement. This is consistent with the FTQ worker educator program, which became a generator of knowledge, not just a transmission belt for the thinking of the leadership. Over time, the Collège should produce original material, at a depth difficult for servicing representatives to achieve in the course of their regular work. Among the topics chosen in the pilot group were:
·The history of labour relations in the Quebec construction industry
·The current situation of Quebec?s pulp and paper industry
·The impact of mergers on municipal employees
·Working conditions in private retirement homes
·The pressures on white-collar workers in the manufacturing sector.
These projects embody the "street smarts" of union activism. The process of producing such work has the potential of creating new links between seasoned unionists and the community activists, university professors, statisticians and journalists with whom they come in contact.
"From this experience, I had my personal values questioned, and I got the energy and desire to try new ways of working" (participant comment)
In the Collège, a serious effort has been made to accommodate the rhythms of adult learning amongst working people. The first 10 days in residence include a weekend to which the partners and children of participants are invited free of charge, so that they might better understand and support the climate of learning. This is followed by 10 days at home, during which the participants have specific assignments. While at home, they may access support by teleconference and e-mail, to strengthen study habits in their personal living space.
The first bloc is followed by several weeks back on the job, so that learning can be shared with colleagues and applied in practice. The same rhythm is maintained in the second bloc, so that the seven weeks of intensive work is spread over a reasonable period of time, avoiding what is called "bourrage de crâne" or "stuffing of the brain". After all, the test of success in the Collège is not passing some external exam, but rather equipping people to think, work and live better. This is not helped by cutting people off surgically from working and living. While this distributed rhythm is more costly and less convenient to the affiliates who send participants, it is essential to the human model of learning that underlies the Collège.
"If we are more efficient, we can do more for more people, without burning ourselves out. We can push further in making change." (participant comment)
The first bloc of the Collège takes an economic and historical perspective, while the second bloc takes a social and forward -looking perspective. The workshops of the first bloc are more introductory, while the second bloc works in more depth. Along the way, participants experience alternative processes such as Open Space Technology, and spread their creative wings by selecting and discussing music and art.
Another layer of rhythm is the alternation of popular education approaches, typical of Quebec union education, with academic and corporate tools. The diet is rich, but the process design poses questions and problems and does not indoctrinate people. Role-plays and activity methods are used, but so are formal lectures and the case study methods from the Harvard Business School. The effort of the Collège is to be broad in its sources without compromising its clarity of purpose. Indeed, as a matter of policy, participants are challenged to reflect on their assumptions, rather than simply reinforced in their current convictions.
"I have learned to explore many ways of resolving issues, and to reflect on ways of changing the climate inside unions" (participant comment)
The Labour Educators
The educators in the College experience a different set of rhythms. Those who start a new labour education program often find it difficult to pass it on to others, or even to make explicit the values and habits with which they have begun. For the four who designed and piloted the Collège, this challenge came quickly, since the success of the first round of courses caused the labour leadership to want greater frequency of sessions, well beyond the capacity of the initial team.
In briefing new members, several assumptions were made explicit, of which the following might be familiar to readers elsewhere with experience in union education teams:
·Spending time on the "personal" among us is necessary and efficient.
·The diversity of learning styles is infinite, and discovering them among participants is our job.
·If participants end up thinking the resource people are intelligent and they are stupid, the program will have failed.
·The responsibility for the Collège lies with the elected leadership of the FTQ and its affiliated unions.
The fourth of the above assumptions is of special significance for the future of the Collège. In early 2001, a week-long program was set up for the FTQ Executive Council to expose them to several of the most effective and provocative resource people. This helped to include the leadership in the learning dynamic to which they assign their staff. In these and other ways, the habits and insights of the Collège are being extended to other parts of union life, and the rhythms of learning sustained beyond the sessions themselves.
Implications
"I'm glad my union sent me here. I feel privileged." (comment of a participant)
After discussion with the "academic committee" of the Collège, university equivalencies were calculated for the program. The total turned out to be well over 250 hours of structured study, with 73 hours of theoretical work, 60 hours of practical skill development, 13 hours of historical and workplace visits and 87 hours of independent supervised study.
For the coordination team, an ongoing evaluation process helped to bring design and facilitation improvements, for the group at hand and for designing the future. This feedback encouraged the team to shift the order of topics and resource people for a more logical flow; to integrate better the theoretical and practical dimensions; to link discussions more to current issues facing the labour movement; to name a few changes.
"The Collège lets you step back from day-to-day union work, to take a fresh approach." (participant comment)
For the participants, regular daily evaluation forms and periodic collective assessments of the program helped to bring together themes; to consolidate learning and to integrate new information and insights; to better transfer knowledge and skill to their roles as full-time union representatives. Of particular importance are the "welcome back" sessions after periods outside the residential setting. Here participants return from their home and work environments, with the ?reality checks? of conversation with families, friends and colleagues.
For the union leadership, evaluation is needed to ensure that the considerable investment of money and staff time in the Collège is worth the trouble. After all, an intensive and future-oriented program is bound to cause trouble to the union leadership in the short term. First of all, members and colleagues are likely to complain about the absence of a seasoned union representative for a period of eight weeks; further, the participants return to their union with new ideas and skills, which will de-stabilize their work environment; and finally, a satisfied participant is likely to encourage colleagues to request assignment for future Collège sessions, so that the trouble will be repeated!
The union leadership, who hold in each affiliated union the authority to authorize or withhold participation in the Collège, are a key constituency for evaluation, both informal and formal. They are invited to the closing day of the Collège in order to observe what participants have learned and to question participants publicly and privately about the process and content of the program. Over a longer period, it is these ranking officers of affiliated unions who will see the effects of the Collège on the will, skill and knowledge of their representatives.
What participants learn, and what they say about what they learn, will be the most powerful force in shaping the future of the Collège. In this respect, it is much like the introductory steward courses and the basic health and safety courses that are the bread and butter of labour education. The test of these courses is in whether workers are better represented in their workplaces. When we compare the quality of representation at the leadership level of the FTQ and its affiliated unions a decade from now, the real report card on the Collège can be written.
In this program, the daily practices of union staff are questioned, sometimes reinforced and other times revised or even transformed. The more subtle and long-term effects will be felt in the relation of participants with the membership. In that spirit, we leave the last word to a participant:
"We can get too caught up in our technical work, and lack the time to think broadly about the labour movement. Yet we're an important link in the union chain. This has restored my energy to push forward, instead of complaining and criticizing all the time. We need to get past a static, mechanical way of working, to keep our militancy, and for that the Collège has been a big help."
References
Blondin, M. (1980). Une formation syndicale faite par les travailleurs eux-mêmes, Community Development.
Blondin, M. (1997). La formation économique des employés, facteur de changement dans les milieux de travail. In Gestion, Revue des Hautes Études Commerciales, 22(3), automne.
Gagnon, M-J., Ed. (1998). Un syndicalisme en crise d'Identité. Sociologie et Sociétés. XXX (2).
FTQ (2000), Programme d?éducation, 2000-2001.
Rouillard, J.(1989). Histoire du syndicalisme québecois. Montréal: Boréal.