Thinking Union

1On reification, see the discussion of Marx's philosophy of internal relations in Ollman, 1971: 27-31. This dominant strain in social science practice is challenged by much current ecological writing, as in Berman:

"The dominant mode of thinking... can best be described as disenchantment, nonparticipation, for it insists on a rigid distinction between observer and observed... Subject and object are always seen in opposition to each other. I am not my experiences, and thus not really a part of the world around me. The logical end point of this world view is a feeling of total reification: everything is an object, alien, not-me; and I am ultimately an object too, an alienated 'thing' in a world of other, equally meaningless things. This world is not of my own making; the cosmos cares nothing for me, and I do not really feel a sense of belonging to it. What I feel, in fact, is a sickness in the soul." Berman, 1981:3.

2Attempts by Canadian unions to address young people have often been as clumsy as I was in this account. Some of the best work for primary school classrooms has been done by the Labour Studies Committee at the Toronto Board of Education. See Charron and Thomas, 1983. A brilliant text for early teenagers is Mackay, 1987. Interesting ideas for older students, with sample activities, are provided in "Unions: Solving Problems by Sticking Together", in Simon, Dippo and Schenke, 1991.

3My informal writing style responds to friends like Don Posnick, Education Representative for the United Steelworkers of America in Western Canada. Commenting on an earlier draft of this study, Don suggested including more entertaining stories, noting "Good writing, like good cooking, requires a certain lightness".

This is easier said than done if the producer is passionately committed:

"I have always tried to conceal my effort. I have always wanted my works to have the lightness and gaiety of spring, which doesn't let one suspect the work that it has cost." Henri Matisse, text of letter to Henry Clifford, 1948, displayed at the Matisse exhibit in Vence, France, August, 1992. See also the chapter on "Lightness" in Calvino, 1988.

4Rich, 1991: 11. I suggest that some of them are to be found among the street smart people of the union culture.

5My writing doesn't follow the linear pattern of much educational literature. A reader who finds wonders whether this text is dialectical or merely badly "elusive" and "repetitive" might find useful the discussion of Paulo Freire's writing in Martin, 1975. On the issue of "popular" and "standard" writing, see Bourdieu, 1991: 90-102.

6The traditional "objective" approach is particularly characteristic of male academics, and the "androcentric filter" may slip over my lens at times. See Patricia Maguire, "Challenges, Contradictions and Celebrations: Attempting participatory research as a doctoral student", in Park, Brydon-Miller, Hall and Jackson, 1993.

Rajesh Tandon describes the awakening of awareness among the mostly male activists who originated the participatory research approach:

"When these adult educators began to examine the problems related to the reality in which they were situating their practice of adult education, when they began to evaluate the impact of their adult education efforts, and when they began to study the learning process of adults, they realized their research methodology was alien to the adult learners and unilaterally controlled by these adult educators as researchers, treating their learners as objects of manipulation in the research process." Tandon, 1988: 5.

7David Lusted, cited in Giroux and Simon, 1989: 314.

8Internal memo, Communications and Electrical Workers of Canada, 7 August, 1987. Paul Keighley is now National Representative, Ontario Region, for the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada. A dedicated and seasoned union staff representative, Paul has consistently supported my work since I joined the CWC in 1986. He has also patiently coached me on the tactical compromises and organizational innovations needed to make it effective.

9The issues of voice and social location will arise again several times in this text. They are now far more explicit in both the practice of adult education and its theorising than when I began union work. See in particular the special issue on Critical Social Theory and Adult Education, Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, Vol.V, Winter, 1991. A perspective wider than the educational field is provided in Himani Banerjee ed., Returning the Gaze: Essays on Racism, Feminism and Politics (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1993.)
On the priority given by unions to education in the past, see Coolie Verner, "Educational Activities of Trade Unions: Some Research Findings", in Pearl, 1975.

On the privileges and handicaps of "traditional intellectuals" in relation to the working class movement, and their relations with organic intellectuals, see the discussion of Gramsci in Piotte, 1970: 45-70.

10In both the unions where I have worked, staff are appointed and assigned by elected officers. In some unions, notably for the construction trades, staff are elected directly by local unions and held accountable in the same way as elected officers. In this "business agent" system, transfers and reassignments of a staff representative are rare indeed.

Appointed representatives have relatively more political insulation than elected people; yet as the experience of past labour educators like Howard Conquergood and Bert Hepworth makes clear, this insulation can be easily pierced in the politically polarized moments of union life. In due time, I learned this lesson myself.

For those of us who see the labour movement as in desperate need of renewal and democratization, the contributions of staff should not be ignored. As we will see, the question of what role a union educator can and should play in such renewal is delicate indeed.

11This goal of course is broader than the subordinate role unions have played historically in Canada. My stance resists the narrowing of "legitimate" union concerns, and stretches the bounds of the imaginable, as part of a broader democratic political agenda:

"In capitalist democracies, there is a certain tension with regard to the locus of power. In a democracy, the people rule, in principle. But decision-making power over central areas of life resides in private hands, with large-scale effects throughout the social order...
In the advanced industrial societies the problem is typically approached by a variety of measures to deprive democratic political structures of substantive content, while leaving them formally intact. A large part of this task is assumed by ideological institutions that channel thought and attitudes within acceptable bounds, deflecting any potential challenge to established privilege and authority before it can take form and gather strength."
Chomsky, 1989:vii.

12In the excellent survey of adult education literature by Brookfield, 1988, for example, discussion of labour is limited to four pages. The lack of experiential accounts in much left political literature reflects the way "ideology" has been constructed:

"Needed is an approach to ideology in which the emphasis is not simply on capital accumulation or the primary determinants of distortion and false consciousness, but on the means whereby the ruling elite manufactures and mediates the relations between the material and symbolic needs of the dominant culture and the productive, lived and embodied symbols of subordinated groups." McLaren, 1989: 200.

13Hunt, 1987:29. Hunt qualifies his stinger as follows: "My emphasis on the value of Inside-out does not mean that I propose to abandon Outside-in altogether... my recommendations are directed to experienced practitioners, who, it must be remembered, can also profit from Outside-in but only after consolidating their own Insider areas. Self-knowledge precedes learning from others." (emphases in the original), Ibid.: 33.

14Of course, this personal motivation must be balanced with the legitimate concerns of those with whom I have worked. People have a right to personal privacy, and organizations a right to internal confidentiality. I have omitted specific references wherever I thought they might betray personal confidences, and have consulted union colleagues on other sensitive points in this text, deleting information when in doubt. While some people may disagree with my views, I sincerely hope they will find I have used inside information in a personally respectful and organizationally responsible way.

15I remember competing against aging athletes who drew on experience to compensate for declining strength. Ah, the indignities of reaching middle age myself!

16"The social critic works from principles naturalized in his own society. He applies those principles with a stringency that makes his fellow citizens uncomfortable; hence he often finds himself alone. `Le vrai intellectuel', as Julien Benda wrote, `est un solitaire'. But he doesn't begin by cutting himself off; nor need he embrace and cultivate his solitude. He has his own obligations and loyalties. Camus's description of the intellectual is better: solitaire et solidaire, apart and united." Walzer, 1984: 428.

17Each of these four will be discussed in this chapter: participatory research and hegemony in this part, conjunctural analysis in part G and popular education in part I.

18The distinction made here is between those ideas which shaped my work at the time, and those affecting my reflections upon it today. Discussion with David Livingstone has helped me to become conscious of this challenge of experience-based academic writing -- to avoid imposture, while recognizing real contributions from others.

On the one hand, there is a risk of imposing, ex post facto, academic frameworks which did not in fact guide my practice at the time. This would mean "dressing up" my past work theoretically in order to pass academic muster.

On the other hand, my educational practice has in fact been influenced directly by the writing and teaching of professionals outside the labour movement. Indeed, I returned to graduate study in 1984 precisely to develop more consistent, rigorous and effective educational practice.

19Williams, 1988: 48-49. A similar direction, but with slightly different emphasis is found in Arnold and Burke, 1983 and in Arnold et al., 1991.

20A brilliant account of learning in union life is provided by Cameron, 1977. This book and others like White, 1987 make little mention of structured union education. The role of union staff is explored by Jane Stinson and Penni Richmond, "Women Working for Unions: Female Staff and the Politics of Transformation", in Briskin and McDermott, 1993.

21One useful exception is Pearl, 1975. Yet overall, Canadian labour educators should feel doubly the lament of our British counterparts:
"We need more sophisticated research on trade union education, so that the debate is taken beyond hunch, anecdote, assertion and conjecture." Edwards, McIlroy, Mooney and Spencer, 1983: 53.

22See for example the document appended to this study as Appendix #1: United Steelworkers of America, Worker Education/ Real Power (Toronto: District 6, USWA, 1979). Adopted at the Ontario district conference of the union, it became the blueprint for the Steelworkers' "back to the locals" program, implemented throughout English Canada in the early 1980's.

23Practitioners like myself were consulted extensively in preparing the two studies for the federal government on their funding of trade union education: Thomas, Beatty and MacKeracher, 1982. See also subsequent evaluations conducted by Waldie, Brennan Associates from 1985 on.

24Particularly gifted in this sort of work is Jim Turk, currently Education Director for the Ontario Federation of Labour. See for example Ontario Federation of Labour, 1988.

25Several of these have been produced with Labour Canada funding by the Canadian Labour Congress in Ottawa. They cover topics as diverse as collective bargaining, arbitration, steward training and safety and health. Dan Mallette has shown particular skill and steadiness in continuing to produce such manuals under very difficult working conditions.

26At a tribute dinner for Gerard Docquier in June 1992, the "back to the locals" education program was repeatedly invoked as one of his three main contributions to the union movement in fourteen years as National Director. Yet no outside academic has yet taken a dispassionate look at how the "back to the locals" program actually functioned.

27The reservations of the labour mainstream about post-secondary institutions have been pungently summarized:

"We must recognize that universities and colleges are not primarily adult education institutions; therefore, only certain departments in universities or colleges are of practical use to us.

Most university and college instructors are completely unfamiliar with trade unions and don't know the aspirations, policies and also the internal workings of the trade union movement.
Universities and colleges have many people who advance particular ideological or political goals. For them, the union is a pawn or adversary, to be used either to create political strife or to maintain the status quo, and they do not really care about the advancement of the trade union movement or the future well-being of union members. Many universities and colleges don't even know the difference between labour education and industrial relations training and relegate labour education to the school of business or commerce." Kube, 1979: 9-10.

28Williams, 1976: 11.

29In the literature, this is referred to as "trade union education". "Labour education", while union-centred, can include citizenship and liberal studies at formal adult education institutions: "Its basic goals are the development of skills, understanding, and knowledge for service within and through the workers' organization, for the achievement of the union's broadest institutional, social and economic objectives. It incorporates motivational aspects designed to relate the learner to the trade union, and this further distinguishes labour education from general adult educational activities." Whitehouse, 1985: 5587-5595. "Workers' education", in turn, can be broader still, extending to job training. See Benedict, 1986. In the late 1980's, unions addressed this aspect of members' learning needs in a systematic way. See Turk, 1989 and Jackson, 1992.

Definitions of "workers' education", "labor education" and "labor studies" are also found in Brookfield, 1988: 179.

30I have used this metaphor since first beginning work with the Steelworkers in 1978. The power of such personal metaphors to unlock creative thinking for professional practice is understood by the artists with whom I have worked over the years. It is also recognized in Hunt, 1987: 75-80. A striking use of such metaphors ("housewifization of labour", "epistemology of mothering") is to be found in the more traditional academic discourse of Hart, 1992.

31In professional circles, experiential learning is increasingly valued, as intuition comes into its own amongst architects, psychiatrists, musicians and others. See the discussion of "professional artistry" in Schon, 1987: 22-40. Yet in the working class, such reflection-in-action has long been an undervalued part of workplace and social life.

The phrase "tacit skills" refers to the experiential and informal learning among workers which is required for effective job performance. An example would be the capacity of an auto mechanic to "hear" what is wrong when a customer drives up to the garage. These skills are usually taught by co-workers, rather than in formal training programs, and while management relies upon such skills they rarely are recognized in job classifications and wages. For adult educators who approach workers as learners, this concept is particularly important. See Jackson, 1989.

32While unconventional in academic and policy discussion, storytelling has a long tradition as a teaching and communications tool. The use of parables for religious teaching, of myths for transmitting cultural traditions and of fables for moral instruction of the young are obvious examples. In critical pedagogy: "In the context of social change, storytelling refers to an opposition to established knowledge, to Foucault's suppressed knowledge, to the experience of the world that is not admitted into dominant knowledge paradigms." Razack, 1993: 83. Razack goes on to demonstrate that, while powerful, storytelling is not without its own problematics.

33A sobering reminder of the seriousness of the stakes is the Day of Mourning, commemorating Canadian workers killed and injured on the job, held each year on April 28.
This broad approach is consistent with the cultural analysis pioneered by Gramsci, and adapted by current advocates of critical pedagogy:

"The basis for a critical pedagogy cannot be developed merely around the inclusion of particular forms of knowledge that have been suppressed or ignored by the dominant culture; nor can it focus only on providing students with more empowering interpretations of the social and material world. Such a pedagogy must be attentive to ways in which students make both affective and semantic investments as part of their attempts to regulate and give meaning to their lives." Giroux and Simon (1988): 296.

34"Patriarchy, the capitalist division of labour, and other dominant cultural processes and institutions have together excluded the great majority of ordinary people in Canada from meaningful participation in the theoretical work through which systematic knowledge about their everyday lives is generated. As a consequence, the mass of the people know their reality in large part through ideologies worked up and transmitted by 'traditional intellectuals' aligned in one way or another to the dominant classes." Williams, 1988: 65.

My political role in the union movement, then, has been to help develop the layer of "organic intellectuals" within the working class, capable of working up and transmitting a different set of ideas, to the point where the hegemony of the dominant classes is challenged on the ideological and cultural level.

35These five contributions are consistent with the commitment to social transformation which gave it birth:

"Participatory research is not a set of tools, techniques and methods. Embodying the values and philosophy of alternative and popular systems of knowledge production, it is based on the belief that ordinary people are capable of understanding and transforming their reality. Its articles of faith include a commitment to collective participation and empowerment of the ordinary people in having and knowing their world; in envisioning a new society; and in playing their collective roles in that process of transformation." Tandon, 1988: 13.

36Had my work been conceived at the time as participatory research, this study would logically have been produced by a group of union educators with myself as facilitator. As indicated above, in note #18, a conscious and rigorous addressing of participatory research theory for me has come in the course of preparing this study.

As a result, the system of learning in which I engaged practically had elements of "mobilizing" members behind pre-established union policies as well as equipping members to "mobilize" facts and understandings to make their own voices better heard within the organization. Insight on these tensions is provided in the discussion of "strategies for knowledge struggles" in John Gaventa, "The Powerful, the Powerless and the Experts: Knowledge struggles in an information age", in Park, Brydon-Miller, Hall and Jackson, 1993: 30-35.

37On occasion, unions have feared such democratic practice, and simply used internal education programs to transmit the views of the incumbent leadership. They may then be engaged in counter-propaganda against the establishment, but not in participatory research.
In a social movement that is subordinate, some counter-propaganda is always needed. The issue is the degree to which the formal education program is allowed some relative autonomy from such transmission, and situated as a place for free critical dialogue. The tension between these two aspects of union practice is in my view legitimate and continuous. It is the educational layer of the ongoing struggle for union democracy.

38Michael Leclair, "At Foxley River", winner of the first Milton Acorn Award for work poetry, inaugurated by Catherine Macleod at a labour-management conference in Prince Edward Island. Published in New Maritimes, Halifax, November, 1986.

39"The popular has been consistently seen by educators as potentially disruptive of existing circuits of power. It has been seen as both threat and profane desire, that is, as both subversive in its capacity to reconstruct the investments of meaning and desire, and dangerous in its potential to provide a glimpse of social practices and popular forms that affirm both difference and different ways of life." Giroux and Simon, 1988: 224.

40To incorporate and cite the contributions of "organic intellectuals" in this study will involve departing from usual professional and academic practice:

"... the vast majority of left, critical and progressive communication research, published and circulated in book form, is produced within the academic circles, and (that) in this production it is rare to see even a passing remark on the communication work of a union, popular organization or left political party, and even rarer still, to find a precise and complete bibliographic or footnote reference to such work." Siegelaub, 1979: 17.

41"Studies examining the way in which the dominated classes decode the cultural products of the ruling classes are very rare. The great lack of information in this area should be stressed. The mechanisms of power have been rather extensively studied, but the way the subaltern classes receive and make use of these messages has not been the subject of great interest." Mattelart, 1979: 28.

42Flair is a kind of personal cultural capital, accumulated and used to establish superiority in a competitive cultural environment. Its unequal concentration means that even without detailed expert knowledge, a person with such flair can "... hold one's own in today's most prestigious market-places -- receptions, conferences, interviews, debates, seminars, committees, commissions -- so long as one possesses the set of distinctive features, bearing, posture, presence, diction and pronunciation, manners and usages, without which, in these markets at least, all scholastic knowledge is worth little or nothing and which, partly because schools never, or never fully, teach them, define the essence of bourgeois distinction." Bourdieu, 1984: 91.

43Sennett and Cobb, 1973. The distinction in this book between "badges of ability" and "badges of shame" is extremely useful. It points to the subtlety of cultural relations whereby working people are convinced that their subordination is due to their inadequacy. In this regard, see also Part One in Lerner, 1986.

44The flashes of genuine empowerment experienced in union education clash with the daily experience of subordination embedded in working class culture: "In Gramsci's formulation,... `every relationship of `hegemony' is necessarily a pedagogical relationship' (Quaderni, vol.II, p.1331). Control of the subaltern classes is much more subtly exercised than is often supposed: it operates persuasively rather than coercively through cultural institutions -- churches, labour unions and other workers' associations, schools and the press." Entwistle, 1979: 12.

45"Whereas, according to the dominant ideology thesis, bourgeois culture and ideology seek to take the place of working class culture and ideology and thus to become directly operative in framing working class experience, Gramsci argues that the bourgeoisie can become a hegemonic, leading class only to the degree that bourgeois ideology is able to accomodate, to find some space for, opposing class cultures and values. A bourgeois hegemony is secured, not via the obliteration of working class culture, but via its articulation to bourgeois culture and ideology so that, in being associated with and expressed in the forms of the latter, its political affiliations are altered in the process." Tony Bennett, "Introduction: Popular Culture and `The Turn to Gramsci'", in Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott (eds.) Popular Culture and Social Relations (Milton Keynes/ Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1986), pp.xiv-xv. Cited in Sanger, 1989a: 5-6.

46My historicist approach diverges from the more structuralist approach of critical theory developed in writing like Marcuse, 1964. Exposure to Marcuse's writings, and to his humanist critics, was among the many gifts made to me by the late Christian Bay.

47Repo, 1987: 79. In turn, most socialists have sustained some variant of the Marxian assertion that culture and ideology are determined by economic processes. See Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory", in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies. Edited by Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), p.407-423.

48In this study, I use the overall metaphor of "street smarts" to encompass the three phases of ideological development to which Gramsci and his successors have drawn attention:
"... `common-sense' which refers, concretely, to the lived culture of a particular class or social group; `philosophy' (or sometimes `ideology') which refers to an organized set of conceptions with a more or less transformative relation to lived culture; and `hegemony' which describes the state of play, as it were, between the whole complex of `educative' institutions and ideologies on the one hand, and lived culture on the other..."

Richard Johnson, "Histories of Culture/ Theories of Ideology: Notes on an Impasse", in Ideology and Cultural Production, Michele Barrett et al. eds., (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p.74. Cited in O'Connor, 1981: 188. Thanks to Jennifer Palin for providing me with this interesting review essay, as well as many useful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

49Here Entwistle is quoting Cammett. Entwistle then goes on to add:
"This amounts to the claim that workers must learn to think and act `like a ruling class', and the continuous controversy in which Gramsci was involved with colleagues in the Italian Socialist and Communist Parties was substantially about the place of education in the making of a socialist counter-hegemony. That he himself saw education as integral to this task is indicated by the rubric which the first issue of L'Ordine Nuovo carried on its masthead: `Instruct yourselves because we shall need all our intelligence. Agitate because we shall need all our enthusiasm. Organise yourselves because we shall need all our power.'" Entwistle, 1979: 14.

50"If common sense is as much an interpretation of the immediacies of experience, a gloss on them, as are myth, painting, epistemology, or whatever, then it is, like them, historically constructed and, like them, subjected to historically defined standards of judgment. It can be questioned, disputed, affirmed, developed, formalized, contemplated, even taught, and it can vary dramatically from one people to the next. It is, in short, a cultural system." Clifford Geertz, "Common Sense as a Cultural System", in Geertz, 1983: 76.

51The six strings in the learning guitar have been described as rational, emotional, relational, physical, metaphoric or intuitive and spiritual. See Griffin, 1988a. To keep this breadth requires constant vigilance against the habits of the "Educational Domain", that is, the bias towards what is being taught rather than what is being learned. "What is dangerous is to confuse the procedures of teaching agencies and their students with the procedures of the Learning Domain and its learners. Only by becoming more cognizant of both the Learning and the Educational domains and the differences between them can practitioners of adult education avoid this pitfall". Thomas, 1991: 175. On the damage done to adult learners by importing the structures and processes of formal schooling, see also Malglaive, 1990.

52Kolb, 1984: 38.

53For me this process has met the four characteristics suggested for significant personal learning:
-self-consciously perceived as profoundly important
-triggered by a major life crisis of some kind
-entails a re-definition of some aspect of the self
-calls into question some aspect of previous assumptions about `proper' conduct of personal relations.
Stephen Brookfield, "Significant Personal Learning" in Boud and Griffin, 1987: 65.

54Thomas (1991): 30. The radical implications of such a perspective are drawn out in Michael Welton, "Social Revolutionary Learning: The new social movements as learning sites". Unpublished, 1993.

55This is not to say that all learning within unions is necessarily empowering. The play of these odds in the British labour movement is assessed in Spencer, 1992. Contradictions in my own practice in facilitating learning by members are sympathetically but lucidly named in Palin, 1988 and Sanger, 1989a.
56Thomas suggests that learning in a social context has eight basic characteristics:
-Learning is action.
-Learning is individual.
-Learning is influenced by other people.
-Learning is a response to stimuli.
-Learning is lifelong.
-Learning is irreversible.
-Learning takes time.
-Learning cannot be coerced.
Thomas, 1991: 4. These points are most interestingly explored later, pages 164-73. At different points in this study, each of these characteristics will be mentioned, but the emphasis will be on three in particular, the first, third and eighth.

57The rise of "individualized" adult education has provoked strong reactions from more communitarian thinkers. See for example: "The existence of the `individual' is merely an ideological construct, an idea that was invented to make sense of the modern reality in which people began to act in very self-centered and self-serving ways that negated their common togetherness and solidarity. But, in our essence, we are connected, and our fulfillment depends completely on each other." Lerner,1986: 174. See also the discussion on homo economicus in Daly and Cobb, 1989: 85-96.

58"In a word, we live from birth to death in a world of persons and things which in large measure is what it is because of what has been done and transmitted from previous human activities. When this fact is ignored, experience is treated as if it were something which goes on exclusively inside an individual's body and mind. It ought not to be necessary to say that experience does not occur in a vacuum." Dewey, 1938: 39-40.

59For a fairly conventional reference text aimed at unionists, see Sue Ward, A-Z of Meetings: How they work, how to run them (London: Pluto Press, 1985). For a more creative and radically democratice approach, see Jorge Garcia Orgales, "Order and Participation", in Effective Union Meetings (Toronto: Education Department, Canadian Auto Workers, 1989).

60On this point, I have revised my thinking about "collective learning" in a series of discussions with Alan Thomas over the 1980's. See Martin, 1985.
Yet I remain troubled by the narrowness of the social experience on which debates about learning are made:
"In research into adult learning, moreover, the adults who form the sampling frames are for the most part ethnically homogeneous; that is, they are Caucasian Americans. They are also drawn chiefly from middle-class or upwardly mobile working-class families, since this is the foremost clientele of continuing education programs. To base a comprehensive theory of adult learning on observations of white, middle-class Americans in continuing or extension education classes in the post-Second World War era is conceptually and empirically naive." Brookfield, 1988: 32.

61See Tough, 1979. This emphasis was parallel to the effort of more liberal and professional voices in the field to tone down the radical and collective activist traditions represented by the earlier Canadian Association for Adult Education. See the quick dismissal of the mainstream by Timothy Pyrch, "Participatory Action Research as a Way of Life: A personal account", in Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, Vol. IV, No. 2 (November, 1990).

62Williams, 1988, p.3. Clearly unions were not fertile ground on which these intellectual weeds might flourish:
"The emphasis in trade union/ workers education has a strong role element and stresses collective action for social change. These are not values emphasised in traditional adult education provision where the emphasis is on personal development and the use of leisure time for educationakl pursuits chosen by the individual." Burkitt, cited in Brookfield, 1988: 180.

63This idea of a complex and problematized subjectivity is central to critical theory. Below the level of conscious and explicit learning needs, attention should be given to other layers. See for example "The schooled body: the ritualized regimentation of desire and the domestication of subjectivity" in McLaren, 1989: 192-196. .

64Griffin, 1988b: 7. Griffin goes on to point out the range of learning capabilities that an adult can discover if given the chance: "your emotions; your physical responses; your subconscious mind; your intuition; other altered states of consciousness; your relationships with friends and partners; and your spiritual capability as well as your rational mind." Ibid., p.7.

65The breadth and texture of union courses is well captured in Winnie Ng and Brenda Wall, "Linking Language and Labour", part of the special issue on labour education of Our Times, Vol. 5, No.1 (April, 1986). Such programs affirm the capacity of the labour movement to develop and lead a broad range of adult learning activities, rather than simply to indoctrinate union representatives and equip them with a narrow range of skills. On this concern, see Radforth and Sangster, 1981-82. In any case, formal courses are only part of the story:
"Rather than limiting its conception of learning to formal educational activities, the worker-as-learner perspective acknowledges the importance of informal modes of learning and tacit skills in the work process. The real meaning of retraining is not exhausted by examining course objectives, enrollment figures and evaluations of course outcomes. Formal retraining programs are but one aspect of a broader learning process which is fundamentally social; learning is a relation which is both shaped by and constitutive of the organization of production in particular work sites." Sanger, 1988: 5.

66As work processes become increasingly knowledge-intensive, the distinction between "worker" and "intellectual" will become increasingly blurred. Indeed, in the most dynamic sectors of Europe, Japan and the United States, it may have practically disappeared already: "The key questions about a person's work today have to do with how much of the job entails information processing, how routine or programmable it is, what level of abstractions is involved, what access the person has to the central data bank and management information system, and how much autonomy and responsibility the individual enjoys." See Toffler, 1991: 72.

67Rather than an abstract moral imperative, then, learning in the working class becomes an act that is situated historically: "Knowledge always is becoming. That is, if the act of knowing has historicity, then today's knowledge about something is not necessarily the same tomorrow. Knowledge is changed to the extent that reality also moves and changes." Paulo Freire in Horton and Freire, 1990: 101. The focus on social action as an integral part of the learning process is reflected in the literature on popular education. See for example the last two chapters of Arnold et al., 1991.

68On diversity within cultures, see Geertz, 1973. On feminism and education, see Jane Gaskell, Arlene McLaren and Myra Novogrodsky, "Claiming an Education: Feminism and Canadian Schools", special issue of Our Schools/ Our Selves, September, 1989.

69Richard Johnson, "Three Problematics: Elements of a Theory of Working Class Culture", in J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (Eds.) Working Class Culture (London: Hutchison, 1979). This emphasis on division is in part a reaction to overly-broad generalizations in the past:

"This realm is not some all-encompassing entity, sweeping entire nations, genders and classes into a common container. The very term 'working'class culture' is therefore something of a misnomer, and I have backed away from it somewhat in this edition. But I do continue to use the term, albeit more self-consciously as description: it connotes diverse realms of everyday life that, however much they differ from place to place, time to time, and among sections of a hierarchically ordered working class, are nevertheless coloured and framed by the dependence of workers and their families on the wage." Palmer, 1992: 20.

70On language, see Bourdieu, 1991. On imagery, see Lasch, 1984. On psychology, see Lerner, 1986. On the limits of economics, see Hazel Henderson, Paradigms in Progress: Life beyond economics (Indianapolis: Knowledge Systems, 1991).

71On diversity, see James, 1989. On terms of coalition, consider: "You don't go into coalition because you just like it. The only reason you would consider trying to team up with somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that's the only way you can figure you can stay alive... There is an offensive movement that started in this country in the 60's that is continuing. The reason we are stumbling is that we are at the point where in order to take the next step we've got to do it with some folk we don't care too much about. And we got to vomit over that for a little while..." Reagon, 1983: 356 and 368.

72The concept of "corporate culture" was widely popularized by Peters and Waterman, 1982, and adapted by others like Kanter, 1984. The emphasis on distinct patterns of behaviour, teamwork and loyalty were attractive to unionists to the degree that they softened "command and control" management styles, but dangerous to the degree that they masked differences of interest and power. See Parker, 1985.

73In fact, this term can be used to insist on respect from non-unionists, since who in Canada's liberal value consensus wants to insult another person's culture.

For me, an important experience in gaining reflective distance from the union culture was a series of seminars with senior civil servants from 1983-86, held at the residential training centre of the Public Service Commission of Canada in Touraine, Quebec. My thanks to Rodrigue Martin, John Flynn, Michael Hicks and Roy Bartlett, who invited me as a resource person. Their feedback and support included taping and transcribing one of my seminar presentations for publication in edited form as Martin, 1985b. To my knowledge, this was the first use of the phrase "union culture" in a Canadian professional journal.

74O'Brien, 1987: 42.

75"In the exaggerations that characterize popular culture as either a culture imposed from above or a culture generated spontaneously from below, there are hints of the political reality of cultural power both as a force for domination and as a condition for collective affirmation and struggle. The point is not to separate these different elements of cultural power from each other as binary oppositions but to capture the complexity of cultural relations as they manifest themselves in practices that both enable and disable people within sites and social forms that give meaning to the relations of popular culture." Giroux and Simon, 1989: 299.

In much classical Marxism, the emphasis has been on the workplace, as the primary point of production. With broadening to include reproduction, socialist feminists have increased the attention paid to the household and community. Writers like those in the Steelworker Families Project argue that it is precisely the link to household and community which gives union culture much of its distinctiveness, autonomy and critical edge. See Corman, Luxton, Livingstone and Seccombe, 1993. In this study, then, I am trying to keep the concept of union culture anchored in the broader category of working class culture. Yet this cannot be done only as a conceptual sleight of hand, since these linkages are in fact a site of political struggle; hence the validity of that conceptual linkage depends on the balance of forces on the ground of that struggle.

76It is important to retain these as a dialectic, an energizing tension, rather than as a paradox, the static mode adopted in much of the corporate culture literature. Although his writings are out of fashion in left intellectual circles, the clearest explanation of dialectics I have read remains Mao, 1953.

77On gender, see White, 1993; also Briskin and McDermott, 1993. Some of the issues around social identity are addressed in the next tension, "oppressive/ affirmative". On the organizational structures of unions, see Jonas Pontusson, "Introduction: Organizational and Political-Economic Perspectives on Union Politics", in Golden and Pontusson, 1992, especially p.10-22. On political currents, see Chapter 7 in Palmer, 1992. On the textures of the work process, which run across such tensions, see Philip Levine, "They Feed They Lion", in Levine, 1984: p.81.

Shortly after the completion of this study, the Ontario region offices of my union moved from Cecil Street, as part of the merger which has produced the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers of Canada.

78These national elected officers occupy the positions of greatest authority and greatest pressure in the union structure. They hire, fire and direct education representatives like myself. Overwhelmingly, they have risen through the ranks, and usually their direct experience in membership education is as past participants in courses.

Leaders who are personally secure and organizationally skilled are rare in any milieu. In the labour movement, Fred Pomeroy, CWC's founding president, is exceptional on both counts. On one memorable occasion in early 1990, we had a lengthy debate about union strategy in a Regina coffee shop. After a couple of hours, I deferred to him because he had more information than I did on the point at issue. A few days later, I received a memo reminding me not to back down in private arguments with him: "I'm elected, so I'll have to make the decision, but the staff close to me have to hold their ground. I need your views, not your agreement to my views."

79Paul Keighley has been mentioned above, in note #8. André Letarte is national representative for the CEP in Montreal. He has been president of the union representing union staff, and active in the Education Committee of the Federation des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Quebec. Lively, principled and hard-working, he is a model colleague. Neither Paul or André received any post-secondary formal training in adult education.

80These people are critically important for two reasons. The first is that they often influence directly the selection and financing of course participants. The other is that their location provides special insights and skills that can contribute greatly as course leaders and/ or resource people.

Two particularly talented course leaders in the Steelworkers were Wayne Fraser and Gord Murchie. Wayne, from the Inco local in Sudbury, was rebellious, informal and hard-working; today, he is area supervisor in Sudbury for the United Steelworkers of America. Gord, from a small local in Hamilton, was passionate, funny and careful; today he assists Ian Kirkpatrick in the Education Department of the National Office of the Steelworkers. Similar contributions to the CWC have been made by local officers like Paul Heath and Linda McKenzie-Nicholas.