Thesis for Ed.D. at University of Toronto, 1994.
CHAPTER 1 - RESEARCH STANCE
D'Arcy Martin
The union culture is the web of knowledge and prejudice, common sense and good sense, which union activists share. It is the way things are done among unionists. It constitutes the social glue of the movement, and distinguishes union activists from other people. "Union culture" is a synthetic concept, which will need unpacking if it gains wider use. It is like speaking of "workers", when we know there are gender, race and other identities that affect their experience. Broad concepts like "workers" or "society" need to be continually defined so that they aren't stretched to cover so many situations that they lose all specific connection to reality. As others develop a literature of union life based on different social locations than my own, I expect that we will come to talk of "union cultures" in the same way that many people now speak of "feminisms".68
In developing this concept, I have drawn on two theoretical streams: the socialist tradition of "working class culture", and the business school literature on "organizational culture".
The first stream emphasizes the variety of experience among working people:
"These internal divisions -- within factories, within industries, between occupations, between sexes and between the employed and the reserve army -- ought to be an object of any primary theory of the working class. We need to start, indeed, politically and theoretically, not from the assumption of simplification and unity but from that of complexity and division".69
Working class culture, then, reflects the contradictory experiences of different fractions within the class. The unionized workforce in turn will reflect the "complexity and division" of the class as a whole.
While recognizing the internal diversity of the culture, the union activist is continually searching for common ground, guided by the adage that "in unity is strength". Hence the dialectic of diversity and unity is played out in every union course. Like the concept of "street smarts" discussed above, the union culture is located within a network of power relations. The texture of these relations is reflected and reproduced in language, imagery and psychology as well as in economic processes.70 In defining our relation to such class relations, adult educators need to examine our own broad political commitments in relation to the specific social identities of course participants. Participatory methods are a powerful tool to maximize the expression and legitimation of diversity within a course group, and then to negotiate terms of coalition which have enduring potential.71
The second source for my thinking about the union culture was the managers to whom unionists react. In the early 1980's, unionists began encountering a systematic effort in workplaces to seek their loyalty to a "corporate culture". Many business consultants and writers about organizational development began to apply this frame to the inner workings of corporate life. Attentive unionists began to examine more carefully the language and assumptions embedded in this literature.72
During those years, I began developing the concept of "union culture" for use in two sites. In my introductory courses for union activists, it helped to situate the personal changes they experienced, and the bonds they spontaneously found with people from other workplaces. In meetings in the "policy circuit", where labour market and worker education issues were being discussed, this same term reinforced the legitimacy of the labour speakers.73 Since it has been useful both in building unions internally and in defending them externally, I have made this concept a pivot of my study.
By saying that it is useful, I do not suggest that this concept is without problems. The strongest critique that I have encountered to the concept has been from feminist friends like Jennifer Palin. They consider that the idea is permeated by masculinist assumptions about work, fraternity and non-unionized workers. Certainly, to the degree that unions maintain the invisibility of women and the events, particularly birthing and raising children, which are central to their cultural experience, then any conceptual tools linked to unionism will tend to perpetuate these silences:
"The contemporary hegemony school is `sympathetic' to women, but the genuine desire to transcend the limitations of correspondence theory and abstract structuralism is seriously at risk where activist male educators are to replace sedentary male philosophers in the uncovering of the truth about truth-making."74
Another difficulty in the concept is that it may provide too much comfort to union activists as they distance themselves from the rank and file. By legitimizing solidarity and exchange with other union representatives, it may be used to justify increasing distance from the membership. Certainly I would not wish to imply that their engagement in the union culture is somehow more valuable than the immersion of their workmates in the culture of the workplace.
It would be possible, then, to use this term in ways that undermine feminism and union democracy. Yet the concept is not saturated with such meanings at this point. Like common sense and street smarts, it should be used critically.
In some respects, union culture is generated from the rank and file, and in others it is imposed from above, particularly from the employers with whom union activists deal. Hence the union culture is one of the points of encounter between capital and labour.75 In the workplace and in the community, it is a site of struggle between common sense and good sense. It is the particular shape of that site which concerns us in this section.
For me there are nine landmarks, nine topographical features of the union culture which help to locate my educational practice. Each feature is expressed in terms of a dynamic tension, a dialectic. The two elements are not precisely opposites, as in dichotomous thinking, but rather aspects which clash at one level and are synthesized at an overall level.76 For example, the final one, mobilizing/ servicing, addresses the tension between commitment to social liberation and response to the immediate needs of members. This could be presented as a dichotomized ideological choice; in fact, both poles are integral to social unionism at different times, and they reflect other balances like that between technique and principle, between skills and passion, etc. In other words, both poles in each of these tensions should be considered as legitimate parts of the union culture. In turn, I will consider:
(i)Diverse/ cohesive
(ii) Oppressive/ affirmative
(iii)Passionate/ bureaucratized
(iv) Informal/ accountable
(v) Subordinate/ adversarial
(vi) Oral/ literal
(vii) Voluntary/ professional
(viii)Rebellious/ cautious
(ix) Mobilizing/ servicing
(i)Diverse/cohesive
As noted above, Canada's unionists are not a homogeneous lot. The range of social, organizational and political identities in Canada's labour movement is in one sense an index of health, the fruit of efforts to organize across the many solitudes within working class culture. For the union educator, it is also a continuing challenge, to develop a solidarity that is negotiated rather than assumed.
In regard to social identities, my own practice and the literature have taken most account of gender. In regard to organizational identities, the power inequities among affiliates and between elected and appointed representatives will be considered. In regard to political identities, the distinctions among business unionism, social unionism and ideological unionism will be explored.
The drama of these differences can be seen by comparing my situation in the late 1980's to my neighbour, a very committed and thoughtful union educator named Alex Dagg. Her office was next door to the CWC, at 33 Cecil Street, in the Labour Lyceum, which for many years has housed the offices of several textile and garment industry unions. Alex was education officer of the International Ladies Garment Workers until she ran for elected office in the union. Since most of the members were immigrant women, much of her time was spent arranging English as a Second Language courses, while in my union's telecommunications sector, nearly all the members have a high school diploma, and fluency in English is taken for granted. Her budget was minimal, as the globalization of garment manufacturing chewed away the dues income of the union. And her political priorities had to do with free trade and homework, while ours were with de-regulation and workplace reorganization. While both of us were union educators, the social and organizational identities with which we dealt were entirely different.77
As a learner and an educator, I have had to make sense of this diversity, to derive some patterns. Let us consider the aspect of organizational identities. In planning and designing courses within my union, I continually need to negotiate with three layers of union activists :
-National elected officials, like Nancy Riche or Fred Pomeroy.78
-Staff people, like André Letarte or Paul Keighley.79
-Local union leaders... officers, stewards and committee people.80
If there is a "union voice" which articulates the "union culture", then, it carries the tension of diverse/ cohesive within it; unpacking it by social identity, organizational identity, and political identity is essential.81 Otherwise, we fall into the simplistic view that each spokesperson embodies the whole movement.
While diverse, the union movement doesn't fly apart. According to one description of Canadian working class culture:
"This was, for long periods of our history, an inert culture. For all of the cultural inertia of the working class, however, its apparent fragmentation, acquiescence, and accommodation could change with the drop of a hat or, more precisely, the drop of a wage, the demise of a skill, or the restructuring of a job".82
This unity reflex is based on the deep understanding that "united we stand, divided we fall". The union movement is about groups, not about individuals, and management listens to an organized group of unionists completely differently from an individual rebel. The ethos of group entitlement may be out of step with the individualism dominant in North American culture, but it is central to the union culture.83
When Canada's unions were overwhelmingly white, middle-aged, urban and male, elected leaders embodied their membership, and unity in the face of management came more spontaneously. Today, as more diverse voices are raised within the movement, leadership requires knitting together a coalition of interests, rather than articulating a pre-existing consensus.84 Union education can play a valuable role in developing such leadership, helping to maintain the cohesion of labour even as new internal relationships are being worked out.85
(ii)Oppressive/ affirmative
There is difference within the labour movement, but that is not the whole story. There are hierarchies among these differences. While union policies may assert the need for equity across gender, race and other forms of social oppression, a daily struggle between progressive and reactionary practices takes place across each of these dimensions of union life. Inevitably, an educator in the union culture plays a role in regard to systemic oppression, for better or for worse. A vivid reminder of the strength of these forces, and my own limited skill and power in addressing them, came in a member's living room in the early 1980's. The walls were covered with certificates. They came from high school graduation, welding courses, Augusta's university degree, all proudly unpacked when they had immigrated. But one small label stood out. It was a piece of masking tape starting to peel off the base of the table lamp, with a price of $20 marked on it in ballpoint pen.
Zeke and Augusta were selling the contents of their house, part of the stake they had built in five years of hard work. Zeke's job, and his union membership, were just one stop in the road to their dreams. Now they were ready to move to a larger urban centre. The down payment on their new house had been mailed to London, Ontario, and Augusta's transcripts had been accepted at the university. Zeke was ready to take a pay cut, since the only welder's job he could find there was non-union, at 30% less than his current rate at the coal mine. Selling their house and furnishings would give the nest egg needed to carry them through this next phase. And it was anyone's guess whether Zeke would find his way back into union life.
It would be a shame to lose Zeke. Charming, intelligent and principled, he had been one of the best participants in this course.86 But the days of life-long service to one employer were gone in Canada, and the union stability which accompanied it had gone as well. Their status as immigrants of colour were the core of their identity. While they were intensely pro-union, they had to face the reality that Canada's labour movement is still dominated by men, Canadian-born men, white men with long service to a single employer.87 They wouldn't fit in easily. It was a stretch for them to relate to me, and a privilege to be invited into their living room.
It had been easier in the course, but then there was no place in the course for Augusta, since spouses weren't invited to participate. While Zeke was the only black person in the room, he had held his space as we drew out patterns -- of young and old, of men and women, of native-born and immigrant, of employed and unemployed. I had insisted on acknowledging these differences, concerned that we not move too quickly into shallow assumptions of solidarity, creating false groups incapable of weathering the storm of a strike.88
The diversity to be addressed runs across the whole of the "power flower" of social identity. Unions either reinforce or challenge broader dynamics of socially conferred power, based on age, race, gender, sexual orientation, body size and so on.89 For union educators, a central dynamic to address is formal education levels.
In the playground we learned the difference. Certainly by the age of nine, the kids who were going to succeed at school were marked out.90 With few exceptions, the future "book smart" already wore different costumes and spoke different languages from the rest. Most participants in union courses belonged to the "street smart" group back then. Expelled early from formal education, they associate teaching with negation and humiliation.
Whether around race, gender or other aspects of social identity, many unionists feel themselves at a disadvantage in union life, and in union education. Careful research is required to sort out the specific ways that the union culture at times challenges, and at other times reinforces systemic inequities. Women, for example, are a significant presence in local union leadership, yet they are less than proportionally represented in staff. Nonetheless, in looking at a series of courses offered by the Canadian Labour Congress, the proportion receiving scholarships to attend was equivalent to the representation of women in the affiliates...in other words, the unions looked good relative to the society, while the courses looked good relative to other aspects of union life.91
Documenting inequities is a research job. Acting to correct them is an organizing job. The union educator can choose whether or not such research and organizing is to be a part of their practice.
(iii)Passionate/ bureaucratized
Unions aren't cool, but at times the focus on detail can be chilling. I remember running a week-long course during a strike in the early 1980's. My daughter Danielle spent the week with me. It was summer, and she played during the day with the children of other participants in the back yard. At the end of the course, the children put on a set of skits for the adults. We sat on lawn chairs, with a cooler of beer and jugs of lemonade, while they performed.92
After our return, Danielle said she had a fantastic time. Her strongest impression was that strikes meant adults had time to spend with their children.93 Both of us were moved by the passionate commitment of workers to their community and to the strike. People were running bulk food distribution, clearing the ski hill, renovating the union hall. They were using their time, waiting for the company to move their way. And the union adrenalin was flowing.
The experience of collective passion94 is common in union life, and openness to it one of the tests of authenticity as an activist. Such passion can't be faked. This antibody against formalism and cold calculation is part of the immune system of the union culture in its healthy state. It is part of the reason why dogmatism and sterile ideology, whether conservative or ultra-left, have such difficulty thriving in this part of the working class culture. It provides the momentum in which an educational program can play an inspirational role.
Yet unions also have a capacity for mind-numbing detail. Even in a strike like the one Danielle and I were exposed to, the system of weekly payments relies on completing picket duty, a huge record-keeping job. In normal functioning of a local, claims for lost time and expenses need to be meticulously checked.95 In turn, the grievance system generates mounds of paper, often focused on interpretation of a single word or brief phrase.
This union administration is necessary and important. It is central to monitoring the integrity of union leadership and the effectiveness of union representation.96 Yet it chills the climate of the movement. And it provides a location from which those who are hooked on protocols and routines, who continually calculate odds rather than leading with the heart, can find their preferred weapons for internal battles. I have learned the importance of administrative precision in union education, and recognize the importance of accounting accurately for the resources that members provide.
As an educator, then, the passionate and the bureaucratized moments of union life have been linked, for my own learning and for the kind of activism I have developed with participants in my courses.
(iv)Informal/ Accountable
The most visible and easily recorded aspects of union life are not always the most significant. Shifts in the movement are marked in the flow of conferences, courses and policy conventions, but they are often generated elsewhere, in informal conversations and networks that are harder to trace. As an educator, openness to these informal occasions is as essential as professional rigour with the explicit curriculum. Indeed, behaviour outside formal sessions would be scrutinized as carefully as any lecture within the course. This lesson was brought home to me in 1982, during cutback time at Alcan, in Kingston, Ontario.97
Jim was 25 years old then, heavy-set, with black metal hair that matched his jeans. He grinned tentatively, and edged past the coffee urn to talk.
Jim had been anxious the week before, when he heard a welding robot was being moved into the plant. After hearing from the company and from me, he felt his own job was safe; but he feared for his younger brother, a guitar player, planning to quit high school in the spring, smoke dope through the summer and start at Alcan in the fall.
Jim wanted my view of his brother's prospects. I turned the styrofoam cup in my hand, contemplated the cream substitute slick on the surface, and took the leap: "We're all working on educated guesses when we think about job security . My educated guess is that your brother will never work more than six months for Alcan at a time."98
We both took a gulp of coffee, and frowned at the bitterness. Jim thanked me for telling him straight, and smiled. Then we went back into the formal session. He was a rank-and-filer, while I was on union staff, but our meeting ground was the union culture... and our basis of communication was entirely informal.
Nothing in that class was as clear or as important as the contact with Jim over coffee. No doubt there were other moments during that day when Jim sized me up, other moments when I didn't even realize that my honesty, insight or information base were on trial. In any case, it later came back to me that Jim was much respected among his fellow workers, and that after that course he had spoken positively about me and the union on the floor of the plant. In the informal logic of that local union, my word was now good, and I was inside the network of trust.99 This meant I had room to be fully myself, both intense and playful, and to call for that openness among the people I was teaching. It was a privileged place for learning to occur.
This trust must be earned again and again, because of the strict accountability to which union representatives at all levels are subject. Many of the courses that I teach run from Sunday to Wednesday. By Friday, the word is out about the course, the verdict distributed all over the region. Decisions are made over the weekend whether to request further education, whether to nominate more participants for courses already scheduled, whether to make complaints or send thanks to the responsible elected officers. By early the next week the results begin to filter through to me on the phone. This is a short leash of accountability, in which the opinions of participants carry political clout.100
The leash of accountability is even shorter for elected national leaders than for appointed staff like myself. Compared to elected parliamentarians, community organizations, or issue-based pressure groups, the actions of union leaders are subjected to more continuous scrutiny and public criticism. Furthermore, challengers often defeat the most carefully-laid plans by incumbents to remain in power.101 While informal, then, the union culture, is ruthlessly accountable, both for elected officials and for internal educators.
(v) Subordinate/ Adversarial
In power terms, the labour movement in Canada is subordinate.102 Rather than the big, strong force painted in the mass media, unions in fact are weak. This is relevant not only for the fact that a union educator has far less resources than our counterparts in business and government, but also because it conditions the content and the process of education.
One need only review the "management rights" clause in any Canadian collective agreement to be convinced of the subordinate role of unions.103 While employees may work through their union to challenge management power, their collective agreements explicitly accept the right of management to control the work environment and the work force. The remainder of the document, however lengthy, merely specifies the exceptions to management rule. And where the contract is silent, management rights govern. This means that residual powers or unanticipated incidents revert in principle to the benefit of management. A consequence is that it simply doesn't occur to management to engage their union in matters other than those specifically spelled out in the agreement. With emerging issues like tech change, this can have broad and damaging results.104
In shutdowns and cutbacks, this subordination is tasted bitterly by union activists. Such decisions are made unilaterally, and the union is left to deal with the anger and sense of betrayal felt by employees. When union leaders come into local union meetings, people scream at them because they are the only ones who have to listen. Management can cancel at will an "open door policy". Government officials can deflect calls and postpone meetings. Their local union president, however, has no place to hide.105
A responsive union leader takes that anger in, and uses it to energize the movement. Some feel that the scrappiness of union leaders is a personality disorder of the individua, but it is structural logic, flowing from the subordinate status of workers and their organizations.106 Over years of union work, the injustice of this situation builds into a slow-burning anger, to which occasional public outbursts by union leaders are a clue.107
Such outbursts occur in union courses as well, and often the anger is directed at the educator. Rather than retreat from the adversarial climate in courses, I have found it most effective and consistent to embrace it. The instinct of participants to resist the power of the course leader is healthy, parallel to the need of the unions to protect themselves from the hegemony of the employing class. As long as workers and their organizations are treated with so little respect in Canada, it is unsafe for unions to adopt any stance other than an adversarial one, whether in collective bargaining or in social bargaining. This widely held conviction in the union culture has major implications for educational practice as well as for public perception. In Canada, the fact that our courts are adversarial and our elections are adversarial is considered a sign of tolerance and democracy. However, the fact that labour-management relations are adversarial is taken as an anachronism, a sign of outmoded union attitudes.108
Central to the adversarial tradition of Canadian unions is the right to strike. Strike action is the last resort when workers are silenced and ignored.109 Whatever the cost to themselves in income and pain, workers gain dignity by standing up straight in strike situations.110 Those who would reduce the incidence of strikes should propose other paths to worker dignity, and to overcoming the subordinate status of the unions workers have built.
The subordinate status of unions also shapes our participation in public policy debates, in response particularly to the significant number of government and business leaders who want to eliminate unions entirely.111 The resulting defensiveness among unionists is a rational response to the subordinate and adversarial status of the union culture, and shapes the climate in which courses take place.
(vi)Oral/ Literal
Part of the reason that the wider public knows so little about unions is that so few documents of the culture are available. Ours is an oral culture, where little of the internal wisdom is written down.112
The importance of this became clear to me during follow up to a meeting in Sault Ste. Marie, only a few weeks after beginning at the Steelworkers. Staff and local activists in the Algoma Steel and associated locals had made a number of suggestions for future courses in that area, and I had dutifully taken detailed notes. Upon return to the office, I wrote minutes of the meeting, and forwarded them to the area supervisor. Again, I was careful to send copies of the minutes to the district and national directors.
Proud as I was of my care in protocol, and my precision in the minutes themselves, I was completely unprepared for the phone call that came three days later. The Sault area supervisor was jumping through the receiver at me.
"What the hell are you doing with these minutes?"
"Oh, did I quote you incorrectly?"
"That's not the point, you asshole. You sent copies to your director and my director. I know you're trying to get somebody, or you wouldn't have put it in writing like that. Are you trying to get me?"
"Not at all. I'm trying to keep clear who is supposed to do what after our meeting."
"All right, you're new. I'll give you another chance. But I'm clear on what I'm supposed to do. If you aren't, you can write all the notes you like. But you keep them in your own office. A memo like that is a weapon. The next one I get from you, I'll send a weapon back."
I was shocked. I protested my innocence. But looking back fifteen years later, I think this seasoned unionist was right. The memo was a weapon, a defensive weapon, a reflection of my fear of making mistakes. This effort to conceal my insecurity behind office protocol was accomplishing nothing constructive. What he and the leadership needed was to know what I planned to do. When I knew that, I should send them memos to that effect... short memos.
As part of my acculturation, I almost stopped writing memos. My writing style became so concise that friends outside the movement found it cryptic. Like my colleague in the Sault, I had begun to see the written word as a last resort for internal communication.113
Yet for outside interaction, written text is central. The encounter of unions with employers and governments is dominated by collective agreements and labour legislation, formal, dense and detailed. In reading such texts, unionists pay excruciating attention to detail... based on experience in grievance handling where the difference between management "may" promote the senior applicant and management "shall" promote the senior applicant has been decisive in an arbitration case. Similarly, the difference between legislation which encourages safe working conditions and regulations which require certain standards of safety may be a matter of life and death.
Partly because of the reliance on oral communication and partly because of the habits from reading contracts and legislation, unionists develop a very methodical and literal relation to written text. It can be mistaken by the uninformed for pettiness or rigidity, especially when someone is beginning to draft and re-draft a broad policy document, and seeks input from a union. The pattern of sketching ideas on paper in several successive drafts is in fact very culture-specific, and actually clashes with union traditions.114
The dynamic of oral and literal, then, shapes the kinds of written material an educator can successfully use in courses. It affects the tools of communication which are effective both internally and when unionists meet jointly with employers and governments. For the "outside" scholar, it significantly affects the amount and type of information publicly available about how unions work.
(vii)Voluntary/ Professional
The drama of union life is played out on a stage of voluntary involvement and commitment. Within the Steelworkers, over 5,000 members were reached directly by the education program in Canada during each year. Yet the staff in the education department was four representatives plus two secretaries.115
This pressure led the union to engage local union volunteers, over 100 of them. My job was to train and coach them, to design and deliver the learning resources they required. Along the way, these course leaders were reimbursed for the days they missed work, but on weekends or scheduled days off, they didn't get paid extra. Neither did I. It is only through this kind of voluntary involvement that unions can overcome the chronic problem of over-extension. The needs of union members are huge, while their organizations are completely under-resourced. This means that full-time staff and officials are usually overwhelmed with work... and often addicted to it.116
The practice of "professionalism" in this context is therefore problematic. While intuitive and judgmental aspects of professional action are now more recognized, the dominant image remains that of objective, rational, impersonal application of skill. Such an image clashes directly with the passionate commitment to a cause which has been discussed above as a defining element of union life. For an educator, seeking to establish dialogue with participants in a course, attachment to the broader vision of the movement is a precondition to effectiveness.
In my own work, I came to speak of "craft" rather than "profession". This term was consistent with the workplace culture of many of the tradespeople in my courses. In turn, it was balanced by "dedication", the term most frequently used by activists to signal their belief in the goals of the movement.
Nonetheless, it is often difficult to secure the conditions of work in which craft can actually be deployed. Limited budgets, large numbers of participants in courses, uncomfortable meeting rooms, short and unreliable time frames... all these conspire to limit the effectiveness of union education. Yet the demand from members, and the need for elected leaders to meet this demand, is a constant pressure to overcome by voluntary effort the limits which a strictly "professional" educator might reject because it would be impossible to perform up to acceptable standards.
In this work, too, educators cannot maintain a professional neutrality around internal politics. Education staff are directly accountable to incumbent elected leaders, and their loyalty to those leaders must be must be steady throughout the term of office. Union leaders are dependent upon membership support, and must be re-elected, unlike corporation heads. Because of this fact, the psychological stresses are enormous, as are the vulnerabilities to being undermined by a staff person who is effective in developing a relation of trust with local leaders. Union leadership is not an easy career and often not a popular one. The relation between leaders and their education staffs is always a delicate matter.
Public stereotypes about unions are reflected here in regard to union salaries. The normal salary for a union educator like myself is between $40,000-$70,000, depending on the union and the degree of responsibility. My income is almost exactly what I would earn as a high school teacher with comparable length of service.117 In general, the employees and officers of unions could be earning more for less work elsewhere, and the activists within unions invest thousands of hours of voluntary effort because of their beliefs, not because they stand to gain personally.
This reality may seem out of step with our cynical and narcissistic times, but it is a reality nonetheless. Any professional who works with unions must face the fact that the criterion of voluntary effort is more powerful than that of technical skill. In other words, it will matter more to course participants that the educator is truly supportive of their efforts than that the presentation of material is fully polished. The opportunities for misunderstanding are legion when unions deal with outside professionals, from actuaries and lawyers to career civil servants and doctors. The possibilities for surprise and disillusionment are also great for an internal professional, like a trained adult educator. Without careful reflection on the voluntary and professional dimensions of our trade union involvement, educators will have very limited effect, and very little fulfilment.
(viii)Rebellious/ Cautious
For a full year, I wore a bracelet to work. It looked like an athletic sweatband, maroon colour, with a small metal square sewn in to secure a dome fastener, a "snap". It was a spontaneous gift from a directory assistance operator in Hamilton, after I had presented her grievance to management. It reminds me of one of the tensions in the union culture, between being rebellious and disciplined.
Shortly before Christmas of 1986, phone operators in Hamilton had started getting shocks on the job. Of course, the company called them something else, "ESD's", or electro-static discharges. The word shock was too scary. The bracelets were issued so that operators could snap on a ground cord to their wrists, and any buildup of static electricity would be drained away. This reduced the risk of shock somewhat.118 The bracelet and cable were referred to by operators as the "ball and chain".
Operators were held in position first by their headsets, (called the "umbilical cord"), and then by their ball and chain as well. They were under constant pressure to reduce the time spent on each call. On average, it was under 20 seconds, and getting faster every year. Their work was machine-paced, isolated, and kept under continuous electronic surveillance. Hence, they were continually torn between the desire to provide good customer service and the pressure to speed up.
The stress load on these workers, almost all women, was incredible.119 In the high-tech workplace, the strain of work is no longer on the back, but rather on the nerves. The politics of the body have shifted from the spine to the central nervous system.
As I handled a scheduling problem for one of these operators, Marlene, her fury kept spilling over the limits of the grievance procedure. At one point, she leaned across the table at a senior manager, and said "Do you realize that I haven't had a weekday dinner at home with my husband in six weeks? We can't really talk about this properly until you have worked my shifts for six weeks."
The manager harrumphed about the differences between bargaining unit employees and supervisors, but the point stood. Unionism is about rebellion against the arbitrary power of management. Marlene's rebellion kept bumping into the disciplines of the procedure, slow and cumbersome as it is, by which it is channelled by the grievance procedure in Canada.120
Her individual experience is echoed in larger processes. The rebellion is not only against employers, but also at times against the leadership within the union movement itself. Yet throughout that grievance process, Marlene treated me with respect, and took my opinions on her grievance seriously. Her outbursts occurred only in those parts of the meeting where we had agreed in advance that she could speak her mind without prejudicing her case. She abided by the outcome of the grievance and even wrote me a note of thanks for my work. In the next round of bargaining, she made proposals for revision of the collective agreement to address situations like her own. She understood the link of individual rebellion to collective discipline.
That link is of particular significance to union education. In courses, members often express their anger, venting feelings at the nearest authority figure -- the course leader. Some internal serenity is needed to accept personal criticism without taking all criticism personally. It takes careful thought to distinguish "free fire" from accurate critical feedback. Sometimes, it just isn't possible, and educators have to stand up for our own dignity in situations of tension which are not of our making. The tension of rebellion and discipline in participants becomes a challenge to the personal maturity and political judgment of the union educator.
(ix)Mobilizing/ servicing
The final key to grasping the union culture as a site for educational work is the tension between service and mobilization. Union education should provide good technical equipment for those whom the membership elect to represent them; in this sense, it is a service.121 After all, the members pay the dues, and many look at the union as a fee-for-service arrangement. Whether in grievances, collective bargaining, safety and health or education, they demand the best possible quality of service.122
Providing such service is honourable, but it is not enough for most union educators. On its own, this approach reinforces business unionism, working from the narrow self-interest of the members.
The main problems facing workers in Canada cannot be resolved by service alone. Whether it is a robot in Kingston, a strike in Elkford or an electronic slave galley in Hamilton, the issues require mobilization of members and assertive rather than "tame" engagement in public policy debate.
A social unionist carries this tension of service and mobilization inside. For me, it carries into gatherings of adult educators. I draw on what I learned from Alcan workers about tech change, and from telephone operators about workplace stress. The distinct perceptions of the union culture are sometimes alien and surprising to others engaged in the adult education field, partly because they have been taught that there's nothing in unionism worth learning about.
In discussion with other social activists, who want immediate mobilization on specific issues, the unionist is squeezed between a rock and a hard place (or between the tree and the bark, as they say in Quebec).123 Unionists learn that oppression and injustice are widespread, but that internal unity and economic leverage are needed to address them successfully. Consistent service of good quality is essential in union life, to build the trust in the organization which is tested in moments of mobilization. In this regard, unions differ from many "issue advocacy" groups, and are often seen to be more cautious because of the fragility of that ongoing service relationship.
Educational service, then, is provided for its own sake, and has its own satisfaction. Yet in union life it also builds internal unity and increases the odds for success at times of mobilization. The relation of service to mobilization, then, is truly a contradiction within union education, a tension which generates creative energy, and is expressed in action.124
In stepping back from these nine tensions, these landmarks in the terrain of the union culture, I do not suggest that this is the whole story. As an educator, these were the key reference points to which I needed to attend if I was to be effective. As others with more grounding in anthropology or sociology work with this concept, its limits and possibilities can be fully developed.
In this process, I hope the potential vagueness of the term "culture" does not muddy the waters. The basic approach is that proposed by Geertz in his discussion of "thick description":
"Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical."125
The value of the concept of culture for a political educator like myself is in its capacity to draw attention to the intricacy of the context in which learning takes place, and to scrutinize this context critically.126 To develop education as a force for democratic renewal in the union movement means a commitment to cultural democracy in this broad and critical sense.
In a cultural democracy, democratic principles would be at work in all aspects of people's lives - in the economic, social and political spheres.127 A culturally democratic educational practice, then, would take into account questions of race, class and gender. It would emphasize respect for the assumptions and dynamics of the economic sector and geographic region in which the education takes place.128 It would take respect for the "street smarts" of a working class learner as the logical starting point of all educational activity, not as a matter of technique but as a matter of principle. This study, then, is an attempt to assess the experience of such an educational stance in a particular historical conjuncture.
The union culture itself is in process, in continuous evolution, and its renewal requires critical thinking. Those aspects of current union practice which are racist, patriarchal, age-ist or hierarchical should not be defended simply because they form part of a coherent whole.129 Rather, the union culture should be considered as a social terrain, upon which progressive and reactionary ideas contend.
This study celebrates the development of a union culture, anchored in the broader culture of the working class, and asserts its strategic potential in a struggle for cultural hegemony with the forces of bourgeois culture.
Any assessment of adult education work in this context, then, should include a reading of whether a given practice has reinforced the hegemonic or counter-hegemonic currents within the union culture.130 Each decision around content, method and organization of union education implies a choice along these lines. My own action within this culture has been centred on certain principles. Shortly after joining the Communications and Electrical Workers of Canada, I wrote an education manifesto, included in every teaching manual used in the Ontario region of the union. Based on the nine tensions outlined above, I invite the reader to consider this statement of principles, to assess its consistency with union language and dynamics, and its stance as a "connected critic" of regressive elements within the union culture. The statement has four elements:
"Dignity on the job - As union activists, we need to feel confidence in ourselves and our backup team. We need skills to educate, organize and represent fellow workers effectively. And we have the right to accurate information about the economic, technological and political forces which affect the security and quality of our jobs.
"Democracy in the union - We equip workers to raise their voices on the job, and we do not silence them in the union. Our education program is participatory. It builds on the creativity and experience of the members. To be a healthy and effective organization, new ideas from the rank and file must be supported and refined. That's part of our educational process.
"Responsibility in the society - Ours is more than a business union.It is part of the broad movement for social progress in Canada. When we study contract language and grievance procedure, it is within this context. The issues of the day, such as free trade and pay equity, are an integral part of our education agenda. And the skills to debate them in public, in the media, are central to modern unionism."
"The grassroots, something to build on - Information is power. Our program aims to empower rank and file union members. By developing confidence and skills, they can defend and extend the rights of all workers."131
This educational statement attempts to work with the language, traditions and aspirations of the union culture. It is also a political statement, a taking of sides with regard to the contending forces of dominant culture and working class culture in the terrain of the labour movement. It is presented as written in 1986, for the reader to assess.