Workers’ Knowledge: Untapped Resource in the Labour Movement

Abstract

This paper makes the argument that underestimation of the current range and depth of workers' knowledge and skills by union leaders represents a significant barrier to further growth of the labour movement. Surveys and case studies conducted by the SSHRC research network on New Approaches to Lifelong Learning (NALL) have found that unionized and non-unionized industrial and service workers in Canada are increasingly highly educated, increasingly participating in adult education courses and devoting substantial amounts of their time to informal learning activities outside the purview of organized education and training programs. Working people are generally engaged collectively and individually in an extensive array of employment-related and other informal learning activities that are neither fully recognized by most employers or union leaders nor given prior learning credit by educational institutions.

Learning in Struggle: Argentina’s New Worker Cooperatives as Transformative Learning Organizations

“…The work of Livingstone and Roth (2001) has particular significance for this study, underscoring the informal and tacit modes of learning and knowledge sharing already always present in workplaces. Combining an impressive gathering of quantitative analysis in Canadian workplaces with qualitative data from their own interviews at Canadian auto manufacturing plants in the 1990s, Livingstone and Roth conclude that there is ample evidence to show that "a massive amount of informal learning [takes place] among working people," both on shop floors and in the portion of their lives not spent working for wages (ibid.:1).…”

The ‘Unionization Effect’ among Adult Computer Learners

“…Moreover, with the emergence of discourses of lifelong learning, information work and the knowledge society learning as a distinct field of activity (as opposed to, for example, education) has come to take on particular interest among scholars. Explorations of informal learning from subordinate standpoints (for example, Foley, 1999;Church et al, 2000;Livingstone & Roth, 2001;Sawchuk, 2003;Livingstone & Sawchuk, 2003) are only now emerging to begin to clearly chart its patterns. It is with this in mind that I have sought to understand an important effect within the field of working-class informal learning that, I argue, can be associated with progressive forms of 'unionization'.…”