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Trade Union education for social change – join the discussion.
Doug Nicholls, General Secretary of the General Federation of Trade Union, believes that trade union
education urgently needs a revitalised content and a new method of delivery.
In his July 9
th
article in the
Morning Star
Dr John Fisher reminded us of the effect of years of state
funding for trade union education. He who pays the piper calls the tune. A generation of trade union
learners have had the political content stripped from their learning. I argue also that the form of
training delivery has mirrored the neutralised content and helped to teach ignorance and obedience.
The Establishment teach their children to rule from an early age, prep school to public school to
Oxbridge. At heart they learn the arrogant and confident mannerisms of rulers, an ability to talk
about anything as if they know something about it.
They learn some concepts and history; this is why they focus on politics, philosophy and economics
(PPE).
Once upon a time the best unions would engage workers in these subjects too. Courses would
commence with discussions about the world we wanted to live in and the laws that underpin
capitalist economics and a socialist alternative. This was done to develop understandings and
convictions that would build our organisations and provide the motivation for learning the skills
necessary to win for our members and transform the political scene.
This tradition was then turned on its head. Trade union training got locked into considerations of a
very narrow range of technical and vocational areas, tutors became purveyors of information and
facts, classes looked more like school rooms than workers discussion circles, qualification replaced
empowerment, learners were told what to learn instead of encouraged to learn from their
experience, rigid curricula stifled debate. As state funded adult education disappeared, so elements
of trade union training became a poor substitute, signposting learners to dwindling vocational
opportunities while the market let rip.
It was all very interesting knowing the detail of redundancy and health and safety legislation, but all
very irrelevant if the workplace was closing down as if because of forces of nature or fate. Education
proved a thin shield as the post war social democratic consensus and manufacturing based economy
were being transformed into today’s neoliberal nightmare.
While most people feel that austerity is wrong, very few can articulate why it has come about and
the political and economic alternative to it. In reality the popular consensus has bought into the
whacky idea that the debt and deficit are the cause of our problems.
When bankers say they create wealth, few union reps seem able these days to counter this joke with
an assertion of the labour theory of value and remind them that everything in their marble vaults
comes from us. The effect of falling rate of profit has been forgotten and our problems attributed
superficially to ‘greedy bankers.’
Worse still workers are being decapitated from the body of knowledge of our history of struggle as a
Movement. We have to re-construct a living appreciation of our past to accelerate a better future.