What does popular education look like in the world of organized labour? It helps to understand that popular education is education that organizes. To answer this question fully, means looking at different contexts such as Brazil's main national trade union, the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT); the context of the USA; and the context(s) of Canada and Quebec. Just to start. The principal educational methodology of Brazil's CUT is popular education, but I will talk about that another time (spoiler: they are way, way ahead of Canada and the US). To understand the difference between Canada and the US, it's helpful to compare union densities (rates of union membership as a percentage of all employees in a country). The US is currently at 10.9% compared to Canada's 25.9%; both of which pale in comparison to Sweden (68%) and Iceland ( 91.8%). This is only one measure, albeit a telling one.
While there is much overlap between popular education and labour education, there are some key differences. Popular education in Canada and the US (as Latin America is a radically different context), tends to be both very grassroots and extra-institutional or, at least, rarely associated with large institutions. Popular education is mostly taught and practiced by community-based institutions that emerge from social movement struggles for political and economic justice. Being able to teach popular education courses at the Faculty of Environmental Studies (now Environmental and Urban Change) at York University for the past 25 years is a rare exception. Labour education, of course, happens in the context of highly organized institutions - both trade unions and the employer institutions for which the unions were formed. And labour education tends to be tightly focussed on developing workers' power. Popular education tends to be highly critical of expert-driven learning while labour education tends to mirror dominant forms of education. At their extremes it is not unusual to find some popular education being extremely laissez faire (about process, power, ideology) while labour education can be rather didactic (if not authoritarian). And everything in between .
An important site that brought together both popular education and labour education is the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. Founded in 1932 by Myles Horton, an activist who, as a teen, had been involved in a union, Highlander was inspired by the Danish folk school movement. In the 20s and 30s, Highlander focused primarily on the education and training of labor organizers. In the 50s Highlander became an important site for civil rights education and organizing. A few weeks prior to the fateful beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King., Jr. were at a workshop at Highlander. Since the 60s Highlander has focused its support on worker's health and safety, environmental justice, LGBTQ organizing, and more. I was fortunate to have been able to visit Highlander several times in the 90s where I participated in workshops and lead popular education workshops. At that time Highlander was in a process of figuring out just what to call their approach to education. When asked what their methodology or approach was, folks from Highlander would refer to the "Highlander way," or simply as "organizing." Myles Horton and Paulo Freire met in 1987 and a book of their conversations was produced (We Make the Road By Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, 1990, Temple University Press). After Myles passed away in 1990, the new leadership began a process of critically reflecting on their history and work. It was on a visit sometime around 1995 that the director at that time, Jim Sessions, told me that Highlander had decided that "popular education" was a good name for what they did. Given all of Highlander's history, this embracing of the term and the intentional association with the history of Latin American-based educación popular, has lead me to expand my definition of popular education and explore the many interconnections of the many practices and theories of education and organizing. And, of course, the practices of labour education are key.
I have developed and co-written several successful curricula for labour unions. I've designed and co-facilitated train-the-trainer sessions. And, not surprisingly, the participatory, and often playful, methods of popular education are usually welcomed and embraced. Of the many practices i've learned with organized labour there are two that exemplify the power of popular education: music and open bargaining. The musical culture of labour organizing is one filled with wonder and joy. From the songs of Joe Hill to those collected in Appalachia by Highlander's Zilphia Horton and Guy and Candy Carawan, to folk singers Leon Rosselson, Woody Guthrie, Billy Bragg and Pete Seeger to the grand stage of a Bruce Springsteen concert, music has always had a central role in labour organizing. I will write more about this in future. For now, I want to focus on open bargaining, which is, heart and soul, a terrific example of popular education.
Open bargaining is an approach to collective bargaining that "opens" the process to the entire membership of a union. Quite simply, when the union's bargaining team sits down with the employer's negotiators, rank and file union members are also in the room observing the process and are available for immediate caucusing with the bargaining team. Unsurprisingly, management negotiators don't like it. This process is described in good detail in a 2022 article in Our Times: Experiences in Open Bargaining: Talking Internal Organizing. Graeme Reniers, a former CUPE colleague and one of the strike coordinators for the 2015 strike at York University, describes the process:
"I was a member of CUPE 3903 during three bargaining rounds, twice as a rank-and-file member and once as the local’s chairperson. CUPE 3903 represents a variety of precarious academic workers at York University and they practise a form of open bargaining where all members are invited to attend bargaining sessions with the employer, and internal bargaining team meetings. Nothing happens behind closed doors, unless it’s forced behind closed doors because of government-legislated arbitration. Everything is fully transparent. It’s not as chaotic as people like to imagine. Only the elected bargaining team members and the local’s staff speak at the table, and only bargaining team members get a vote at bargaining team meetings. But as I said, those meetings are open to the membership, and members do attend. And they’re very knowledgeable about the collective agreement, so they’re quite capable of making their feelings known. Throughout the bargaining round, the local’s position at the table is hotly debated at membership meetings, so the bargaining team knows exactly what the general membership wants, and what they will ratify."
Open bargaining is a powerful means of both education and action. Describing the benefit of having workers attend negotiations, Jane McAlevey, in an excellent interview (really, you should listen to the whole thing) on The DIG Podcast: How to Build a Fighting Labor Movement says: "... if a worker - one time - walked into the negotiations room, they'd suddenly understood in a way they never did in their entire life: now I understand what the union is - it's me and my co-workers."
Open bargaining is also a very effective non-violent means of flexing member strength. And learning how to respond to the aggression, dirty tricks, and violence of management is a necessary part of any organizer's and member's toolkit. McAlevey begins her newest book (co-authored with Abby Lawlor) Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations (2023) with an account of being assaulted in an elevator while working on a hospital union campaign in Las Vegas in 2006. Forced into a hotel elevator by seven private security guards and then prevented from leaving by the notorious union buster Brent Yessen, Jane was subjected to the sexual violence of Yessen forcing his body against hers until the elevator doors opened. Jane's description is yet more harrowing. And, while the goal of this violence was certainly to intimidate Jane as the chief negotiator, it was also aimed at undermining the union's power by creating a "cloud of suspicion" around the negotiating team. Jane describes the importance of maintaining discipline and avoiding the provocation by the union busters AKA "union avoidance" consultants. This hearkens back to 1920s and the open - and often lethal - violence against union organizers when armed thugs working for "detective" agencies such as Pinkerton's or Baldwin-Felts were hired to prevent union organizing in the West Virginia coal industry. Dramatized in John Sayles' film Matewan, you can see it for free on YouTube or The Internet Archive. The thugs that strong-armed Jane into an elevator are the modern equivalent of the anti-union thugs of the 1920s.
All this leapt into my mind when I learned of the letter that York administration distributed through various deans last week. The letter read, in part: "The University has decided that employees in the CUPE 3903 Units 1 and 2 who wish to declare their interest to resume teaching assignments and, where the University determines that work is available, will be allowed to declare their interest to resume teaching activities during the labour disruption." Such a message isn't the same as a gun pointed at one's head nor a physical assault in an elevator. But it is part of the same type of thinking. This message is an invitation to scab, an invitation to strike-breaking. It is aimed at sowing dissension amongst the rank and file. Unions have a legal right to strike and are governed democratically. But that does not mean an employer has to play fair. And they know that a union of several thousand members includes some who disagree with the union. Nonetheless, union rules govern member behaviour and a strike-breaker can be sanctioned, lose member-in-good-standing status and be prevented from participating in the union. However, exercising such sanctions, while part of democratic practice, risks being seen as unreasonable and even authoritarian.
An employer can hire scabs, whom they refer to as "replacement workers," and can reasonably be expected to get away with it - i.e. not suffer much, if any, public outrage. The anti-scab legislation introduced in Canadian parliament last November would make hiring scabs/replacement workers illegal for employers under federal jurisdiction. A first in Federal law. (I've read that there are anti-scab provisions in the Quebec Labour Code but have yet to learn more about that.) But, it remains the case that when labour unions seek to bar scabs from the workplace or sanction them, they are often quick to draw public condemnation. This reminds me of one of the most powerful things I learned from the work of Paulo Freire who writes (in a footnote, no less), in Education as the Practice of Freedom (written before his more famous Pedagogy of the Oppressed):
Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression, is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things - the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by lack of it. And things cannot love. When the oppressed legitimately rise up against their oppressor, however, it is they who are usually labelled "violent," "barbaric," "inhuman" and cold. (Among the innumerable rights claimed by the dominating consciousness is the right to define violence, and to locate it. Oppressors never see themselves as violent.)
I just learned today that a member at the Sentinel Rd. picket was arrested by the police - released now, but we've all yet to learn just what the circumstances were and why what was a legal picket during the 2018 strike warranted such aggression this time. Evidence seems to be mounting that the employer is willing to exercise much more aggression than in the past - not only against union members, but also possibly against our allies in unions representing other workers on campus. This strike seems to be shaping up to be quite different from past strikes. And I am reminded of one of the first things I ever learned about working in unions from D'Arcy Martin, one of the most experienced labour educators in Canada (and a former colleague of mine from the Doris Marshall Institute for Education and Action, in his approach he calls Union Judo. I just found this November 2023 video presentation in which he talks about his "union judo." Worth watching! I prefer aikido as a martial arts approach to conflict but judo works just fine.
Popular education and labour education are kindred and have much to teach each other. And there are a lot of great resources out there. That's why i'm doing a PhD. It is also why, along with my colleagues at the Catalyst Centre we organized for several years in the early 2000s to create a national Activist School aka Democracy School. We forged a remarkable coalition from coast to coast that included an almost unprecedented membership including representatives from all of the major unions. Though it was short-lived (3 years) it was another step in the struggle to build alliances across sectors and provinces. I'll share more about this in future issues of this newsletter. Meanwhile, here are some excellent resources worth checking out:
Education for Changing Unions by Bev Burke, Jojo Geronimo, D'Arcy Martin, Barb Thomas, and Carold Wall (Between the Lines, 2002)
This book is PACKED with methods and theory that has been developed in popular education and labour education contexts. It's a must-have for every labour educator and anyone interested in social movement organizing of any kind. In the chapter "The Craft of Union Education" there's a sections titled "Facilitation" and "The Power of Co-Facilitation" that I have included in my popular education teaching for over 20 years!
We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change by Paulo Freire and Myles Horton (Temple University Press, 1990)
Of the several "talking books" that Paulo Freire did with colleagues, this is easily the best. The conversation between Freire and Horton is incredibly rich with challenging ideas rooted in lots of stories of personal experience. It's as easy a read as Pedagogy the Oppressed is "difficult" (as so many people are quick to declare.) The section "The difference between education and organizing" is the most lucid explanation i've ever read and has been a staple of my teaching (in both university and community settings) since this book was published. Someone has posted a PDF to their wordpress site here (no guarantee it'll be there long).
A Troublemakers Handbook 2 edited by Jane Slaughter (Labor Notes, 2005) - with contributions from dozens of union educators including at least one Canadian who I know)
A soup-to-nuts collection of ideas and methods for union education. It's not exactly what I consider a "handbook" which are books that I find useful actually to have handy when i'm doing a workshop. It's an excellent resource for planning workshops and designing curricula, but it's more unwieldy than a handbook should be. Still, a must-have for labour educators. Not sure why it's not on the Labor Notes website and store.
Teaching for Change: Popular Education and the Labour Movement ed. Linda Delp et al (UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education, 2002)
An excellent collection of essays as relevant today as when published in 2002. The essays address many of the connections between popular education and labour education.
Some Websites really worth checking out:
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