At present, the Fondation conducts basic and refresher courses for up to thirty-five enterprises per year (and increasingly, for the investee firms of specialized funds, et al, such as the Fonds agro-forestier and Biocapital).^{Endnote 64} The costs of this training are borne by the Fonds de solidarité and by individual employers. According to fund officers, owners/managers or of investee firms are usually receptive to this due to acknowledged gains in productivity. Actually, some companies, especially those with extraordinary restructuring and adjustment needs, are ready to contribute beyond the usual expenses for a more comprehensive training program.

A higher degree of worker involvement in investee firms is often immediate following such training. In many instances, new structures are established, such as joint committees to review financial statements and data, participative management models implemented, and production and work reorganized. Fondation instructors also report substantially altered relationships in the normal course of enterprise affairs and in negotiations during collective bargaining. The Fonds de solidarité is not usually an actor in post-training activity unless invited by both employers and employees to advise or mediate.

Other labour-sponsored funds, such as Working Opportunity and the Crocus Fund, also deliver, or plan to deliver, education and training programs, including those geared to employee participation and skills formation in investee firms.

Changing the workplace

1994 studies suggest that the priority given by labour-sponsored funds to employee participation and ownership are, in turn, generating economic rewards. Data and analysis contained in the research reports of the INRS and CSTIER show apparent efficiency and modernization benefits in investee companies attributable to the efforts of the Fonds de solidarité and Working Opportunity.^{Endnote 65}

The CSTIER study, in particular, pointed to numerous qualitative changes in firms backed by fund capital leading to increased productive efficiency, according to both employers and employees. Of course, these have yet to be tested empirically. The economic and financial training program of the Fonds de solidarité has been cited specifically as a trigger for skills formation and workplace innovations. Indeed, this has been recognized elsewhere in Québec industry - in 1994, for example, the corporation Noranda, Inc. (without ties to the fund), requested and paid for the delivery of Fondation training to an equal number of workers and managers in three plants.^{Endnote 66}

(x) Facilitation of co-operation between labour and business

The emergence of labour-sponsored investment funds has occasionally been greeted with little enthusiasm by some in business and financial constituencies. It is useful to remember, however, how perceptions of the Fonds de solidarité changed in these constituencies in Québec over the course of its ten-year plus history. Surveys of members of Québec's largest employer organization, the Conseil du Patronat du Québec, found that while only a plurality approved of the inception of the Fonds de solidarité in 1983, approval rose to nine out of ten members within five years.^{Endnote 67}