The Role of the Union

Increasingly, unions are seeing the potential that can come out of their involvement in literacy. Many national unions across Canada as well as provincial and territorial federations of labour have launched their own literacy initiatives in recent years. They are promoting awareness of what literacy means and its potential to strengthen the union. They are putting literacy on the negotiating table, and achieving favourable ways and means for workers to learn basic skills at the workplace and at union training centres. They are training union representatives on joint committees to understand their role and to work towards high quality worker-centred programming.

The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), for its part, launched its Workplace Literacy Project in 1996. It provides co-ordination and technical support to affiliates, and develops literacy and clear language resources through its Learning in Solidarity series of publications. Through the CLC Literacy Working Group, it brings union co-ordinators together to share ideas, tools and encouragement.

Learning for the Future

There is still a long way to go. Unions need to continue to hone a labour vision of workplace literacy, and find ways to support how the vision gets realized in practice. We need to push literacy up on our bargaining agendas, knowing that gains made in bargaining will not only benefit union members, but will often have a positive ripple effect into unorganized workplaces. We need to work with literacy and social justice organizations to push the envelope of public policy at both the federal and provincial levels so that adult education is not relegated to being a charitable enterprise but is entrenched as a right. We need a publicly supported system of life-long learning. We know that literacy work is not a quick fix. It takes creativity and stamina to pursue an agenda of this kind of “learning in solidarity.”

CLC. (2001). Seeds for Change: A Curriculum Guide for Worker-Centred Literacy. Ottawa: Canadian Labour Congress.

This article is an abridged version of the original which appeared in Just Labour, vol. 1, 2002. The original, full-length version can be found at www.justlabour.yorku.ca.

Tamara Levine is the coordinator of the Workplace Literacy Project of the Canadian Labour Congress.