Union Education

I spent the weekend in a CUPE Ontario fall education school. Larry and I participated in a strategic planning session that I was hoping would explore larger questions about union democracy and trade union activism. Unfortunately, it seems like I was hoping for too much. I was expecting to participate in a workshop that would seek to build membership political capacity which would be designed to deal with larger political problems associated with membership democracy (and larger political action in the community) What we got was a very narrow training session dedicated to tackling problems in locals (such as contract disputes, membership apathy, workload issues etc). While this is important, I really thought an opportunity was missed. (and I am not convinced that the union education curriculum was designed to take workers seriously)

I was also a little disappointed with the entire outlook of union education. The moderators expressed little interest in creating courses that would be designed to organize workers as a class and instead seemed to focus on technocratic nature of union activities: how to file a grievance, how to prepare for collective bargaining and how to avert strikes.

I think this is a disservice to working people. From my experience, workers are desperate for information on the economy, on politics, and on questions of international solidarity. I'm not convinced that was the point of the CUPE school. And that is sad.