Trade union education in the new Europe
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Trade union education in the new Europe: an outline of past, present and future opportunities
Nick Howard, University of Sheffield
Introduction
This paper is based upon the author’s experience of teaching in trade union education ; over a period of twenty five years. The aim is to apply that experience to the current situation confronting workers’ organisations in their workplaces throughout Europe drawing upon an understanding of our common history. All European trade unions in their history have been through periods of repression. At such times they lost their independence and common identity as freely formed associations for the advancement and defence of workers’ interests. In these periods their objectives as autonomous organisations were forcibly incorporated into those of the state and of the employing classes. What is of vital interest to workers today is that they continue to build upon the dramatic changes they have won in the last twelve months from those who would legally or illegally oppress them. The task now facing trades unionists is to secure permanently, the essential freedoms of expression, organisation, movement and representation which are the bed rock of a truly democratic society. It is as a contribution to these objectives that trade union education should be devoted.
The purposes of trade union education
W of necessity in all existing economic systems, industrial organisations for the production of goods and services bring together large groups of people under imperatively co-ordinated methods of control. The response throughout industrial society of those in the subordinate position of employment has been to organise collectively in order to prevent their employers from operating an internally divisive system of control within the enterprise and a competitive market for labour in the industry concerned. The aim of these apparently negative responses is the positive advancement of pay and working conditions. Such collective responses can only succeed through the permanent organisation of a trade union, independent in its structure and functions from the organisations of the employers.
In the process of establishing both permanence and independence, members and organisers have to learn skills for which the general education system makes little or no provision. Most trade union education thus takes the form of self education. The professional adult educator has to recognise this special characteristic of trade union education, exemplified in the early demand of English trades unions in the 1860s, for a reduction in the length of the working day to eight hours to facilitate ‘8 hours for our own instruction.’ The tutorial task is one that starts from the desire of the trade unionist to catch up with the superior facilities provided for the education of employers and their class. However, the syllabus is not one that is identical to those provided for graduate corporate managers. To remain truly independent, trade union education curricula are designed separately from all others, even if the subject areas may overlap and share apparently similar conceptual bases.
The constraints upon syllabus design
It is a characteristic of a democratic trades union to maintain its autonomy against the pressures from the classes that contend with it These pressures take many forms, from the building up of anti-trade union public opinion, to direct suppression of trade union rights, but the most frequently operated form of control is by statute. The objective of all trades union legislation in all parts of Europe is to restrain and restrict the independence of unions, in the interests of capital accumulation. However, the legal and regulating Processes that seek to curtail union independence, range from the Stalinist model, now so utterly in disrepute, to the co-determination model that is widely admired as an influential factor in the success of the economy of the German Federal Republic. Insofar as the teaching profession is encouraged to undertake trade union education, it is with the implicit assumption that education will enhance the social controls that the dominant classes seek to impose upon the unions.
The response of union organisers to this process of social control is generally one of ambivalence. On the one hand they are aware that their success as democratic representatives of the union depends upon their ability to satisfy their members in securing their separate interests. On the other, they will be accorded no recognition from employers if they seek to over-ride their distinctive class interests. The outcome of this dissonance is an exercise in balanced control that encourages trades union organisers to form a full-time salaried, self-regulating group of officials. It is invariably upon their terms that trades union education is permitted to proceed. Nevertheless, the nature of the teaching process in trades unions is, as with all adult education, largely an inter-active one, that depends upon the tutorial relationship with the body of students. These may be drawn from a variety of levels within the unions but their selection should be a joint procedure, involving both educationalists and union officers.
Historical conditions: British and Russian experience
The process of syllabus design is one that has to take account of the prevailing objectives of the union leadership. For example, in the mid-1960s, the British Trades Union Congress adopted with government approval, a scheme for the training of 200,000 workplace representatives. The explanation for this development, which in 1986 provided for over 10,000 trade union students annually, lay in the interest of the TUC in promoting trade union involvement in the governments’ National Economic Development Councils and in promoting increased industrial efficiency through productivity bargaining. The implementation of these objectives dominated the syllabus which in most cases was drawn up and presented by the unions’ administrators to the study tutors.
An earlier episode in trade union history and one of contemporary relevance in most Eastern European countries, provides another illustration of the process through which trades unions and their education policies are incorporated into the social and economic objectives of the employers or of the state. In 1921, the Bolshevik party under Lenin’s leadership had to contend with the widespread collapse of industrial production and with the ‘virtual dispersal of the industrial working class’. The revolutionary government determined that the task of trades unions should be to instil discipline into workers and raise productivity. Union leaders, it asserted, must persuade and educate workers, their unions must become schools of administration, of economic management and of communism. Yet they should at the same time, pending the creation of full socialism, remain as independent and autonomous bodies within the soviet framework. This policy upheld the right to strike, but provisionally placed on the unions the obligation to curtail its operation. Thus arose the dual function of trades unions in the Leninist system. It was one that could be accommodated by the democratic centralist practices of Bolshevism, but it did not survive the counterrevolution initiated after 1928. The dual function was altered beyond recognition and eliminated entirely by the totalitarian forms of state capitalism imposed by Stalin. Trades unions were permanently subordinated to the institutionalised supremacy of the communist party, of state managers and of the leading party officials of the state regulated unions. Consequently, trade union education took the form of factory schooling, in which workers were trained in skills without leaving their factory benches. Unions, as arms of the state took on general education to encourage literacy in the proletariat and even trained managers. In the Kruschev era and subsequently, some aspects of the dual functioning trades unions were re-instated but they never regained their original independence, nor their un-qualified right to stoke.
These examples show that, under the impress of political and social change and of fluctuations in the national economy, the role of the trade union educationalists is a variable one, which reflects the prevailing strengths and weaknesses of the organised working class. Such an approach might not conform to the idea that education requires the imparting of eternal verities from a position of isolated splendour. Yet the independence of the educator has to be recognised, and with it his or her responsibility to the needs of the students. In the British experience, the mainstay of this relative autonomy has been drawn from the recognition of the traditions of liberal education.
The meaning and implications of liberal education
The participation of the Department of Extramural Studies of the University of Sheffield in a wide ranging programme of trade union education from the early 1950s to the mid 1970s gave impetus to teaching methods that were open ended, available to all active union members below managerial grades, and which encouraged a considerable measure of classroom participation. The common aim of the tutors, regardless of the political understanding each individual might bring to the problems of industry and society, was and remains the encouragement in each student of the ability to think, rather than what to think. Thus basic skills and advanced socio-economic analyses were all imparted in a free and equal dialogue between tutors and students. Perhaps the atmosphere of freedom was too great. When it was exercised in certain steelworks classes to criticise the actions of managers and of full-time trades union leaders, the response of these authorities was to attempt to steer the courses more towards the model devised by the TUC for the training of authorised workplace representatives.
When the criticisms by the trade union students were drafted into circulated pamphlets, or put into practice during plant negotiations, then the authorities moved to restrict and eventually close the courses. The sole remaining courses that have continued in this tradition are in the Derbyshire and Yorkshire coalfields. It remains to be seen whether the application of liberal education principles to trade union education in this region will be compatible with the drive to return the nationalised coal pits to private ownership.
Training or education? How and by whom?
The problems here cited give rise to the key issue in trade union education. Should it concentrate upon exercises in collective bargaining or on training for the performance tasks required in the labour process, or is the priority to provide trades unionists with the skills required for the advancement of individuals or groups of workers. The problem is more starkly seen perhaps if it is applied to groups, such as ethnic minorities or women, for whom the aims of emancipation may be more clearly apparent. There are implications in both these cases that influence the way that training and education can accommodate contradictory alternatives. In these contexts, training may be seen as a preparation for coping with circumstances that are unacceptable to the trainee, whereas in any education process the aim is to transcend or transform circumstances to the betterment of the participant. This divergence of interest, when applied to trade unions and working class education, places upon the course providers, the responsibility of clarification as to the objectives of such provision. The betterment of the individuals’ situation arising from educational opportunities provided by the unions may lead to greater job mobility which in declining industries assists his or her re-deployment. Or the greater social awareness that arises from such education may lead to a challenge to those in authority who rule over the decline of an industry. The latter alternative is elevated to a challenge to social power when an entire society is in decline. Such is the situation that faced the working classes, deprived of independent trades unions for most of their history, in Eastern Europe in 1989. The introduction of trade union education will be a necessary contribution to the growth of a genuine trade union movement in that region. The question of how it should be provided is largely one for resolution during the process of policy making, by unions, employers, teaching institutions and political parties through the democratic process. However, a key issue concerns the selection of tutors. In the Sheffield course provision, the mad consideration in the selection of staff was the prior experience of each candidate in a unionised occupation before undertaking a career in adult education. However, in the absence of a genuine trade union tradition, should those who provide the teaching come from within the movement to build one, or are they to be largely to be drawn from other social groupings?
The situation in the new Europe
Attention has to be focussed on the developments in the East. The collapse of the authoritarian states and their opening up to free enterprise and market capitalism present problems for the whole continent. Firstly perhaps, there is an urgent need to prevent a lapse back into state tyranny. Secondly, and linked to the first, is the need to build free, self-governing institutions; thirdly, to prevent the super-exploitation of the low wage eastern economies by multi-national capital; fourthly, to reform the educational system up to university level h order to provide the teachers required to assist these objectives. Free trades unions are essential, for all sections of the wage and salaried class, in the implementation of these objectives.
The difficulties in facing these tasks are perhaps highlighted by reference to the Polish experience. The Solidarity movement was of seminal importance in the political transformations in the East. Its creation was assisted by the fusion of the working class and sympathetic sections of the intelligentsia. Yet in taking on the reigns of government, that fusion has ended and the movement is deeply divided in the application of its responsibilities. Most of the intellectuals now support the introduction of free market institutions which pose a threat to the real wage levels of workers and to their security of unemployment. How would organised labour re-act to the inclusion of such intellectuals, many of whom are members of the higher teaching profession, in programmes of trade union education? In all the ex-Communist countries there is a problem of privileged elites, whose record of support for the old regimes makes them unsuitable in the eyes of many whom they serve, for the open-minded, self-governing tasks now facing the new democratic institutions. The intellectuals feel ashamed of their past. The workers feel distrust of them. The unity of workers by hand and by brain is severely strained. Yet many intellectuals, particularly in the teaching profession are now in conditions of poverty and insecurity and are thrown back into dependence upon the ability of organised workers to defend and advance their conditions and standards of living. If unity is not established, the way is open for movements of isolated radicals, whose divorce from the majority leaves them vulnerable to the ideas of racism and extreme nationalism. Recent events in the Moscow writers union illustrate this danger. Yet other recent experiences show how the prospects for trade union education can be built upon the links between the dissident intellectuals and the independent trade unions being built in the East, that are comparable to those initiatives that preceded the Solidarity union in the late 1970s. The recent miners’ strikes throughout the Soviet Union gave rise to a non-nationalist independent trade union called Sotsprof, which was and is being assisted by academics from various universities. It is this link that continues a tradition with a long pedigree throughout trade union and social history.
Western responses and the problem of ideology
The opportunities for a revival of that tradition may throw strains upon the operation of the free market system which many sections of the educated classes are now so anxious to introduce. It is incumbent upon the teaching profession in the West to resist the temptation to disown or withdraw recognition from class based autonomous institutions of workers, as they have tended to do the last decade and a half. Some social scientists have sought mistakenly to link the introduction of new technologies to the disappearance of the working class, hailing the gradual creation of a new social system freed from the oppressions of the mass production workplace. This dogma of ‘post-Fordist, New Times’ is not only factually incorrect, it is highly subjective and applicable perhaps only to the social and working conditions enjoyed by those who dream up such fantasies. In the New Europe, the spread of factory production to the whole continent since the end of World War Two has reached its highest level in history. There is no evidence that it is about to decline, though the transition to improved technologies is obviously necessary and desirable. But this necessity lies at the centre of the great upsurge of demand for social improvement which has thawed the monolithic structures of the Cold War. In both east and west, there are and will be continuing conflicts between social classes as to the priorities for development. Trades unions will be involved in these conflicts and their members will be educated in the process.