Educate to organise
Dave Spooner Looks at the challenges for education work as it evolves in helping to strengthen the trade union movement internationally
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| DAVE SPOONER (ABOVE) LOOKS AT THE CHALLENGES FOR EDUCATION WORK AS IT EVOLVES IN HELPING TO STRENGTHEN THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT INTERNATIONALLY | |
Over the last 10 to 20 years there has been a significant decline in the funding available for general trade union education in the South. By this we mean programmes such as training the trainers, building the capacity of education departments, knowing how to manage trade union education programmes on the ground, and designing a curriculum.
At the same time there has been an increase in funding available to short-term, highly specific project-based education work. If you want to do short-term work on HIV/AIDS education, promote women’s leadership in the union, or organise amongst informal economy workers, you might find financial support relatively easily (although perhaps not easily enough!). But sustained funding for more day-to-day general education work is much harder to obtain.
I have seen many education officers, sitting patiently behind an empty desk. When I ask “What courses are you running at the moment?” they say “Nothing, because we are waiting for the funds to come. We are waiting for the next project to arrive, which will enable us than to start planning our educational activities.” Fewer and fewer unions in the South have the resources or skills to run systematic and sustained education programmes in support of basic democratic trade union organisation.
Funding demands
In addition, those funding agencies still prepared to support trade union education programmes – most often West European or North American solidarity organisations with access to state funding for international development – now require much greater levels of accountability. The skills needed to write a funding proposal, to provide project monitoring and evaluation reports, to manage project finances and supply adequate financial data and so on are becoming more and more complex and difficult for many unions.
Many unions simply do not have the skills or capacities to manage externally-funded projects. So funding agencies increasingly turn to sympathetic labour NGOs, which in many countries are staffed by bright young and skilled graduates who understand how to put together budgets, who understand how to do financial reporting, who can work in English, and can negotiate with the funding agencies.
Hence in the last 10 or 20 years agencies are increasingly working with NGOs to deliver trade union and workers’ education on behalf of trade unions, rather than working directly with unions themselves, inevitably creating tensions.
Meanwhile in the North there is also a decline in the support for general trade union education or political education, while at the same time, an increase in support for trade union engagement in the delivery of “life long learning” and skills training.
Skills investment
In a reaction to the challenge of globalisation, governments are investing heavily in upgrading workers’ skills, seeking the higher ground of knowledge-based economic growth (and – in effect – abandoning manufacturing to the low-wage economies of the South & East). Unions are seen to be very important to this strategy. So today, in many Northern countries, it is becoming increasingly difficult to gain state support for education in support of trade union or political development, but much easier to gain access to government funds to enable trade union members to develop vocational skills.
In both the North and South, general grants to support trade union education are in decline, replaced increasingly by contracts. In other words, governments turn to unions and say, “We will no longer give you X thousand dollars to support your education work, but we pay you Y thousand dollars to deliver this number of courses, for this number of people, with these objectives.”
It is becoming almost a commercial contract to deliver government targets, as opposed to a general grant to support a union’s democratically determined education programme. Rather than ask ourselves “What are our education priorities?” we ask “What are the priorities of the funders?”.
At the same time, as we all know, there is a crisis in the general membership of unions. Therefore there is a new organising agenda in both the North and South. How do we build our unions, how do we concentrate on organising? And what role does education have in the organising agenda.
Training activists is one aspect of this question. But how does trade union education in general relate to trade union organisation? Education is not simply restricted to training of organisers and recruiters. It is the means by which the democratic life, culture and political traditions of the trade union movement are maintained.
Tools for development
We need to ask ourselves – how do our education programmes help us organise more effectively? But also, how do we build core education programmes that are not dependant on short-term external project finance, but are permanent, sustainable and self-sufficient engine rooms of trade union development?
These questions are not limited to the ITF. In the early 1990s, the education work of the then International Confederation of Free Trade Unions was delegated to the regions. This made it difficult for the ICFTU to achieve a coherent education programme or policy. It also left many of the national centres unable to support the education needs of their affiliated unions, other than through participation in the occasional short-term workshop or seminar, with the vacuum increasingly filled by supportive NGOs.
The creation of the new International Trade Union Confederation however, offers new opportunities to consider a fresh global approach to trade union education development. The ITF, along with other Global Union Federations, could play a significant role in determining what approach that should and could be.
The core of our argument – both within the ITF and in the broader Global Union community – should be to concentrate on building the ability of our unions to design, manage and deliver our own education programmes on our own terms, and break the habit of dependency on external agencies.
We have to recognise that an international education strategy is not the same thing as a project financing strategy for unions in the South, nor a vocational training strategy for unions in the North. It must be capable of supporting international union organisation development and campaigns both North and South, and East and West.
The challenge for unions is to harness the power of education in support of organising, while keeping in mind that education is the long-term lifeblood of the union, not just a short-term recruitment tool.
It is time to engage in a fresh and critical dialogue with the “solidarity support organisations” (sympathetic funding agencies) as to how a new deal can be negotiated with their respective governments. Such a deal would recognise that healthy and vibrant trade unions are not merely agencies for reaching working people to deliver training and development targets. They are the bedrock of civil society and democratic life, based on participatory and democratic education provision.
Dave Spooner is a national union learning organiser, responsible for education programmes on international trade union development, for the Transport and General Workers Union of Great Britain. He is general secretary of the International Federation of Workers’ Education Associations (IFWEA).
