Hidden Knowledge: Organized Labor in the Information Age (review)

The issue of workers' role in the increasingly "knowledge-based" economy and the necessity to create a "lifelong learning culture" in every workplace have been the focus of official studies in industrialized countries around the world over the past ten to fiteen years. These studies, as Livingstone and Sawchuk write, "impl[y] that most workers suffer from a deficit of necessary skills and knowledge which must be rectified by greater education and training efforts." This book details a sophisticated study that explicitly challenges these assumptions.

Working with Canadian unions, the authors conducted in-depth ethnographic interviews with workers in five different industries: auto, chemical, college, small-parts sector (automobile components), and garments. The sites vary not only by industrial sector, but also by wage level, training, managerial practices, employment situation, and union strength.

The study has four strengths in its methodology. First, the authors recognize informal training that takes place on the job, and thus refuse to limit their understanding of learning to formal education, whether in the classroom or in the workplace. Second, their research provides both worker and management perspectives, and contrasts these two clearly. Third, the project itself was designed to provide feedback to workers and help their unions become more aware of how workers learn, and how this knowledge could be used to strengthen their unions. And fourth, this study had an explicit learning theory base—CHAT (Cultural Historical Activity Theory)—through which Livingstone and Sawchuk build a rich picture of how workers actually learn. CHAT sees learning as a collective process that actively takes place within specific historical and cultural social processes; in other words, learning is not individualized, is not simply provided to workers, but rather takes place in economic sectors and workplaces that have a specific historical context and resulting cultural understanding by workers. CHAT focuses on the power-determined processes of formal education, and contrasts them with how workers respond using their own work- and community-based learning communities to generate their own learning counter-power.

In many ways, the book is a paean to workplace activists, particularly those in unions. The ethnographic accounts report what workers say about their work, their companies, their training, their workplace situations, and provide a rich understanding of the knowledge that almost all workers develop in the workplace. It also introduces those of us outside Canada to some Canadian working-class history as well as to the economic changes taking place there.

As the authors conclude, this study reveals "highly active learners who face serious barriers to applying much of their current skill and knowledge in their paid workplaces, formal educational settings and civil society generally. In fact, working people are far more likely to be underemployed in their jobs than to be underqualified for them."

Despite the excellence of the study, I have a minor dissatisfaction. The authors primarily focus on direct skills learning for the workplace, with no real consideration of how workers learn in a political-economic-cultural environment where much of the information is "mediated" by the mass media, the government, or the corporation. Thus workers are challenged to reflect on their direct skills acquisition in the workplace, but not on understanding the social order in which their workplace is located and their unions must operate.

Nonetheless, Hidden Knowledge is an excellent study that I highly recommend; in my opinion, it should be read by anyone doing or planning to provide worker education, whether in the union or in the academy.