Thinking Union: Activism and Education in Canada's Labour Movement, and: Education for Changing Unions (review)

These two volumes shine a light on the labor education profession: Thinking Union addresses the day-to-day realities of being a labor educator, and Education for Changing Unions looks at the educational content of what we do.

In Thinking Union, Martin reflects on his own education as labor activist and labor educator. From his story emerges a loving yet credible portrait of union culture in Canada over nearly two decades. Starting with when he took a job as Canadian education director for the Steelworkers (USWA) in Toronto in 1978, he brings us up through the mid-1990s, by which time he has been fired by the Steelworkers, worked for the Communication and Electrical Workers of Canada (CWC) and then on a national job training scheme and ended up with the Communication, Energy and Paperworkers (Canada) merged union.

Although the frame of the book is Martin's personal story, the content is his thoughts about learning to do his job. His position put him in contact with workers all over Canada. These relationships are where the focus lies. He gives us many brief, almost photographic moments of perception: the impact of a thoughtless remark by a manager, the way a comment dropped in a chance meeting on a plane or at a lunch counter resonates later in another context, the calm mood of a small group of rank and file members after a vote, the choices made by union leaders as they approach a contested election. He reflects on these moments to illuminate the choices he makes as a labor educator who is both a "radical democrat" and "conscious romantic." He then generalizes from them, attempting to develop a strategy for union education and educators.

Early in the book he lays out ten "dynamics or cross-currents" that he uses to locate his own work in the union movement. He also elaborates three metaphors for the flow of communication (and power) within unions: staircase, web and channel. While he doesn't dwell long on these, they let the reader in on the kind of analytic structure that underpins his reflections. He illustrates these with brief stories that are not easily reducible to moral fables.

Thinking Union is illustrated with small black and white photographs of people who figure in the story and situations and ends with a collection of revealing reactions to the book as it circulated in manuscript among his friends and colleagues.

In Education for Changing Unions, the authors, who include Martin, build upon the earlier Educating for a Change (1991, with three of the same co-authors). Basically, they apply the principles of popular education to union education, first through a readable theoretical discussion and then by sharing their knowledge of the craft, which is considerable and expressed clearly and modestly, along with examples of familiar mistakes, which they call "challenges." The accumulated experience represented by these sections is a treasure. Finally, they describe how our educational work "might strengthen democracy and participation across our unions." Their ideas for how labor educators might evaluate our own work are particularly cogent, as are their ideas for personal survival as a union educator.

In short, this book is the best thing out there. Every page can produce a shiver of familiarity for the labor educator reader. While it is useful as a compendium of well-tested and original exercises and program techniques, its even greater value is as a consistent theoretical and political framework, explicitly expressed. For the authors, popular education in the labor movement must include six threads: community, democracy, equity, class consciousness, organization-building...