ILO Online: What is this meeting all about?

Dan Cunniah: The International Workers’ Symposium on the Role of Trade Unions in Workers’

Education aims at evaluating workers’ education activities and identifying workers’ education needs at national, regional, and international levels. We will discuss experiences, lessons learned, and the way forward. Delegates will also examine the role of labour education in implementing the ILO’s Decent Work Agenda, and develop strategies to build and strengthen trade union capacity. This includes a review of the role that workers’ education centres can play, as well as new methods and techniques in delivering labour education.

ILO Online: The last major international trade union meeting on labour education was held in 1994. Why did you organize this event right now?

Dan Cunniah: It is no doubt more than appropriate that, over ten years after the last major international trade union meeting on labour education, the 2007 Symposium organized by the ILO’s Bureau for Workers’ Activities should be devoted to this topic. It is one of considerable importance to workers’ organizations. The training of activists, shop stewards and leaders which, almost since the birth of trade unionism, has been one of the main sources of its faithfulness to its ideals and principles, its growing strength, its constant adaptation to new realities and, last but not least, its durability.

ILO Online: Does all this international attention mean that labour education is in crisis?

Dan Cunniah: Certainly not. Every year around the world, labour education trains hundreds of thousands of trade unionists in the basics and the techniques of collective bargaining, trade union recruitment and organizing methods, occupational health and safety issues, rights at work, equality and so on. In many countries, it goes beyond workplace-level concerns and deals with the role of trade union organization in society, the strengthening of democracy and the fight for social justice and the environment.

ILO Online: What’s the difference between labour education and teaching given in schools?

Dan Cunniah: As truly popular education, in the best sense of the term, labour education does not mimic the teaching given in schools and universities, although the importance of that teaching is of course beyond dispute. Rather, it offers a unique kind of training which takes as its starting point the problems faced by working men and women. Its content can be very different to school curricula, and its teaching methods are its own. Constantly evolving, labour education has broadened its own scope and has established crossover points with all levels of the education system, including the universities. The workers’ activities programme of the ILO International Training Centre in Turin has not lagged behind. Each year, it trains several hundred trade union leaders, confirming the high importance that the ILO assigns to strengthening the capacities of workers’ organizations through labour education.

ILO Online: So why devote an international Symposium to it?

Dan Cunniah: The answer is simple. Labour education has already given much to the trade union movement, but in future it may well have to give even more. And since the Helsingør meeting, the world has changed and the challenges posed by globalization and the need for Decent Work have become clearer. Beyond immediate concerns trade unions do also have to wrestle with the question of what it is they want to achieve through labour education. Are they simply striving to represent members within the new global order or should they, strive to become key players in civil society?

            In other words, training will also have to expand, taking in courses and programmes that will enable trade unionists to take part in the construction of society as a whole. This debate has already begun, and some trade union centres have started adjusting and experimenting with new pathways. Hence the idea of this Symposium, which will enable trade unionists involved in training on all five continents to dialogue, exchange views and experience, and look into coordination and synergies.

ILO Online: Can you explain this further?

Dan Cunniah: Apart from being a tool for implementation for the unions, labour education is also the laboratory in which activists cook up new ideas for mobilizing, so as to face the new problems that they encounter in the workplace or which are of more general concern to workers. Stress, violence at work, homophobia and harassment are some of the issues that trainers have had to tackle – sometimes even before they found their way on to their union organization’s agenda.

            Today, trade union organizations and their training programmes have to take account of the effects of economic globalization, the demand for Decent Work, the fight against the spread of HIV/AIDS and against any discrimination towards HIV-positive people, climate change, migration, and the expansion of the informal economy. They have to prepare the workers’ representatives to take responsibility for complex negotiations: economic integration processes, strategic poverty reduction programmes, flexicurity and multinational company councils.

ILO Online: This is not always an easy task…

Dan Cunniah: All this happens in an environment which often does not exactly foster dialogue. In its first annual report published in September 2007 on violations of trade union rights, the new International Trade Union Confederation cites 144 murders of trade unionists in 2006, more than 5,000 arrests in connection with trade union activities and more than 8,000 cases of dismissal for the same reasons. The report lists violations of freedom of association, to varying degrees, in 138 countries.

ILO Online: What do you expect from this meeting?

Dan Cunniah: The trade union movement’s contribution to the promotion of education for all, free of charge but of high quality, is known and acknowledged by the public at large. But the movement’s own training role, through labour education, has stayed out of the limelight. This despite the major investment that it requires, in terms both of financial and of human resources. The international workers’ Symposium on labour education and the documents that will be devoted to it, including this one, will help to fill that gap. They will enable the ILO and, more particularly, its Bureau for Workers’ Activities to reassess training programmes in the light of the conclusions that will be adopted.

__________

^*/          For further information, the ILO’s Bureau for Workers’ Activities has produced a background paper, which provides an overview of the state of labour education in the world: The Role of Trade Unions in Workers’ Education: The Key to Trade Union Capacity Building, International Workers’ Symposium, Geneva, 8-12 October 2007, International Labour Office 2007.