Finished improving and no more inflicting.

This is the third and final assignment I did for the course, attempting to summarize the current state of labour education in Canada and internationally – and future trends as well.
It took weeks to write anything but ‘Get some labour educators who’ve done physical labour for a living. The worker who digs ditches knows something about shovels. The strawboss may know as much or more. The person who supervises the strawboss has even odds of knowing less. Anyone at that level of organization or more had better pick up a shovel for a couple of weeks every year or the workers with the shovels are hooped.”

I finally wrote this assignment, got an A- and counted myself lucky.
Labour education publications are the only thing I’ve come across nearly as abstracted from “real life experience” as are Educational Psychology publications. (Sorry Robert – but I did quote you in this assignment.

The current state of labour education in Canada is not a static thing, easy to see from within or from the outside. International trends can be described in terms as detailed as daily weather reports, but as vague about the future as any discussion on global climate change. “General statements will necessarily neglect particular national circumstances,” says John Stirling in his article on Trade Union Education in Europe.[i] There are so many people in our Canadian workforce, and billions of workers internationally – an observer can discuss labour education from one aspect and find s/he is describing the work experiences of hundreds of thousands of people even if her/his discussion skims past or contradicts the experiences of hundreds of thousands of others. In this discussion, I will focus on what I have seen of our national and international trends, and my opinions about their future prospects.
I believe any discussion of the current state of labour education in Canada and internationally must include personal experiences and anecdotal perspectives. As Gunilla Harnsten and Lars Holmstrand point out in their article on Research Circles in Sweden, “a central ingredient in what Friere calls a pedagogy of the oppressed consists in training people to continuously reassess, to analyze discoveries… and to perceive themselves in a dialectical relationship to their social reality.” The personal experiences I discuss here are part of my dialectic, in which I “take a more critical stance towards the world and thereby change it.”[ii] There are plenty of statistics to back up anyone’s program, whatever the goals of that program may be. Statistics alone don’t get laws changed. It’s the stories that one shares among trusted associates that change how one feels about what has happened and is happening, and what one resolves to do in future.
As for future prospects for labour education, there are trends representing any alternative that can be imagined, up to and including young women being pulled out of public education to be groomed for a lifetime of home service as junior wife – in Canada, in Bountiful, BC. Educators discuss the trends that they want to work towards, or against. Journalists discuss the trends that they can document for their forums. Linda Cooper writes in her essay on Union Education in the New South African Democracy that “labour educators will … need to find ways to challenge capitalist notions of skills and productivity and re-assert the possibility that worker’s skills and knowledge can be put to collective, social use rather than simply serving the interests of profitability and international competitiveness.”[iii] In that company, I will not apologize for discussing the trends that are of most interest to myself.
“We cannot speak of a single Canadian labour movement any more than we can hypothesize about a homogenous Canadian working class,”[iv] says Craig Heron in The Canadian Labour Movement. The needs for labour education among Canadian workers are recognizably different when unions of workers in disparate disciplines are compared, and also when non-unionized workers are compared with union members. It can be difficult to compare a civil servant with a tenured academic; it is harder to compare an industrial professional with the low man on a corporate totem pole. As Harnsten and Holmstrand point out, “it is difficult for an authentic dialogue to develop between people with different knowledge and experiences.”[v]
And yet, union members in Canada are crossing those gaps, sometimes by meetings between unions for the purpose of influencing legislation or partisan politics, and sometimes on an individual level. On the website for the Canadian Media Guild, Kenn Sunley tells about the lockout of Canadian Media Guild members by the CBC in 2005, and how five janitors refused to cross a picket line in Saskatchewan.[vi] The janitors were union members too, and their union came out to support the Canadian Media Guild. Even a small local in a service industry saw its union brotherhood with media professionals. Five janitors made a deep impression on the radio workers at that building, a warmer impression even than that give by their own picket line. Rhetoric can teach union members a slogan, but it does not change a person’s work environment in the way that a sense of union brotherhood does. Individual moments like that one are what stands out, not only for the Canadian Media Guild’s records, but for individual members like me, particularly since I am a journalist who has also worked as a labourer and in the service industries.
Working with young people in a call center for the last year and a half has been an education for me. I’ve learned again that there are many young people, high school graduates and even university or community college students, who believe they do not need to consider joining a union. Some think they should actively avoid becoming a union member. It’s not because ten people at our call centre got fired last year for trying to organize a union local. It’s not just that they believe they don’t need an advocate to help them discuss grievances, or protection from arbitrary measures. (For one thing, they don’t believe they will ever have more than petty grievances or modest arbitrary measures to complain about; people get fired or a bonus is with-held, but nobody fears getting beat up or raped. For another, they believe that complaining about petty things will neither improve the situation nor keep them employed. In their belief that a union will not defend their small grievances, my Canadian work associates are like the Chinese workers interviewed by Rita Kwok Hoi Yee for her article on A Chinese Perspective on Worker’s Rights in Labour Education [vii] – but also unlike them because Canadian workers believe that labour laws will usually be enforced.) My co-workers are avoiding becoming union members at least in part because they think that all a union is for is to go on strike to get a contract for higher wages.
There is an opportunity here, one I would call a mandate, to educate all workers that unions exist for more than going on strike. Tom Nesbit points out in his article Education for Labour’s Professionals: Britain, Canada and the USA that “often education has to take second place to a union’s other functions such as organizing, servicing members or negotiating contracts”[viii] – but a moderate amount of general worker education might improve many unions’ success at organizing new members, servicing them and negotiating contracts for them. Some workers who take honest pride in doing a good job turn up their noses at the suggestion that they might act collectively. Over the years, I’ve had many co-workers in various disciplines in six provinces across the country, people who don’t want to associate themselves with the stigma of withholding their labour just to get more money. I have come to the conclusion that their rejection of self-serving greed is widespread, wider than the circle of my immediate acquaintance. This conclusion is supported by the fact that during thirty years of working I’ve been employed in a wide variety of fields, as a security guard, teacher, short order cook, research assistant, telecommunications worker, textbook writer and editor, salesclerk, and farm labourer. Maybe if I’d been working as a lawyer or car salesperson I’d be more cynical about greed, but the people I’ve met expect to earn an honest wage for honest work. They expect sensible working conditions. They’re simply unaware that unions do anything other than going on strike for higher wages. They’re unaware of union efforts to get workers’ rights recognized in legislation that affects all workers.
Others of my co-workers just don’t want to get organized into any more activities, meetings, organizations or groups: they simply want to go to work, earn a paycheck, and spend what remains of their time as they choose. While many of these people are over-extended parents or full-time students, others simply don’t know how little of their time would be committed to union meetings. And none of them have any expectations of learning anything at all through a union, even though the Canadian Labour Congress believes that “education should infuse all aspects of the local union.”[ix]
My belief about trends in Canadian or international labour education, now and for the future? It’s time for labour education to move beyond existing and potential union members, to workers in general and the public at large. There is a new emphasis by trade unions in Britain, says Keith Forrester in his article on Unions and Workplace Learning; “instead of targeting only their lay-representatives within the workplace, the members (and importantly, potential members) are the new targeted constituencies.”[x] It’s time to be visible, not as slogan chanters or scary political movements. It’s time for union organizers to gain the “language and cultural skills to effectively work [sic] with … immigrant workers and their potential allies.”[xi] My friend Marge Klein struggled to learn a few words and greetings in Cantonese twenty-five years ago when she was an organizer for the United Steelworkers in Vancouver, BC – now such language efforts are routine in Canada, and real translation is put to regular use. It’s time for unions to be recognized by Canadian workers as part of what has become the ordinary work world – part of what has made labour laws, minimum wages, EI and worker’s compensation to be ordinary and normal. Too many workers have no idea what unions are for, except strikes!
But there is the odd mention of unions, integrated into popular media. I found a digression on unions and labour education in a book of interviews with Noam Chomsky[xii], which quoted a popular singer. “That’s what unions were about – workers’ educations, which often came out of the unions. These were ways for people to get together to encourage one another, to learn from one another, to find out about the world. Over quite a range, in fact: literature, history, science, mathematics. Some of the great books on science and mathematics for the public were written by left-oriented specialists, and such topics found their way into workers’ education,” wrote singer T-bone Slim in his memoirs. “There are things you can do in groups you can’t do by yourself. In fact, that’s true of the most advanced sciences. Very little is done individually. It’s usually done in groups by collective action and interchange and critique and challenge, with students typically playing an active and often critical role. The same is true here.”
He goes on in Juice is Stronger Than Friction: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim, to add: “Part of the genius of the system of domination and control is to separate people from one another so that doesn’t happen. We can’t ‘consult our neighbors’ as one of my favorite Wobbly singers once put it back in the 1930s. As long as we can’t consult our neighbors, we’ll believe that there are good times. It’s important to make sure that people don’t consult their neighbors.”[xiii]
My co-workers who resist the idea of joining a union are not consulting their neighbours. They believe these are good times, because some aspects of our work environment are indeed good. But they are not aware of how many aspects could be improved by collective action. It is the responsibility of labour education to make such knowledge more generally known, and to remove the stigma that for some people still brands all collectivism as a godless, mind-numbing version of Communism.
Union learning programs, as well as individual labour educators, need to renew continually their awareness of the experience of workers. In D’arcy Martin’s book Thinking Union, his personal epiphanies are largely a result of his shared experiences with the union members he is teaching.[xiv] Jeffery Taylor, in Union Learning, quotes from the United Steelworkers of America’s Guidelines for Training; “Training must be an integral part of every job… In most cases our own members make the best teachers. Instructors should be trained from within the union.”[xv] As labour educators begin and continue to have differing work experiences from the workers they are teaching, the delivery of their materials becomes increasingly less effective. This is a trend which begins in public elementary schools, as observed by Joan Richardson in her article on Teaching Teachers About Learning, and which she believes is most easily improved by continual assessment of the learning experiences of both the teachers and students.[xvi] As our technology and goals change, our learning environments and experiences are necessarily changing as well as our working experiences.
“In 1985 only 15 percent of Canadian workers used computers, but by 1994 that proportion had risen to nearly one-half. This new technology has enabled employers to reduce the number of workers required, to monitor employees more closely, and wherever possible, to eliminate manual skills, “ points out Craig Heron. “This complex, new technology demanded a skilled workforce, but of much smaller size. It also widened the gap between highly trained specialists and those who were restricted to simple, often repetitive input, and who had more limited access to the better jobs.”[xvii]
That trend has continued in the early years of the twenty-first century. And the increasing tendency over the last ten years has been for specialists to work hard to maintain their employment and seek promotions, or instead they will join the ranks of those with limited access to the better jobs.
Canadian workers now must find elementary training in as many fields and skills as are available to them, in order to be able to take any employment opportunity when (not if) their current employment ends. “Employability, rather than secure employment, has been the vision,” according to Chris Holland and Geraldine Castleton, who have detailed a similar trend in Britain, in their article on Basic Skills and Union Activity in the UK and Australia.[xviii] It is not enough to be good at what you do, when that work is not there to be done. It is not enough to be willing to go where work exists – and Canadians are a very mobile society. Workers are finding that they must be simultaneously good at what now needs to be done, and able to go where that work is being done. The only alternative is a job which remains static, with little chance for pay raise or internal promotion – and the position may be downsized or the employer non-existent within five years. There is an opportunity here for labour education which supports adaptable learning skills in workers.
The employment prospects for unskilled labourers do not bear thinking about. My son is an unskilled labourer, at present. An unskilled labourer is by definition an expert at finding new positions, or s/he is an imminent part of the statistics on unemployed and homeless persons.
Even skilled labourers who have only one field of expertise are perilously similar to unskilled labourers, when the industry that employs them eliminates their jobs. It is brutally demoralizing for a worker who has earned a living wage for years to be laid off. When the only employment opportunities locally may be paper routes and clerking at a corner store, the formerly skilled labourer becomes acutely aware of why the turnover rate can be so high in marginal, entry-level jobs. There is a real need here for labour education in how to find new work, and also in how to develop new opportunities. These need will not diminish in the near future.
“Where did they go, the people who left?” asks Thomas Geoghegan in his book Which Side Are You On? He tells of meeting a friend, a Chicago city official who worked in the Mayor’s office of Employment and Training. “Deborah runs a job-training program at Republic Steel, to place steelworkers in new jobs… She does not know either. She admits there are no jobs and wonders what the hell she is doing… ‘The one nice part is graduation… We have a dinner, give out awards. People get dressed up in caps and gowns.’ I said, ‘Deb, do any of these people have jobs?’ She looked away. ‘No.’”[xix]
Geoghegan is not the only one to notice trends like this, and they are not limited to large American cities. Job-training programs can be found in cities across Canada, but statistics counting people who find lasting employment because of these programs – well, those are harder to find. Many of these job-training programs are run by private businesses, which get a fee from the provincial or federal government for each person who takes the courses, if the person is already on Employment Insurance (EI). For some EI recipients, a job-training program is just another hoop to jump through in order to demonstrate that one is honestly seeking employment, and therefore continues to qualify for EI. The content of many job-training programs often consists of resume preparation, skills and interests assessment, and self-employment business plan development; these are all worthy things, but they are training in how to look for a job among available opportunities. These programs are not training in how to do a job, or how to make opportunities. That is a mandate which is being missed by the union educators as much as by the private business job-training programs.
When I was on welfare with three-year-old twins in 1988, the social worker informed me about job-training programs in basic job-hunting skills, and encouraged me to sign up for literacy training, resume preparation and job search programs. I immediately offered to teach any such program as an accredited teacher, and to generate educational materials as needed, but to no avail. My social worker looked for further education possibilities for me, and confirmed that full subsidies were available to get me into a two-year program to become a welder. (It’s worth mentioning that I am five feet tall and not powerfully built.) But I was not allowed – by provincial law – to take Education courses at the University to improve my teacher training, even if I saved the tuition fee from my welfare cheque or if my relatives paid my tuition. Welfare “fraud” is that easy, and work-related training can be hard to come by honestly.
Training and education are worthy in themselves and never a waste of time or effort for the learner, the teacher and the community or even an employer. But training and education are not useful when presented in a situation where there is no forum for their use. General training and education are no substitute for training in a real job. Training and education do not replace opportunities, economics, climate changes or industrial imperatives, and they are worth little without health, strength, luck and entrepreneurial talent. Union learning can help me, but it can’t make union educators effective in the field if some unions don’t know what to do with them.[xx] And nothing could ever make me tall and strong enough to be a welder, or thaw the frost eighteen inches down in my market garden after four years’ drought. In labour education, “the test of success,” according to France Laurendeau and D’arcy Martin’s article on Equipping the Next Wave of Union Leaders, “is not passing some external exam, but rather equipping people to think, work, and live better.”[xxi]
My choices are not empowered when they are disabled by my employer’s choices. My current employers at a call centre use incompatible computer programs which cause delays yet insist that average call handle time to troubleshoot cell phone problems for customers roaming internationally should be under 500 seconds; the training period in how to use this department’s programs has been cut back from two weeks to one. I applied to become a trainer, and was turned down four times. My employers don’t want an accredited teacher, with experience in adult education, as a trainer. When my focus group was asked why schedule adherence was so poor and the turnover rate among employees was so high, we described problems with the computer punch-in time clock program used by each worker eight times each shift, and infrequent bus service with poor connections. The response was a lottery to award a brand-new car to each of three lucky winners. Employees get extra tickets in the draw if their schedule adherence is 90%. The employees walking past that motivational prize to the bus stop are not coveting the prize, but they are learning something important: Work reliably, and three of you will be very lucky! As Bruce Spencer and Naomi Frankel said in their essay on Unions and Learning in a Global Economy: “Workplace learning, as defined by employers, is essentially about learning to become a more efficient and compliant ‘human resource’.”[xxii] I can choose to be a reliable and conscientious worker, and hope to be one of the three out of nine hundred who gets rewarded arbitrarily.
Guess I’m lucky this is only my secondary job, not my primary work. I’m a science fiction writer. You don’t want to ask me what the future of labour education could be like. My guesses about the future have been described in reviews as “haunted.”[xxiii]
How about this for an anecdote about what labour education is like internationally, say, right now in South Africa? I just wrote a nonfiction book on AIDS and HIV[xxiv], and learned that South African business interests and government officials are finally taking an interest in implementing some of the AID/HIV preventative education that has been so effective in Uganda at reducing the rate of new HIV infections. They’re taking an interest now, not because one in nine of South Africa’s 45 million citizens is infected with HIV or diagnosed with AIDS, nor because United Nations figures show that 20 percent of their people aged 15 to 49 are infected by this disease. They’re going to take action because the turnover rate among employees suffering from HIV or AIDS is so high that it’s beginning to affect the profit rate in gold and diamond mining. South African workers are being educated in how to avoid HIV infection, because a less than 2.5 percent drop in the profit rate due to worker turnover, according to the South African Business Coalition on HIV and AIDS (Sabcoha), is something that business and government will not allow to continue.[xxv]
I’m a science fiction writer, nominated for national awards, and member of SF Canada, the national professional association (that is currently debating which of our union affiliations will soon be formalized). I would never have made up that statistic in one of my stories. I don’t have that kind of imagination.
It boggles the mind to think that in any region of the world so much preventable human suffering was not motivating for business and government officials, but a drop of less than 2.5% of profits was sufficiently motivating to put a worker education health program into high gear. But then, my mind and imagination were educated in Canada.
Here in Canada in 1999, Chapters bookstore chain didn’t pay for most of the books they sold, for eighteen months. Chapters kept ordering books from distributors and publishers, selling books, and didn’t pay for them. This led directly to the collapse of General, the largest book distributor in the country. Some estimates suggest that a third of all Canadian smaller book publishers went out of business as a direct result of Chapters delaying their payments. There is no way to calculate how many presses released fewer titles that year and the next, or let employees go. You cannot put a dollar value on an author’s experience of not selling a book that was accepted for publication; I estimate that over two hundred planned books were not published that year. The publisher I was working with cancelled plans to employ me as editor for a new imprint that would release two Young Adult titles a year. Two publishers who had interviewed me cancelled their expansion plans also, as did several others. I went into a Chapters store more than five years later to buy a gift certificate to send in the mail for my niece’s birthday, spat and walked out.
It’s hard to find any mention of Chapters at all in the labour education I’ve had since that fateful time, but I do note that Canadian book publishing associations and writers associations are reminding their members to allow authors to do signings at Chapters but to hold book launches, readings and literary events at independent bookstores instead. As one member of SF Canada said: “I’ll let Chapters sell my books. But I will be damned if I buy anything from them.”[xxvi] I guess that’s the difference between the book industry and gold mining.
My gold wedding and engagement rings are twenty-five years old. It’s a safe bet that this tiny 0.05 ct solitaire is a “blood diamond,” that currently fashionable term for a gem mined by oppressed workers with no union protection. But since then, the Canadian diamond industry has been developed. I bought tiny 0.03 ct diamond earrings a year ago, only after confirmation from the independent Canadian jeweller that every diamond they sell comes from a Canadian mine. Canadian labour laws protect Canadian workers whether or not they belong to a union of miners. I won’t buy anything else, and my friends and family feel the same. We are part of a trend in grassroots education about labour discussed by Naomi Klein in her book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.
When Naomi Klein discusses comparison shopping for brand-name goods and holding the companies responsible for working conditions in their factories, it’s sometimes to insist those companies maintain the standard of behaviour that they set for themselves in their ad campaigns. “Feminism, ecology, inner-city empowerment – were not just random pieces of effective ad copy… [C]ompanies [that] publicly presented social accountability as the foundation of their corporate philosophy from the first” have learned to talk the talk, but they don’t walk the walk. [xxvii]
It’s not just an ad campaign; corporate philosophy affects what we eat and drink, what we wash with or drive, what we wear and own. Consumers can be taught through advertising to think of corporate products as socially accountable. But corporations should remember that education, according to Michael Newman, is not merely as “an exercise in instruction, management and control” but also “a creative, imaginative endeavour in which problems are posed and examined.”[xxviii] If people are taught that social accountability is part of a corporate vocabulary, it shouldn’t be surprising when some people want their corporate products to be accountable.
Most Canadians don’t grow food, or make soap or clothes or any of their possessions. I was pleased when my grown children learned to make clothes. But the only image my husband and I insisted our goth/punk rocker son remove from his decorated black clothing was a Nike swoosh. When we explained how sweatshops employ kids in bad working conditions, for substandard pay, he removed that image. It was a small learning experience, but our son makes garments and accessories to sell to many other young people. “Knowledge… is the result of a constructive process,” says Fernando Lopes in his article on Programa Integrar in Brazil. “It does not spring from a mere accumulation of information. The learners bring their real experiences to the learning process.”[xxix] Sweatshop is a word in a newspaper. Making and decorating clothing is something my children do with their hands, and solidarity is something they have learned to do, not merely a word to say.
Craig Kielburger began speaking out about child labour when he was only twelve years old.[xxx] Starting with his own Canadian school and community, Kielburger has gone on to become an active voice in the effort to create a more just, equitable and sustainable world for young people. One of his beliefs is that no one is too young to make a difference in the world. Even if all a child learns from a school or library program is that employment alternatives exist, that is something s/he will take into the future.
Kielburger has proved that even one person’s efforts can have lasting results in a neighbourhood, a village, a region or a nation. It is not necessary to become the figurehead for an international movement in order to make lasting changes in the working lives of many people. It certainly helps when an international movement has a charismatic spokesperson, but individuals or very small groups can work quietly in their own communities or for the benefit of communities in other parts of the world. For example, small investment groups in Canada support many small business development projects, whether in Canada or developing countries. That personal effort to improve the working lives of people in small projects is another trend in labour education which links Canadians with each other and with people around the world.
And that is the trend which gives me the most hope for the future: the hope that my conversations in the workplace and my small projects are part of a labour education trend that has been productive in Canada since long before workers shared their knowledge on picket lines in the early twentieth century. It doesn’t matter that what we need in Canada is the charisma of another Martin Luther King, Jr, or that what we need internationally is the movement of another Gandhi. In the absence of grand spokespersons we must simply do the individual efforts which may change a life or a workplace, and work to effect a cumulative change rather than an instant revolution upon our communities, industries and nations. As science fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin wrote: “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution.”[xxxi]


[i] Stirling, John. “Trade Union Education in Europe: Emerging From the Gloom.” Unions and Learning in a Global Economy. Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2002, p. 28.
[ii] Harnsten, Bunilla and Lars Holmstrand. “Research Circles in Sweden: Strengthening the Double Democratic Function of Trade Unions.” Unions and Learning in a Global Economy. Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2002, p 85.
[iii] Cooper, Linda. “Union Education in the New South African Democracy.” Unions and Learning in a Global Economy. Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2002, p 48.
[iv] Heron, Craig. The Canadian Labour Movement: A Brief History. James Lorimer & Co, 1996. p xix.
[v] Harnsten, Bunilla and Lars Holmstrand. “Research Circles in Sweden: Strengthening the Double Democratic Function of Trade Unions.” Unions and Learning in a Global Economy. Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2002, p 81.
[vi] Sunley, Kenn. “A Tale of Five Heroes” Canadian Media Guild website, http://www.cmg.ca/gforceEresults.asp?ID=24 accessed February 15, 2006.
[vii] Kwok Hoi Yee, Rita. “A Chinese Perspective on Worker’s Rights in Labour Education.” Unions and Learning in a Global Economy. Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2002, p 65.
[viii] Nesbit, Tom. “Education for Labour’s Professionals: Britain, Canada and the USA. Unions and Learning in a Global Economy. Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2002, p.56.
[ix] Taylor, Jeffery. “Union E-Learning in Canada.” Unions and Learning in a Global Economy. Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2002, p 153.
[x] Forrester, Keith. “Unions and Workplace Learning: The British Experience.” Unions and Learning in a Global Economy. Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2002, p 143.
[xi] Wong, Kent. “Labour Education for Immigrant Workers in the USA.” Unions and Learning in a Global Economy. Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2002, p 73
[xii] David Barsalam and Noam Chomsky, Propaganda and the Public Mind: Conversations with Noam Chomsky, ch. 6 “Liberating the Mind from Orthodoxies” Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001, p. 146.
[xiii] T-Bone Slim, Juice is Stronger than Friction: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim, ed. Franklin Rosemont .Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 1992.
[xiv] Martin, D’arcy. Thinking Union: Activism and Education in Canada’s Labour Movement. Toronto, Canada: Between the Lines, 1995.
[xv] Taylor, Jeffery. Union Learning: Canadian Labour Education in the Twentieth Century. Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2001, p 223.
[xvi] Richardson, Joan. “Teaching Teachers About Learning.” The Education Digest, Vol 70, No 3 November 2004 p 49.
[xvii] Heron, Craig. The Canadian Labour Movement: A Brief History. James Lorimer & Co, 1996. p. 120.
[xviii] Holland, Chris and Geraldine Castleton. “Basic Skills and Union Activity in the UK and Australia.” Unions and Learning in a Global Economy. Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2002, p 95.
[xix] Geoghegan, Thomas. Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back. New York: The New Press, 2004, p.88-89.
[xx] Widenor, Marcus and Lynn Feekin. “Organizer Training in Two Hemispheres: The Experience in the USA and Australia.” Unions and Learning in a Global Economy. Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2002, p 108.
[xxi] Laurendeau, France and D’arcy Martin. “Equipping the Next Wave of Union Leaders: Quebec’s College FTQ-Fonds.” Unions and Learning in a Global Economy. Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2002, p 116.
[xxii] Spencer, Bruce and Naomi Frankel. “Unions and Learning in a Global Economy.” Unions and Learning in a Global Economy. Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2002, p 169.
[xxiii] Runte, Robert. Professor in Education, Lethbridge University; author and reviewer, quoting his own and other writers’ reviews in conversation at NonCon science fiction convention, Edmonton AB, 2002.
[xxiv] Johanson, Paula. Coping Strategies for AIDS/HIV. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group Inc, 2007.
[xxv] Mutikani, Lucia. “HIV takes toll on profits at S. African mines – report” Reuters, 30 Nov 2005 13:07:55 GMT.
[xxvi] Duncan, Dave. Author of 36 fantasy novels, in conversation with Paula Johanson at Con-Version XIX science fiction convention, Calgary, AB, August 2004.
[xxvii] Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Random House, 2000. p 361.
[xxviii] Newman, Michael. “Part of the system or Part of Civil Society: Unions in Australia.” Unions and Learning in a Global Economy. Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2002, p 164.
[xxix] Lopes, Fernando Augusto Moreira. “Programa Integrar in Brazil: Union Intervention in Employment, Development and Education.” Unions and Learning in a Global Economy. Toronto, Canada: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2002, p 126.
[xxx] Camosun College Speaker Series 2006, Insight Global Perspectives on Community Issues, display ad in Victoria Times-Colonist June 8 2006, p D2.
[xxxi] LeGuin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. New York: Harper & Row, 1974, p 242.