ABC Life Literacy Canada

Canadian unions have a historic role in championing workplace education

By Jenefer Curtis

Back in 2004, Esther McKinnon was a playground supervisor with the Cape Breton Regional School Board and she did not have her high-school diploma. She had never thought completing high school was even a viable option until her union encouraged her to complete her General Educational Development (GED), which offers the equivalent of a high-school diploma. “I wondered if I could do the work on top of everything else I had to do,” she recalls. “I found that I could. After a few classes, I opened up. I could ask questions when I had problems and I felt good about myself.”

McKinnon’s union is one of many in Canada that has upped the ante on workplace literacy programs and through them helped employees enjoy a new sense of ability and competence. Over the past year, nearly 400 members of Canada’s largest union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), had experiences similar to McKinnon’s, participating in the union’s six-year-old literacy program. And at the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), a Workplace Literacy Project has been in place since 2004 and has spawned a plethora of initiatives, including many clear-language programs and a very active Literacy Working Group, through which union and federation of labour leaders meet biannually to thrash out ideas.

But the picture isn’t all rosy. Despite their desire for literacy programs – CUPE reports that 75 per cent of surveyed union members counted literacy as important as health and safety – some employees are too shy or embarrassed about their literacy challenges to come forward. As for employers, some tend to bypass literacy as not being part of “essential skills” development, some take a long time to put any type of program into place, and some don’t participate at all.

In addition, the wholehearted focus of unions on literacy initiatives is in sharp contrast to the lack of organization on the part of both levels of government and various other stakeholders. “It’s like hurry up and stop,” says Tamara Levine, the CLC’s full-time Literacy Coordinator, “There is so much passion for these programs, both on the part of employees and employers, but there is a huge gap in terms of the pieces that need to be in place for them to be carried out.”

Those missing pieces include support to build an infrastructure that would deliver adult-literacy programs equitably across the country – an infrastructure imperiled further by recent cutbacks in federal funding for such programs.

Given these challenges, union leaders say, it’s no wonder the big picture in Canada is discouraging. Indeed, numerous studies have concluded that Canada is (to use one study’s terms) “under performing” in workplace learning compared to other countries. Employer Investment in Workplace Learning in Canada, released in 2006 by the Canadian Council on Learning, reports that more than one-third of Canadian workers have unmet, job-related training needs and that U.S. firms spend, as a percentage of overall payroll, about 50 per cent more on training than Canadian firms.

Union initiatives have certainly made positive inroads. One primary area of activity covers clear-language programs, which ensure that documents of all sorts are written without unnecessary complication and jargon. “Language is about power,” says Levine. “The way we use it can either invite or discourage participation. For labour, communicating clearly is part of facilitating access and equity. It’s about solidarity and inclusion.” The CLC has taken a leadership role in this area, adopting a clear-language rewrite of its constitution, for example, and developing courses that train participants to deliver training in clear-language awareness to their own unions or locals.

Unions also report success in convincing employers that literacy may often be an issue before an employee can take advantage of other training. Sylvia Sioufi, CUPE’s Literacy Coordinator, recalls her work for a hospital-employees union in British Columbia. When one new training program was set up, she recalls, nurses and technicians were applying to participate, but not unionized workers who lacked the literacy skills for the program. As a result, she initiated a literacy program to open the door. “If you’ve been out of school for a few years, you can’t just jump into a training program,” Sioufi says. “Sometimes you need something else, too. It’s taking employers a while, but they are coming to see this.”

Another element common to many of these programs is that they are “broad-based” by design. “They are not always job-specific” says Patricia Nutter, who heads up literacy initiatives for the Canadian Association of Municipal Administrators (CAMA), which partners with CUPE in its literacy program. “The idea is to work with material from the home, the community and the workplace to figure out a holistic idea of what a person wants, and to foster a long-term interest in learning. Some start, for example, with wanting to read their child a bedtime story.”

As examples, Nutter cites the City of Moncton, which invites the families of employees to participate in some of the workplace-learning classes, and the City of Bathurst, NB, whose Workplace Education Program includes gardening classes, workshops on buying a home and auto-mechanics classes. Why are the offerings so varied? Tracy Branch, Bathurst’s Director of Human Resources, believes that any learning is valuable learning. “If a person is comfortable in a class on gardening or one on how to change the oil in the car, they will be encouraged to do other classes. No matter what learning you are doing, it is building confidence for the classroom.”

Union members teach some of these classes, which can enhance the feeling of inclusion. Indeed, many unions tout the effectiveness of “peer-led training” as a means of helping members overcome initial shyness at taking classes.

Some of these municipal programs are not built into contract negotiations. Branch, for example, consulted widely with the unions and management – including the mayor’s office – to get an endorsement for workplace learning. “We are all singing from the same page in that we want enthusiastic workers,” she says. “Anyone can request a program, and we’ll do what we can to make it happen.”

By contrast, the City of Winnipeg’s Essential Skills program, including its literacy component, has attracted attention for its success as a formal, joint union-management initiative. There have been three formal letters of understanding between the union and management, and a commitment of $3.9 million that goes into a fund jointly administered by union and city management. “This program is a first in Canada for both the degree of cooperation between employers and employees and for the amount of money involved,” says Nutter, who has seen other city initiatives fail either because management has not viewed literacy as a priority or because the two sides couldn’t get beyond other issues to discuss skills initiatives.

As for private companies, their unions report less collaboration between employees and employers in the details of workplace training than their public-sector counterparts, but there is nonetheless no shortage of programs in place in these companies. Victor Carrozzino, Director of Education and Training at United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), one of Canada’s largest private-sector unions, runs a well-entrenched and successful literacy program as part of its workplace-skills “training trust funds” system. Much like Quebec-based unions, which are mandated by law to put a percentage of wages into a training tax, UFCW negotiates a cents-per-hour rate or a flat amount from the employer that goes into its fund.

Many companies – Winnipeg-based Palliser Furniture Ltd., Lunenburg, NS-based High Liner Foods Inc. and Hamilton, ON-based Dofasco Inc. among them – have won awards for their commitment to workplace literacy. The need for the kind of programs they offer is clear when one considers that four out of 10 adult Canadians – about 9 million people – have literacy challenges to some degree, according to reports from Statistics Canada and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2005.

The CLC’s Levine thinks these are the best of times and the worst of times for literacy training. Unions are enthusiastic for them, she says, but there’s a lack of political will on the part of governments and some employers to ensure that an infrastructure to implement the necessary literacy and essential-skills training is in place. “We need a partnership – ideally between unions, employers and governments at both the national and regional level – in which parties come together to figure out what to do,” she says. Nutter agrees, stressing a role for the provinces in such a partnership. “The provinces are key bridges for the implementation of literacy programs, and yet they are all very different in their commitment to literacy.”

There is much at stake, say Levine and her counterparts at other unions – for everything from the preparedness of Canada’s work force to compete, to the skills and confidence of individual workers such as Esther McKinnon. She had to leave her job as a schoolyard supervisor in Cape Breton, but her decision to enroll in a training program gave her more confidence about her future. “Since I have my GED,” she could say as she looked for a new job, “I am not the least bit worried about getting one.”