Abstract:
Australian trade unions in the 1980s and 1990s sought to influence and guide the
restructuring of vocational and workplace education policy, to widen participation
in education and training, and establish partnership arrangements with government
and business in order to promote international competitiveness. Since
the mid 1990s, however, the changed contours of the labour market, and a steady
decline in both the numbers of union members and density rates, accompanied
by legislative attacks on the right to organise, led many unions to shift their emphasis
to organising new members. Education was identified as a critical factor
in preparing unions to undertake this new effort and as a means of changing
union culture. This article studies the changes in union education that flowed
from one union’s new concentration on developing capacity for organising for
growth, and examines the new ways of knowing that resulted among officers and
activists.
