Economy
Teaching the parts others fail to reach
Published 28 March 2005
With a learning fund, learning reps and a new academy, the trade unions are taking skills as seriously as pay and conditions. Francis Beckett on a progressive advance
The Trades Union Congress has just launched its bid to be a key player in the workplace learning business, in the form of an ambitious prospectus for its proposed union academy. The unions, in training as in many fields, have come a long way in recent years. Many trade unionists who are still active can remember a time when trade union education meant just what its name implies: courses in how to be an effective shop steward, health and safety representative, paid official or union publicist. Training people to do their jobs was not generally considered the business of unions.
They have always been involved in learning, but this has tended to be mind-broadening stuff rather than skills. Trade union members studied in public libraries and mechanics institutes, and unions helped pioneer liberal education. The Workers Educational Association and Ruskin College Oxford were places where working men and women could broaden their minds and equip themselves for something better than the mind-numbing jobs that were then available to the unskilled.
Unions have not, until recently, been providers of the skills needed to turn the wheels of industry. How far they have travelled may be gauged from the language they now use. The academy prospectus offers dense management-speak that fits comfortably into a world in which the Sector Skills Development Agency refers to schools, colleges and universities as "the supply side" (employers are "the demand side").
Today, unions consider it a central part of their work to support the government's skills strategy. The Union Learning Fund was set up in 1998 to promote training and education in the workplace. It has helped to arrange learning programmes for thousands of people, and to convince union members that learning is the route to job satisfaction, security and employability. Union learning representatives have helped to bring thousands of employed people into learning, and have negotiated formal learning agreements with employers. They bargain at least as ferociously over proper training facilities for their members as shop stewards have ever bargained over pay. The TUC has trained 8,000 union learning representatives who have helped 100,000 employees on to courses. More than 450 Union Learning Fund projects in 3,000 workplaces have arranged courses for 14,000 people. Time off for training has been negotiated for 1,250 union members, and nearly 40,000 union activists a year are trained.
The TUC general secretary, Brendan Barber, can boast that "trade unions are helping people at every level, from brushing up their basic skills to gaining MBAs". Unionised labour is more likely to take training seriously, and more likely to benefit from it. More than one in three union members do some training in any three-month period, but this is true of only a quarter of non-union members. Unionised workplaces are 17 per cent more likely to have a training centre and 11 per cent more likely to have a training plan. And union members get a better pay-off for their training. For male union members, the post-training wage is 21 per cent higher than the pre-training wage, while the corresponding increase for non-union members is only 4 per cent.
This may be why the academy proposal finds favour with both the Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly, who believes it "will help drive up the demand for learning and skills and lead to a step change in the number of working people engaged in learning", and Chancellor Gordon Brown, who says it will help "to bridge the gap between what people are and what they have it in themselves to become". And the government also hopes it will improve Britain's productivity. Ministers believe that unions can reach those workers with whom management and training providers have failed.
The plan is to establish the union academy over the next two years, giving plenty of time to accustom all the unions to the idea. The TUC plans to work out the staffing and develop regional centres (called, inevitably, Centres of Excellence) straight away, and launch the "brand" at the Congress in September. Next January it will appoint the core staff, and next March a national board will be elected. Then it will begin the process of transferring the Union Learning Fund to the academy, with the full merger pencilled in for next April. The following month, a research and strategy centre will be established.
The academy will concern itself with everyone: union activists, those in need of basic skills, and the training needs of technical, supervisory, managerial and professional workers. The aim is to train at least 22,000 union learning representatives by 2010 and to help 250,000 or more union members into learning in that year. But the academy will not just deal with union members. Their families, retired members and non-members (or "potential members", as the TUC calls them) will also be targeted. Retired members may not need, or want, marketable skills; but as people live longer, educators are finding that the thirst for knowledge for its own sake is strong among those who are no longer young.
There is, says the TUC prospectus, "a vast 'learning market' of almost 6.4 million union members, as well as their families, which must be tapped". The TUC cannot force member unions to do anything. Unions will choose whether to opt into any of the academy's customised services, and each union will decide for itself whether the services it provides should be free to non-members. The academy will, however, be able to offer unions economies of scale, because greater numbers of learners generally make courses viable to run and can drive down costs to levels that unions and their members can afford.
The TUC claims that a union academy, particularly at the local level, will be able to help different unions at different workplaces to identify learning needs, and either arrange appropriate courses or offer advice on who can run them. It will help make learning and skills provision more flexible and demand-driven, so that workplaces do not have to fit in with training providers - providers will fit in with them.
The prospectus says: "Approved centres would operate under contract with the national academy and would continue to be inspected regularly for quality assurance purposes. The unique feature of these centres of excellence would be their trade union credentials. They would be staffed by people trained and accredited through TUC programmes or similar union courses." The TUC hopes to make itself central to the whole training process by handling much of the training provision that is currently organised by the Learning and Skills Council, the government quango responsible for training.
But is training really the role of trade unions, which were formed to protect members' pay, conditions and security against rapacious employers? Yes: you can no longer separate training from pay and conditions, says Jeannie Drake, president of the TUC and the unions' representative on the board of the Sector Skills Development Agency. "If you care passionately about pay and conditions, then in today's world, people's capacity to get these is directly related to skill levels. You can't separate them any more. If people are to protect their jobs, the workforce has got to be in the top skills range. Training is an integral part of our role now, and vital if we are to defend jobs and pay and conditions. We need to give union officials the capacity to help deliver the skills agenda."
Training, says Drake, is now "a mainstream part of our efforts to keep members in jobs".
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