Workers’ Knowledge: Untapped Resource in the Labour Movement
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper makes the argument that underestimation of the current range and depth of workers' knowledge and skills by union leaders represents a significant barrier to further growth of the labour movement. Surveys and case studies conducted by the SSHRC research network on New Approaches to Lifelong Learning (NALL) have found that unionized and non-unionized industrial and service workers in Canada are increasingly highly educated, increasingly participating in adult education courses and devoting substantial amounts of their time to informal learning activities outside the purview of organized education and training programs. Working people are generally engaged collectively and individually in an extensive array of employment-related and other informal learning activities that are neither fully recognized by most employers or union leaders nor given prior learning credit by educational institutions. This paper will provide an empirical analysis of the schooling, further adult course participation and informal learning of organized and unorganized workers in different occupational classes across Canada and offer some in-depth profiles of workers' learning activities based on a case study in a unionized auto plant with one of the most extensive worker education programs in the country. In light of the massive amount of informal learning among working people, the strong popular demand for access to advanced education and training programs, the increasingly widespread support for use of prior learning assessment and recognition (PLAR) and the proliferation of accessible forms of information technology able to facilitate learning networks among workers, it is imperative for unions to address the growing learning interests of workers with more responsive and inclusive educational approaches and programs in order to enhance membership solidarity and attract new members. The major data sources are the first Canadian national survey of adults' informal learning practices (N=1562) conducted in 1998 and field notes and interview transcripts drawn from participants in the auto plant case study of the Working Class Learning Strategies project conducted at five union locals in southern Ontario during the 1995-2000 period. 1 Recommendations for future education programming strategies to facilitate union growth are based on what has worked most effectively in these locals of differing general organizational strength and demographic profiles.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it