Worker Education Research Consolidated Research Report

We live in the ‘time of monsters’, as Antonio Gramsci put it, in which every person is pitched against the other in competition driven by individualism at all costs, in a life-denying ideology that creates conditions that enforce and celebrate isolation and alienation. For this, ‘we have destroyed the essence of humanity: our connectedness’ (Monbiot, 2014, cited in Kotze and Walters, 2017:1). The National Summit on Worker Education (2009) noted that our planet and its people are in serious crisis2 . The Summit Declaration further noted that this crisis is a capitalist crisis, and that it is common cause across the globe that capitalism has failed humanity as a whole. The features and effects of the crisis articulated in the Summit Declaration continue to escalate. These include:  Growing unemployment, income inequality, poor public services such as energy, sanitation and poor education and health care for the world’s working class and the poor.  Human induced climate change that is causing havoc in several parts of the world through extreme weather conditions:  A crisis of high food prices, food shortages and food insecurity for billions of people across the globe whilst food is a basic necessity to sustain life.  A crisis of urban migration where humans are forced to migrate to the cities in search of the basic means for survival3 . Now more than ever, worker education is critically important, particularly in the current context of neo-liberal capitalism and the growing informalisation and precarious nature of work, in which trade unions and workers are increasingly under attack, as described by the ILO: “Unions are faced with the effects of unfair globalization, attacks on their existence by supporters of neo-liberalism, rapidly changing technology in the workplace, undemocratic global governing bodies and expanding informal economies in which people try to make a living as best they can, as well as other challenges such as the worst forms of child labour and HIV/AIDS. Learning how to address these and other issues effectively is the key to the continuing health and growth of the labour movement. And the key to learning in the labour movement is effective union education. Improving the funding of union education, linking it to labour research and workplace issues, making it relevant to a broader spectrum of working people, updating its methodologies and training its practitioners will help the movement learn how to create the new knowledge it needs to face the challenges ahead.” (ILO, 2007)

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