Workers’ Knowledge: Untapped Resource in the Labour Movement

Behind the rhetoric about ‘knowledge-based economies’ and ‘learning organisations’, there is the reality of extraordinary increases in the incidence of adult learning activities in Western societies. In Canada, these increases include a doubling of post-secondary education completion over the past generation, a six-fold increase in adult education participation since the early 1960s, and even-larger increases in the amount of informal learning that adults do on their own (see Livingstone, 2001). In 1998, the first national survey of informal learning activities found that Canadians on average are spending about 15 hours per week in informal learning activities. This is significantly more time than the ten hours a week a prior U.S. national survey and a series of case studies found adults devoting to informal learning in the early 1970s. Many factors have encouraged these increases, including rapid economic and environmental changes, the availability of new information technologies and pressures to get more educational credentials.