Tony Brown

Within the context of Australian workplace literacy and numeracy programmes, and based on a larger study from an ethnographic perspective, we outline two case studies of manufacturing companies implementing training programmes in ‘lean’ production processes. The role of literacy and numeracy in the training programmes was approached quite differently in the two companies. In one company, a trainer delivered the lean training to a group of workers selected on the basis of their formally assessed literacy and numeracy needs and the training was preceded by some ‘upskilling’ in literacy and numeracy skills. We refer to this training as an orthodox ‘deficit’ model in which literacy and numeracy are seen as pre-requisite skills and potentially ‘problems’ for workers undertaking training programmes. In the other company, literacy and numeracy were not addressed specifically and, in effect, were completely embedded in the lean training and indistinguishable as elements of the training program. We discuss this embedded nature of literacy and numeracy within a conceptualisation of literacy and numeracy as social practices. We use these two case studies to indicate some implications for workplace training programmes of different understandings of the role of literacy and numeracy in workplaces.

Public policy discourses claim that there is a ‘crisis’ in the literacy and numeracy levels of the Australian workforce. In this paper, we propose a methodology for examining this ‘crisis’ from a critical perspective. We draw on findings from an ongoing research project by the authors which investigates production workers’ literacy and numeracy in lean manufacturing firms. We focus on how language, literacy and numeracy (LLN) practices are embedded in production work and investigate various perspectives, including those of management, trainers and workers, on LLN problems and issues in the workplace. We adopt a critical perspective that analyses the way work, learning in work, and literacy and numeracy in the workplace are shaped and reshaped by social relations and culture, values and the histories of the industry and the local workplaces. This perspective examines the literacy and numeracy as social practices and using the theoretical analysis of cultural-historical activity theory, we indicate some of the complexities surrounding literacy and numeracy issues in workplaces, which have implications for the dominant ‘crisis’ discourse.

Five years after the global financial crisis, and trillions of dollars in stimulus spending later, the crisis not only remains unresolved, but risks entering a new deeper phase in southern Europe. The global turbulence, although experienced with differing degrees of intensity and dislocation around the world, manifests as high unemployment, industrial slow-down, extensive austerity measures and a range of health and financial pressures passed on to working and unemployed people. One response by governments has been a renewed emphasis on ‘skill’ as a means to work through the crisis and reposition the national economy for a post-crisis world. This paper questions this emphasis suggesting that if skill is the answer then the wrong question is being asked. The concept of ‘fixes’ is used to examine changes in production and work, before discussing the limitations of organized labour’s response to the crisis. The crisis poses questions to the labour movement about its understanding of the changes taking place in the economy, and therefore work, and the alternatives it could be advocating for new less crisis-prone ways of governing the production of goods and services, and the education that might support that.

This paper discusses how using feature films in a graduate university subject for adult educators can pose questions about pressing social issues and develop critical thinking and consciousness. While a variety of film sources were used, the focus of this paper is on four feature films that were chosen to highlight a particular approach to learning. Firstly, films were chosen where the filmmaker’s intention was to pose questions raised in stories of everyday life and which wove together personal dilemmas and choice. These films were set in different countries and against a backdrop of particular histories. Secondly, films that sought to re‐present collective identities, and most importantly the diversity within working class identity, were selected. Thirdly, films that enabled viewers to examine common ‘truths’ against actual social conditions, and probed beneath that accepted or prevailing wisdom, were chosen to develop critical understanding or ideology critique. Drawing on theories of learning, storytelling and narrative the paper considers how films of everyday life can be used to facilitate a dialogic approach to understand changes taking place in different parts of the world and the impact they have on different groups of people, notably those exploited or marginalised by the new global market.

Casualization of teaching has become a major issue in Australian universities. In 1990 casuals delivered about a tenth of all university teaching. By 2008 between a third and a half of university teaching was being delivered by casuals. Quantitative studies have assessed the scale of casualization; this qualitative study addresses the experience of casual academics. It documents a sharpening class divide among academics, which has become institutionally embedded. It reports on interviews with casual academics examining how the divide is experienced, and how it may be addressed. Academic casuals report underpayment and compromised quality; they experience persistent income insecurity; and they find themselves voiceless in the workplace. These experiences are interpreted as aspects of class subordination, and possibilities for addressing them are discussed.

Can the current education programme of the Australian trade union movement contribute to reviving union growth and union culture, develop new activists and leaders, and encourage and facilitate the organisational change needed to re-orient unions to develop broader alliances? Twenty-five Australian trade union leaders were asked to describe the educational activities of their unions and to assess the education provided by the Australian Council of Trade Unions' (ACTU) national Education and Campaign Centre (ECC). Analysis of their responses reveals a number of structural, organisational and pedagogical challenges for delivering a national union education programme. It also raises questions of how education can support a union movement trying to convince new layers of workers that unionism can be a dynamic, forward-looking, social movement. The article outlines the existing course framework as a means of understanding the scope of current educational provision. Drawing on interviewee observations and Newman's concept of three contracts in union education, it considers the roles of educator and of organiser, and how an understanding of these roles is currently expressed by union leaders. We conclude with some questions about ways that the union movement might consider the relationship between education and union renewal.

Australian unions have adopted new organizing methods to rebuild and develop their organizations. This represents a change in direction from the commitment to partnership and tripartite planning that characterized the Accord period under the Labor governments of the 1980s and 1990s to a new focus on capacity building. A serious decline in union density along with shifts in the labour process has led unions to focus on recruiting and organizing new members. The vitality involved is tempered by a hostile legal climate that supports workplace flexibility, casualization, fragmentation and low-wage work, while curtailing the rights of unions to recruit and organize. This paper explores the common heritage between the new organizing and theories of popular education, radical history and social movement experience. The paper suggests that contemporary efforts to regenerate unions as assertive organizations that rely on developing and educating new activists and leaders can benefit from drawing on emancipatory traditions of popular education, radical history and community organizing, and in so doing avoid an uncritical adoption of what might become simply a new set of organizing techniques.