From union education to workers’ education: workers learning how to confront twenty-fi rst-century capitalism

The fi rst years of the twenty-fi rst century have not been kind to unions and the workers they represent. Capital is continuing its global reorganization of production, distribution and exchange in a never-ending pursuit of profi t maximization that gained a new lease of life with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of “the short twentieth century” (Hobsbawm, 1995). While capitalist expansion and reorganization have been features of global society for fi ve centuries – and the theorists of globalization should remember this – there are departures as well as continuities in the current period. Each succeeding phase of capitalist development extends the spatial and social reach of commodity relations, but this phase is unique with its internationalization of production and re-engineering of an older model of industrial mass production. Workers, who sell their labour power

to provide the essential fuel to produce profi ts, are confronted daily with incessant pressures from employers to work harder, be more productive (produce more output for less return), and accept the reality of managerial control whereby any notions of human equality or democratic decisionmaking are checked at the door. While the variety of legal regimes in the capitalist world mean that workers in the global north continue to enjoy relatively superior workplace protections to those in other regions, this basic workplace reality is the same for all workers (Moody, 1997; Munck, 2002; Yates, 2003).1