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Plenary Speeches
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Theme 4
It is appropriate, as we talk about lifelong learning today, to remember the trade union contribution to this particular process. It was from the hunger of many people to learn about the new technologies, the new processes and also the liberal arts, that inspired many of the educational developments over the last 150 years. It also demonstrates the centrality of unions to the process of learning because learning in a sense is not just top down by societies, by churches and others, but also reflects the desire of people to know more about the world that they live in. Britain, like other European countries and perhaps even more than some, has experienced massive structural and social change. You can see it as you walk round this city: the ravages of recent years, the changes in the industrial structure, the decline of old style manufacturing industries, the rise of the service sector and the rise of the high tech. areas. We have witnessed a decline of employment in manufacturing and the spread of new forms of so-called flexible work. While many have benefited from these changing employment structures and new social patterns, for some it has often led to alienation and poverty. Many people simply do not have the skills, the aptitude, and the opportunities to keep pace with the changes which have developed. Lifelong learning is one response to this challenge: investment, education and skills to ensure long term economic success and to ensure that companies, businesses and others are able to take advantage of the new opportunities of the global market place. However, lifelong learning should never be just an economic matter because learning reinforces the best values of our societies in Europe. It reinforces democracy, the quest for greater equality, liberalism, tolerance and diversity. It fosters a love of learning for its own sake, improves the quality of people's lives and the range of their choices. The society of the future should be one that regenerates communities, enriches families and individuals by providing genuine opportunities for learning throughout life and giving people a better chance. I have welcomed the vision set out in THE LEARNING AGE, the UK Government's Green Paper on Lifelong Learning. You have all seen copies of that. It makes a compelling argument for a new culture of learning to sustain these twin goals of competitiveness on the one hand and social inclusion and cohesion on the other. It recognises the danger that lifelong learning, too, can perpetuate social and economic divisions by concentrating the new opportunities overwhelmingly on the already educated. In this rapidly changing society the dangers of rapidly widening gaps are ever more apparent. UK statistics show that a third of adults have not taken part in any formal learning since leaving school. Yet employees in the professional occupations are four times more likely to have had such an experience than manual workers. If you earn about £9 an hour you are more than twice as likely to receive training and learning opportunities than if your earnings are £4 per hour. So you sense that the inequalities persist and reinforces one against the other. The less the earnings, the less the opportunities to learn and the greater dangers of perpetuating poverty and the sense of redundancy, both in and out of work. This mounting sense of alienation from most of what is good in society is a dangerous prospect. Now our response at conferences like this and from the action which we hope flows from conferences like this must be a shared commitment by Government, by education providers, by the social partners, employers and unions to transform lifelong learning from a fashionable slogan into meaningful action. Bridging that learning divide and giving everybody the opportunities to make a new start must be at the centre of all our actions including in the trade union world. Our role in the trade unions in Britain at the moment is to be ambassadors for learning both to press employers to do more and to press more workers to take up opportunities. At this conference, you will see a trade union running a session on its 'Return to Learn' programme and you will see the TUC's exhibition on 'Bargaining for Skills'. We are running a network of 'Bargaining for Skills' projects, which are joint partnerships between the TUC and our local institutions called Training and Enterprise Councils, to stimulate an increased demand from the workforce for training. These projects help trade unions and employers establish the commitment, the trust and involvement essential for transforming the average work place into a learning organisation. Commitment and Consent These projects have shown the success of managing the process of change with workforce enthusiasm and commitment and consent rather than strengthening the adversarial tendencies that can result from the management of change. Horizon Biscuits and BICC are two workplaces which I hope many of you will visit during the conference and both have directly benefited from the support of our 'Bargaining for Skills' project in the North West. We are committed very strongly to stepping up our work in this area. We have set up a TUC learning services taskforce to develop practical ideas for securing greater involvement of trade unions in lifelong learning and this has already drawn up an ambitious agenda for action. With the Government's new Union Learning Fund, we are looking for real support for our agenda for trade union innovation in workplace learning. By 2000 we intend to have a network of union learning representatives with a mission to work with employers to improve opportunities for education and training. We are also working with unions to develop new courses to tackle the problem that far too many people still have with basic literacy and basic numeracy. Also we see unions as very much the providers of front line guidance for union members. Unions are, in a sense, on the spot and trusted by many workers in a way that some management teams find difficult to emulate. This mixture of accessibility and trust gives unions a unique role in terms of helping people find their way through the rather complex world of learning opportunities. There is a proposal in the UK at the moment to establish the University for Industry. We want to help anchor the success of this project by working with employers to establish many more learning centres which are open to workers, their families and the wider community. At the TUC, we work strongly with our partners throughout the rest of the European Union, particularly with our colleagues in the other national Trade Union Centres and the European TUC, to promote these kind of initiatives at the European level.
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