Volume 2, number 2, Winter 1999/2000
Literacy makes its mark at CLC Labour Education Conference
"Literacy is an important issue for me now. It began one day when one of my members arrived at the local union office. The high paying, heavy manual job he'd done for 20 years at the Cominco plant in Trail BC was being cut. He didn't want to go to a new job that involved monitoring operations on a computer screen.
He was ready to fight me. Finally, he broke down and told me he was afraid he couldn't read well enough to do the new job. I helped get him into a literacy program. Three months later he was not only doing the new job, but reading stories to his granddaughter."
Ken Georgetti, CLC President, in his opening remarks at the CLC literacy forum that took place in Winnipeg on September 16th, added "Literacy is about making people whole. When the union gets involved, we are more relevant to our members and they are more likely to get involved in the union and in the community."
More than 80 people from Kitimat to St. John's attended the forum that preceded the CLC's Making a Difference with Union Education conference. The conference attracted 400 labour educators from across Canada, including 25 rank-and-file literacy activists who were able to attend with subsidies from the CLC through its funding from the National Literacy Secretariat.
A panel on literacy from aboriginal, international and Canadian perspectives included Marjorie Beaucage, a Franco Manitoban Métis film-maker, Roberto Romero, a former Sandinista Deputy Minister of Education in Nicaragua and Jean Connon Unda, an adult educator and psychotherapist formerly with the Ontario Federation of Labour's BEST program. Both challenging and inspirational, each offered participants much to consider as they met regionally and discussed how to bring a literacy perspective to the conference. As Denis Lemelin, Vice-President of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) said, "Now I understand that literacy is a political act."
Two dynamic workshops, Union-based Literacy for Labour Educators and Union-based Literacy for Practitioners, left participants inspired and hungry for more. Linda Wentzel, Literacy Co-ordinator for the Nova Scotia Federation of Labour who had been a fish plant worker for 19 years, found the courage to go to the mike at the final plenary. She said, "I got into literacy to help people. Now I realize how literacy can be so much more than that. It can change the way we see the world."
Learning Together is published three times a year with financial support from the National Literacy Secretariat. We welcome your articles, event notices and opinion pieces.
