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Research
Domain: Group Five - Informal Learning in Different Workplaces
Title
of Project: The Storage and Transmission of Men's Informal
Skills in Working-Class Communities
Start
Date: April 1, 1997
Academic Investigator: Dr. Dorothy Smith (OISE/UT)
Student Researchers: Stephen Dobson (UT), Michelle Webber
(OISE/UT)
"Downsizing,"
"restructuring," and so on refer to the contemporary
reorganisation of capital enterprise that makes its central
objective the reduction of labour costs. New technologies and,
in particular, the increased penetration of corporate
organization by the computer and engineered computer software,
radically reduces the role of labour in large-scale
manufacturing. Such changes are not only oriented to the
reducing the cost of labour to the corporation. They are also
part of a continuing project which is to subject the work
place to an increasingly pervasive managerial control that
integrates work processes more and more intimately into the
managerial and financial accounting systems. An aspect of that
increased control which is of special interest here is the
development of skills training technologies and managerial and
corporate strategies (through such agencies as the Conference
Board of Canada) aimed at breaking workers monopoly of
nonformal skills training vested in workplace hierarchies and
in the stable working class communities sustaining an
industry. This study is concerned with a process that can
properly be described as an aspect of class struggle in which
capital in new managerial forms has been constantly and
restlessly in search of more effective means of expropriating
workers', skills and workers' control over their reproduction
and availability, and replacing them with a management
controlled production of skills, both directly in the
workplace and through the state.
The
major focus of the present term research interest is to
discover how the relations reproducing nonformal skills in
community and workplace were put together, the nature of the
skills resource created by workers in both settings, and hence
what has been lost with the dismantling of the great
communities associated with the downsizing and restructuring
of major manufacturing centres.
The
study planned looks toward the past to learn about the ways in
which the nonformal manual skills of men who worked in the
steel industry in Hamilton were passed on from generation to
generation among peers. These non-specific skills involving
the use of tools, familiarity with the workings of a car
engine, familiarity with plumbing, carpentry, and so on were
not only an important resource for the community, they were a
resource for industry. The acquisition of skills on the
shopfloor through experience and learning from senior and more
experience workers, built, the study suggests, on the
groundwork that was created and reproduced in the community
nonformally. The study is also concerned with the
intersections of community relationships among men in the
community and the kinds of hierarchies of skills in the plant.
Some historical studies (or studies that have become
historical such (as Michael Buraway's and Wallace Clement's)
describe the relationships among skilled and experience
workers and those who wanted to learn from them or had been
assigned by the foreman to them to train. Some studies suggest
that pre-existing relationships in the community were
significant in an experienced worker's decision to take on a
particular younger man to train (see Joy Parr). It might be
expected also that the prestige of skilled workers in the
plant was a source of status in the community. And where did
the union local come in in relation to the ways in which such
nonformal skills were being recognized and transmitted. This
study is also interested in the ways in which informal
knowledge based on experience in the workplace was circulated
through the ordinary ways in which people talk in bars, in the
union hall, and so on.
The
study will examine the period twenty to twenty-five years
before the effects of downsizing had bitten deep into the
local community. The study will be comprised of oral history
interviews with 10-15 male subjects with recollection of the
community as it was before the first major period of
downsizing in the mid-to-late nineteen-seventies and who had
grown up in Hamilton and worked at Stelco as young men.
Steelworkers Local 1005 has aided in locating initial
interviewees. The remainder will be located using the
"snowball" method.
The
focus will be on how and from whom the subjects learned manual
skills in the community (family, friends) and how and from
whom they learned workplace skills when they entered the
plant.
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