Workplace Learning

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the worker’s interest in workplace learning. It examines the incidental learning of a group of public sector workers in their changing Australian workplace. The emergence of the workplace as a ‘site of learning’, and as a policy issue, has posed significant problems for trade unions. ‘Workplace learning’ has a long history and many meanings. Apprenticeships, traineeships, work-based degrees, continuing vocational and professional education—all are forms of workplace learning. Additionally, the workplace is suffused with informal and incidental learning. Critically engaging with ‘given’ understandings of workplace learning is a key theme in the Work and Learning Certificate. In The Department, union officials and activists have tried to foster ‘resistance through persistence’, but most workers have opted for ‘resistance by distance’. The inactivity of union members and the ‘union official as representative’ model was clearly failing. On a wider scale, a decade of reflection by the labour movement had failed to find a miracle cure.