YUFA
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Canadian Labour Council's 12th Annual
Women's Conference
June
14, 2003
By
Ruthann Dyer
This was the first CLC women’s conference that YUFA representatives attended. CAUT has affiliated with the CLC through the creation of NUCAUT, the National Union of Canadian Associations of University Teachers. Labour organizations are represented in CLC by their national organizations; NUCAUT is thus the national labour organization for YUFA.
Linda Briskin has written an excellent review of the conference and the political activities that took place during it. My report will focus on the activities of the small workshops and their value to the participants. The workshops met four times during the conference; approximately two dozen women were assigned to each workshop. This format gave us the opportunity to know the individuals in our workshop and to learn of their barriers and successes. The theme for the conference was organizing to deal with globalization and its effects. There were two foci for workshops: Organizing in our Unions and Workplaces or Organizing in our Communities.
Cooperative learning strategies formed the basis of the workshop activities. It was refreshing to see cooperative learning techniques used effectively, particularly when participants were from very diverse backgrounds. My workshop included educators from all levels, public sector employees, auto workers, health care workers, transit workers and workers organizing other workers. As might be expected, lively discussion occurred.
While it would have been very easy to use all of the time to share our concerns as women in the labour movement, the facilitators designed activities that increased awareness of the status of women from all designated groups, identified barriers within labour organizations and resulted in plans for change within workplaces. Our group worked to plan and implement changes that would result in a workplace that respects workers of all generations as members of families with family responsibilities outside the workplace. This goal had originally been identified in bargaining priorities at the University of Manitoba and was presented at the CAUT women’s conference earlier last fall. It was a major concern that workers identified throughout the CLC conference.
The workshop activities were planned so that the participants had concrete strategies to apply within their own work. It was interesting to compare the productivity of a labour focused group to prior strategic planning exercises with management and labour!
One of
the most effective exercises was designed to present the history of women
in the Canadian labour movement through the use of poster materials.
Each group of three to four women received an envelope of clippings
for a particular historical period; the envelope also contained an object
that could be used to symbolize the period.
The group I worked in was assigned the 1939-1959 period and our
symbolic object was a wooden spoon. The older participants recognized the
spoon as a symbol of putting women back into the kitchen at the close of
WWII, while many younger women did not realize the role that women played
in the labour movement during the war. While cutting and pasting pictures, reading press releases and
finding the symbolism in an everyday object may sound like unproductive
work, the participants learned a great deal of history in a very short
period of time. Putting that
history in a chronology was helpful to many of us that were not born and
educated in Canada.