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The economic and social agenda
AS WE HAVE SHOWN IN PAST PAGES OF Canadian CEO, leaders in Canada's business community have made great strides in developing and implementing workplace literacy and essential-skills programs that enhance employees' lives and the corporation's competitive edge. These people have led the way and, increasingly, others are taking up their example and realizing their own benefits. For this third issue, we chose the theme of labour. We wanted to look at how corporate management and unions work together to develop and deliver literacy programs. What were the compelling reasons for their working on this? How well were they doing? What lessons have they taken away? What are the challenges and the rewards? They talked, we listened. What emerged is a dynamic picture of people identifying needs, working through the issues and, ultimately, cooperating to answer some pressing challenges. Those challenges? Canada is losing out in global competitiveness, having been downgraded, once again, by the World Economic Forum in Geneva, from a 13th to a 16th ranking worldwide. Some nine million of this country's working-age adults face varying degrees of low literacy. As a result, they struggle with the demands of an increasingly complex technological and knowledge-based work environment. That's not the right scenario for stellar economic performance and an uptick in our global competitiveness. A shrinking workforce and a cohort of aging baby boomers who will soon leave the scene compound the problem. Also, due to that low literacy, we have millions of Canadians who can neither reach their full potential in the workplace nor engage fully as parents, neighbours and citizens. These are some of the key challenges facing our companies, our municipalities and our unions. They are social challenges and they are economic challenges, and a failure to address them fails both employees and Canada's business interests. That's why public and private corporations and the unions represented in these pages worked as hard as they did to find solutions. We invite you to listen to their stories. In reading about their accomplishments and their challenges, and listening to our "round table" panel of corporate and union experts, what also emerges is that the definition of "literacy" in the workplace is undergoing a "re-fit." It's not a thorough overhaul so much as an evolutionary change in the way literacy practitioners and business people speak of it. Instead of seeing literacy in terms of employees attaining skills such as reading and numeracy that are then applied to workplace tasks, they see it more as training embedded in the requirements of the work itself and sometimes using, as part of the instruction, references to the learner's life experience. Learning computer skills or how to fill out an income-tax form, for example, also enhances an employee's acumen in literacy and numeracy. The evolution of workplace literacy is fascinating to watch, and unions have been instrumental in that development. The call for workplace literacy programs was a natural for Canadian unions, which, since the mid-19th century, have championed public education, the building of libraries and other social programs. But literacy is hardly just a "labour issue." It is everybody's issue, with labour, business and governments all having a role to play. It is an issue that reaches into homes and community halls in neighbourhoods across this country, and it is one that strikes at the core of business. As the companies portrayed here can attest, it is an investment that reaps many rewards. Alan C. Middleton
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