Trade Unions and Vocational Education and Training: Questions of Strategy and Identity

Abstract

Australian unions entered the ‘national training reform agenda’ in the late 1980s promising themselves a high skill, high wage economy in which ‘lifetime learning’ was an integral part of paid employment. The regulatory arrangements the union movement sought in order to realise these goals have instead been used to promote the ‘marketisation’ of vocational training, in which the business community has gained increased leverage over training design, delivery and assessment. As a result, unions have seen one of their traditional strongholds—the male-dominated apprenticeship system—cut back, while training access remains sharply defined by class and gender. Unions now face questions of how best to participate in the training market, in ways that promote union identity.