Riahl
I’m really excited to be talking with a good friend and a graduate of The Transformative Trainer program, Bruno Dobrusin. Brilliant mind, brilliant popular educator, doing really important work, and I’m excited to get into it. So, Bruno, I’ll give you a chance to introduce yourself to folks.
Bruno
Thanks, Riahl. My name is Bruno. I use he/him pronouns. And I’m a labor organizer and educator from Argentina, currently living in so-called Canada and very happy to be here. It’s a pleasure and really looking forward to this conversation.
Riahl
To start things off, tell us about some of the ways you’re using training and education in your work.
Bruno
So I work at a global labor federation. It’s a union of unions at the global level and I work in the Transport Workers Federation in an area of public transport workers. Education for us is a key way to engage affiliates, rank and file workers who are often going through very similar issues in different countries, in different locations. But sometimes they don’t have the time or the space to connect with each other and to see how their issues are interconnected, how they share similar realities and therefore can think together of different strategies. So, for us, having education as a process and training is key not only to have that common understanding–we are all transport workers in this given moment–but also how the realities of transport workers are similar and will require us to take similar actions, or we can share the actions that we’re taking to see what has worked and what hasn’t. So I would say it’s a very action-oriented type of education, but because of the nature, the global nature of what we do, it’s also very global. It opens up a lot of minds about realities elsewhere in the world.
Riahl
Who exactly are the folks that are participating in your trainings? What types of transportation work are they in? Where are they located? I mean, you’re in Canada, but I also know you travel around a lot, so say more about who these members are.
Bruno
I’ll give you an example. Just last week I was in Brazil. We did workshops on campaigning for public transport with workers from the public transport sector more generally, which include drivers and sometimes ticket vendors. Sometimes unions include, for example, the cleaning staff who are part of the public transport family, so they’re included in the trainings as well. It could include folks in the administration offices of a given public transport authority or company. So it’s kind of across the spectrum. What’s interesting is that while it seems like all of them are public transport workers in reality, they are in very different situations. Whether you’re driving a bus, whether you’re driving a subway, whether the subway you work in has no drivers because it’s now what they call fully automated subways. So it is very different realities within the same workplace.
In terms of reach, it’s all over the globe, literally. So we have member unions in every continent. In most countries we have affiliated transport workers. So my job takes me all over the world, and my task is to try to understand their realities and be able to communicate it to others by translating experiences so they can be understood in other continents, which I find one of the most exciting parts.
Riahl
So you touched on a few of the benefits of having people come together, see perspectives that they might not see and notice the commonalities and the patterns between them in order to better inform their action.
What other benefits do you see to using training and education?
As a global federation bringing people together, they’re not working on the same campaigns, they’re not working on the same contract fights. So what benefits do they see to participating in these types of training and experiences with folks that are in Bangladesh and Brazil and India and different contexts and even different industries?
Bruno
Yeah, I would say there is a broad, common goal, which is about class struggle, and that’s something that we really believe in. So even though these are workers in very different sectors, in different employers, different governments, different contexts, different contract fights, there’s still workers fighting their bosses. They are supporting each other because it is part of a global workers’ fight. When workers go on strike in one place, if they lose a strike, that’s probably going to affect, directly or indirectly, workers elsewhere. So for us, having that kind of baseline of agreement that we are all workers, we’re here with a common goal to empower our class in this context of a class struggle that we have. That’s speaking very broadly, ideologically as well as philosophically. But it has very concrete ramifications in other ways as well, more practical ones that sometimes they’re part of the same employer.
So in the sector of public transport, it’s a little bit less common, but increasingly it’s happening that you have multinationals running public transport. So the workers of, let’s say, to give you an example, maybe Washington, DC, the public transport workers working for a French-owned company that runs the operations of public transport. That French company has workers in South Africa. It has workers as well in South Korea. So part of the work for us is getting those workers together in that specific company and saying, you know, the policies that they implement are probably going to affect everybody. So we need to figure out a way to fight back to get workers’ rights in that context. Sometimes it’s about companies that don’t recognize unions in one place and they do in others. We try to pressure them with the unions, that we have to recognize the unions in those locations.
You saw a classic example very recently with a Volkswagen plant in the south of the US that was the first unionized under the United Auto Workers. That’s not exactly our sector, but we do something very similar. The unions worked a lot with the German unions to pressure the company in Germany to say, you’re going to stay neutral during this union vote, and that kind of solidarity is only possible through these kind of exchanges, these kind of umbrella organizations that help you make those exchanges easier.
The third part is about not necessarily actors, but the kind of policies that are happening are actually very similar. When you look at public transport, there is public transport funding cuts all over the place. There is a heavier emphasis on fares instead of public funding. Right now you see a tendency, which is very concerning for public transport workers and passengers to promote what is called microtransit. So companies like Uber and Lyft are increasingly taking spaces of public transport, that is happening not just in the US, it’s happening everywhere. What we try to do is set a common strategy with those same problems that workers and passengers face.
Riahl
So the education piece helps create a unified ideology. It can also help unify the strategy and also help coordinate campaigns, when oftentimes there are common policies or common employers or targets for the campaigns that they’re actually engaged in that are impacting their day-to-day life.
Bruno
And I would just say that all of that isn’t possible without the education piece. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a workshop, education goes both within the workshops and outside the workshops. It’s education as a process of collective self-awareness, not just the individual. So as a worker in Brazil driving my bus, through these exchanges, through these spaces, I’m becoming more aware that I share a lot in common with the bus driver in Jakarta and that maybe we have the same employer, but we certainly have a lot of similar issues. And I think that raises self-awareness, and without that process, it’s very difficult to do anything else. And that’s why I think education is such a key piece.
Riahl
There are a lot of challenges, I would imagine, to implementing training and education. You referenced it in talking about these different perspectives that are coming to the table, that have different geographies, I’d imagine different languages, you know, different contexts, and sometimes they’re coming to the same space to share experience.
What are the challenges that you see in using training and education in your work?
Bruno
I think there are many challenges. One of the biggest challenges for us is language, but it’s a challenge in the sense that I think a lot of education also happens outside of the workshop. So we normally have interpreters in our workshops. Right? So the space, those, let’s say, 8 hours that you have in the room, you will have interpreters. Issue number one is that everything is being interpreted already towards your mother tongue. Ideally, often the mother tongue is actually not the main language. Let’s say you take workers in India. Most of them will speak Hindi, but if you are from South India, your mother tongue is actually a very different language, like Tamil. So it might not even transfer to your mother tongue. But I think language is one of the big issues, and especially because they’re more informal spaces. So you finish the workshop where you have all of the training facilitated by interpreters as well. Then you go out for coffee or a beer or whatever that night. And I think that’s a key moment of education, too. Even though it’s more informal.
Another one is sometimes also priorities. I think increasingly our organizations are oriented towards metrics in which education is not always easy to fit in. So metrics about signing petitions, metrics about number of people involved, a number of actions, but it’s very quantified. And I think a big part of the education process is not about quantifying it or you cannot quantify it in a way that will satisfy a report to funders. And to me, that’s one of the worrying parts, because I think it’s taking us away from spaces that are necessary, that are valuable, and that build power without necessarily having a metric associated with it.
Riahl
I can see that and I can also see someone saying, well, and yeah, that is how we bring funding to our organization, or that that is how we prove our impact. So what might you say to someone who’s asking, okay, but what is the real value of them getting together and sharing their experiences? Couldn’t we just make an online module and have them view the video at their own pace, in their own language, and people don’t need to be necessarily talking to one another?
What is the value of education and training in the long term?
Bruno
Do the online module, I’m fine with that if that’s something that will satisfy those needs. To be honest, sometimes when you have a global organization, the online module is a very good way to engage people in different time zones, for example. Like if you do a workshop that you want everybody, you need people to wake up at 05:00 a.m. and also people to stay up at 08:00 p.m. at the same moment. And sometimes that’s very difficult.
I think the question is, what do we want this for? Not just the education piece, but the metrics. What are we trying to do with these numbers? I guess that would be my counterquestion. You ask me, what is this useful for? I’ll respond in mostly what is our objective as an organization. We’re trying to build workers’ power. I think there is common agreement on that. How do we do it? There are many different ways. I think in order to take any kind of collective action, you need to build a base of understanding and a base of comfort with each other. I’ll give an example. If I’m going to ask workers in Argentina to do a solidarity strike or go to the embassy of Korea because the Korean government has jailed three union leaders for trying to organize a union, I think that action is going to be much more effective and will get many more people if this exists.
Riahl
Trainers and educators often come across this challenge. We know something in our heart is important because we’re interacting with the people every day. We’re hearing their stories. You know, we want to create space for that. And one strategy that I hear you lifting up is posing questions. And that’s not just when the training takes place. You actually need to pose questions to folks about what it is that we hope to accomplish and then determine what the tactics are together. Maybe it’s a few online modules. And also we might consider some ways to bring people together that might also help us accomplish our long-term goals. Some of those might be measurable, others might be harder to measure, particularly in the short term. There are multiple ways to achieve these goals.
What advice would you give to that person who is working as an organizer, trainer, as a facilitator? They want to use more education in their work. You know, maybe they’re trying to bridge people who have different realities. They’re trying to bring people together and having some challenges and figuring out how to build those bridges.
Bruno
Well, number one would be sign up for The Transformative Trainer. Because I think it’s going to help resolve a lot of the questions. One of the valuable things is that you’ll hear from other people that have gone through it. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You notice that people go through similar challenges, and I think it’s very helpful.
The second one I would say just whatever you plan to do, be open and flexible to learners and totally disrupting if necessary, because I think that’s part of the process as well. Sometimes out of fear of not having things perfect, we try to stick to what we planned. We were only going to have 15 minutes in this conversation, and now we are at 25. But if it’s a really solid conversation where people are getting involved, that’s where you notice that this is what matters to people.
Another on just trial and error, just doing things many times and making mistakes along the way and learning from mistakes, I think, is the most important one in my experience. But I would say the other part is just talking to fellow educators and trainers, just having many conversations about what’s working, what’s not working, listening to podcasts. I often check in newsletters about education, and not necessarily I don’t read the whole thing or listen, but whenever I’m maybe struggling with one thing that’s where I go to try to figure out, okay, so what are some tips that could work in other contexts? For me, the most useful has been talking to other people, especially if they have very different origins.
I can give you one short example. One of our affiliated unions has an education institute in Brazil, and they do a lot of popular theater, like Theater of the Oppressed, which is a very big practice especially Latin America, but also worldwide. They train workers to do theater as a way to express their realities at work. It’s an amazing program. I went in November and they did a play about women in public transport. Then after that, I said, wow, this would be amazing if we could do it without speaking because we could take this theater play everywhere. It wouldn’t require people having to understand the words in order to understand. They were like, Yeah, that’s totally doable. I went back and the play they have come up with is fantastic. It’s a one-hour play of women in transport where nobody speaks any language. They make sounds, and it’s perfectly clear for any context.
We actually tried it out for different people from different countries, and everybody understood what was trying to be communicated. For me, that was just an example of like, okay, it’s something I have no idea if that’s doable or not. But having those conversations and then working on it for the last four or five months led to this beautiful process and result.
Riahl
I appreciate you mentioning The Transformative Trainer, our cohort program. I’m really glad to hear that has been beneficial to you and your work. That’s also such a powerful example of putting your minds and perspectives together as educators to think about how you can serve a broader purpose, how can this serve a strategic purpose, and meeting a need that’s much greater than what may have been identified at the beginning. Bruno, this has been so awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your insights.
