This article poses the question, who or what ‘teaches’ workers political consciousness? It argues that this question cannot be answered in the abstract, but must be located in historical context. Drawing on a case study of a South African local government trade union, it argues that radical education traditions within the labour movement remain, although the trade union movement has lost much of the militancy that characterised its early years, and its education work has been weakened and compromised. The case study union’s education programmes are ideologically directive and transformative in intent. Radical learning does not only take place in these organised spaces, however; members’ participation in ongoing union activities develops their political understanding and working class identity, while moments of mass action ‘teach’ workers not only about tactics, but also about political and economic power.

This article poses the question: Why is it that work/life teaches some workers resistance and militancy while it seems to teach others despondency, withdrawal or manic careerism? The significance of this question lies in the decline of working-class community. The question is answered through an exploration of ways of conceptualising working-class learning that account for a diversity of outcomes in terms of class consciousness. The article briefly reviews key dimensions of learning theory, and then, by drawing on two empirical illustrations, it argues that the workplace must be conceptualized as an ensemble of work/life spheres. The argument confirms the prospect for a better understanding of the complex nature of work-learning relations with an emphasis on artifact mediation (i.e. the role of tools and ideas) and participatory structures (i.e. activity systems). Here the content and structural location of working-class cultural practices and dispositions (i.e. habitus) within activity systems are deemed central.

Contemporary Australian workers appear reluctant to identify as working class. The article argues the inadequacy of structural explanations of declining working class consciousness, such as the claimed broadening and flattening of the middle class. Instead, it explores the interacting roles of economic conditions and worker education in the decline in workers’ class identification. The educational focus is on the decline of those informal popular education institutions that in Britain and Australia until the mid-twentieth century had aided the articulation and transmission of class identity through programs of literacy and literature, autodidacticism and political activity. Recent hard times have not been sufficient in themselves to trigger a revival of class consciousness, without the help of some vehicle of working class political self-education. The popular media have thus been able to step in, co-opting the icon of the independent battler — a non-collective symbol of traditional longing to escape oppression. Recent promising efforts to build a collective identity around the term ‘working people’ fall short of fostering class identification.