The American Labor Studies Center helps educators provide students a lesson often missing from school curriculum: workers and their unions.
At Castelar Elementary School in Los Angeles’s Chinatown neighborhood, there’s trouble in the hen house. Henrietta the hen and her fellow fowl are organizing a union to stand up against cruel Farmer Brown who wants to reduce their food rations while demanding they increase egg production. Inspired by unionized cows, the chickens form Hens United and succeed in convincing Farmer Brown to sign a contract with them.
Henrietta, in reality a felt puppet in the hands of second-grader Andy Li, depicts a character in a play written by Li’s teacher, Phyllis Chiu.
“The children really get into those things,” says Chiu, a member of the California Federation of Teachers/AFT Labor in the Schools committee, who wrote Trouble in the Hen House to educate students about the issues working people face and why they need a voice on the job.
On Farm Workers founder César Chávez’s birthday, a state holiday in California, Chiu invited other young students to watch the puppet show. Hundreds of miles to the north, teacher Bill Morgan adapted the show to suit his older elementary school students, who act out the roles of Henrietta and the other characters. “If you want to have a strong labor movement in the future, you have to start teaching kids about working people now,” says Morgan, a member of United Educators of San Francisco/AFT Local 61.
Chiu and Morgan are two of the hundreds of teachers nationwide helping children understand the importance of America's union movement by integrating lessons about workers into their classrooms. Now, with the help of the American Labor Studies Center, a nonprofit organization spearheaded by the AFT and other unions, teachers can browse a website and download hundreds of worker-oriented resources for students at every grade level. The website (www.labor-studies.org) features a variety of materials on historical events, music, art, literature, biographies and current workplace issues. Information about Trouble in the Hen House is linked to the site, as are biographies of major U.S. union leaders, chronologies of major union events in history, MP3 files of union songs and a thorough glossary of labor terms. With a few clicks of the mouse, teachers can bring these resources to their own schools and communities.
Through this Web resource, history teachers can integrate events such as the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire and passage of the 40-hour workweek law into their lectures, while English teachers can draw from worker- and union-related topics when assigning term papers and debates. The site includes activities to help students of all ages simulate the experiences of workplace life—including organizing unions and bargaining contracts.
Putting education to work
The high school students at Warren-Saratoga-Washington-Hamilton-Essex Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in Hudson Falls, N.Y., spend half their school day in vocational education classes to prepare them for careers ranging from early childhood education and nursing to welding. The rest of the day, they take academic courses, including history, economics and government, with Mike McTague, who encourages them to use the American Labor Studies Center's website to explore American labor history and biographies of heroes of social justice movements.
"Our students are going to jobs where they are going to be involved in unions," says McTague, a member of the Saratoga Adirondack BOCES Employees Association, an AFT affiliate. "They have to have an idea about how unions work." With four computers in his classroom, McTague and his 11 students navigate the site together. The illustrated time line of labor history and glossary of union terms are among students' favorite links.
Students today, union members tomorrow
The website is just one facet of the American Labor Studies Center. Building on its July 2003 labor in the schools symposium in Washington, D.C., the organization is planning future workshops, courses and conferences to help teachers implement the lesson plans. By this summer, the center expects to have a permanent home at the Kate Mullany House in Troy, N.Y., a National Historic Landmark and former home of the union trailblazer for whom it is named. In the 1860s, at age 19, Mullany organized an all-female laundry union, leading a successful strike that won a 25 percent wage hike.
Teacher access to the center's resources enables children to learn about the union movement so they'll grow up to be adults who understand why unions are important, says Paul Cole, the center's executive director and secretary-treasurer of the New York State AFL-CIO.
"The American Labor Studies Center will be a significant contribution to fostering understanding of the contributions of U.S. workers and their unions throughout our nation's rich history," says Cole. @
