Students gain insight into labor relations

The Collective Bargaining Education Project, initiated by
UCLA’s Labor Center with the support of United Teachers Los
Angeles and the Los Angeles Unified School District, aims to teach
students the importance of labor relations by giving them a
simulated experience in labor negotiations.

Founded in 1991 by the Center for Labor Research and Education
at UCLA, this nationwide project seeks to provide an educational
forum for high school students to learn about the dynamics of labor
relations.

“We designed this interactive learning module to give
students a better understanding of the whole collective bargaining
process,” said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center,
which seeks to promote labor studies among both university and high
school students.

The Labor Center help set up the project, which now successfully
stands by itself with the help of a national grant.

The importance of negotiation in the realm of labor relations
has recently been re-emphasized in light of the ongoing contract
dispute between the Coalition for University Employees and the
University of California.

The Education Project organizes a citywide Collective Bargaining
Institute every year, which brings together more than 100 high
school students from all over the Los Angeles Unified School
District and engages them in mock negotiation sessions.

In these simulated bargaining sessions, students play the roles
of unions and management, and are taught how to reach peaceable
agreements by their supervising teachers and union volunteers.

The project also employs full-time teachers and consultants who
visit every high school in the Los Angeles district to both train
teachers and educate students in the art of labor relations.

“Students learn skills of conflict resolution and how to
negotiate from a power of strength,” said Linda Tubach, a
high school teacher who helped launch the project.

“They are essentially rehearsing the roles of adults in
the workplace. And as they handle all the decisions themselves,
they learn that individuals can make a difference,” she
said.

These sessions also provide students with labor education that
they might otherwise not receive in their schools and colleges,
said June McMahon, the coordinator of labor programs at the UCLA
Labor Center.

“Students don’t even hear about unions in high
schools,” McMahon said. “This project exposes them to
this method of negotiation between unions and
management.”

Negotiations are essentially nothing more than a set of rules
that govern the relationship between workers and management. When
workers come together as unions, the process of collective
bargaining develops.

“Both unions and management use arguments, compromises and
trade-offs to solve their problems and reach agreements on
issues,” she said.

These issues generally involve wages, working conditions and
hours, which are often inherent sources of conflicting interests
for union workers and management.

Collective bargaining manages to peaceably resolve these
disputes as much as 98 percent of the time, McMahon said.

But, it is the 2 percent that usually makes the news, as is the
case with the current contract dispute between the union of
university employees and the UC.

“Unions and management are generally able to settle their
differences through negotiations,” McMahon said. “Only
very rarely do they resort to a threat of strike or lockout, though
it’s only this that you see in the papers.”

McMahon also teaches the Management 180 course at UCLA, which
deals with collective bargaining and the art of negotiations.
“In the first couple of weeks, we organize negotiation
sessions and collective bargaining games, and students find it very
enjoyable,” she said.

The simulated bargaining sessions met with a similar response in
high schools, McMahon said, where students took to their first
experiences of bargaining and negotiations like “ducks to
water.”

Students began to excitedly resort to collective bargaining on
every issue they could think of, she said, even ready to approach
their teachers with their own demands.

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