Cute guys serving pizza, cute girls
scooping ice cream, a passionate and mostly innocent fling, and a bittersweet
march toward the end of August. In the movies, summer job storylines are
filtered through a warm gauzy lens. Career experts, too, have a sunny view of
summer employment: That’s when young people learn about responsibility,
discipline, and teamwork.
But when our sons and their friends
had their first jobs, the picture was sometimes less rosy. The manager at a
chocolate shop stole a worker’s tips. A neighborhood Italian restaurant
required new employees to work unpaid “training” weeks. A theater concession operator
paid workers per shift, with hourly rates lower than minimum wage.
How many teenagers nationwide had
similar experiences or worse this past summer? How many faced sexual
harassment, or were asked to do dangerous jobs without training? Young workers
(aged 15-24) are far more likely to be injured on the job than those
who are older. In 2023, three 16-year-old high schoolers were killed on the job in a five-week period, at a
Mississippi poultry plant, a Wisconsin logging company, and a Missouri
landfill.
As they return to the classroom
this fall, students will learn nothing at all about dealing with any of these
realities, because throughout the United States, we generally have zero required
education about people’s rights at work. This needs to change: High schools
nationwide should incorporate education about workplace rights.
As it stands, teenagers with summer
stints become twentysomethings and thirtysomethings with full-time
employment, many also juggling childcare or elder care. (Some of them even
become bosses.) All the while, our system assumes people will learn the essentials
through … TikTok? Osmosis? A yellowing poster in the break room? Workers’ lack of
knowledge creates fertile ground for low-road employers to take advantage,
leading to high rates of wage
theft, workplace
injuries, and more.
Especially now, when federal labor
protections are under attack and federal enforcement agencies are being
hollowed out, state and local governments will need to play a more active role
in protecting workers and creating a fair playing field for law-abiding
employers. Incorporating workers’ rights in the classroom is a practical
concrete step that states and localities can take, since high school curricula
are usually determined at state and local levels. A variety of people and
entities could help make this happen in states both red and blue: legislators,
school boards, principals, teachers, parents, and community members.
Discussions about requiring
workplace rights education would also be a welcome change from the cultural
battles now routinely waged in our nation’s schools, since this is content
everyone should be able to agree on. Everyone won’t, of course. But when
plutocrats, business groups, or culture-warrior parent activists oppose this
proposal, let them explain why.
Let billionaire tech executives
explain their objection to teaching high schoolers about the federal minimum
wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, before many of today’s teens
were born. Let them explain why students shouldn’t learn about gig
corporations’ tooth-and-nail fight to avoid having to pay even that paltry
rate.
And the family values crew? Surely
they’d want students to learn that the United States is one of only a handful
of countries in the world—and the
only industrialized country—that doesn’t require paid maternity or
parental leave when a new child is born.
Conservatives want abstinence-only
sex education? Then they should welcome training about laws prohibiting sexual
harassment, and how to report handsy gropers and creeps.
Culture warriors worry about
bathrooms? I do too, but here’s my concern: I want teenagers to know that it’s
not a safe workplace if the pace is so fast that you can’t step away to use the
bathroom. Work shouldn’t cause urinary tract
infections. People should never have to wear diapers on the job, as has
been reported at poultry plants, or pee in bottles, as has happened
among Amazon delivery drivers.
And a word for teachers, who might
fret about adding one more topic to an already-packed curriculum: This content
is perfectly suited for the end of the school year. Even antsy seniors will
perk up when the subject is managers stealing their tips.
To be sure, a proposal to teach
students about employment laws may seem modest in light of the country’s dire
situation generally, and in light of attacks on labor more specifically. But
people’s utter lack of knowledge about workplace rights is exactly what sets
the stage for steamrolling them, at a moment when the federal government is
already rolling out the red carpet for exploitation. Plus, workers’ rights
education could foster greater skepticism and a heightened sense of agency in
relation to mega-corporations that currently have far too much power—both in
our political landscape and in people’s everyday lives as workers, consumers
and small businesses. Wouldn’t it be just a little healing, too, if we had some
positive movement somewhere?
Already one state is leading the
way: California in 2003 passed a law designating Workforce
Readiness Week, required in all public high schools, during which students
learn about child labor, minimum wage, unionizing, workplace safety, and other
workplace laws. Incorporating this kind of practical, life-skills content is
nothing new; Illinois law, for example, requires basic consumer and financial literacy
education, including about debt, banking, and installment
purchasing.
Adding workers’ rights education to
the high school curriculum is hard-nosed, humane, and long overdue. It reflects
some core shared values. First: that high school students need to learn
responsibility, self-discipline, and teamwork. And also: that each one of them
is a precious, irreplaceable human being, not a line item or a cog. Every young
person should start their life knowing they have rights on the job, and that
they are worthy of fair pay, safety, dignity and respect.
The post A Labor Day Lesson Plan: Teach High-Schoolers About Workplace Rights appeared first on New Republic.
