In 2023, Governor Gavin Newsom approved Assembly Bill No. 800, which designates the first week of May as “Workplace Readiness Week” in California high schools. AB800 requires that all California eleventh and twelfth-grade students be taught their rights in the workplace. This type of instruction is incredibly important. Many California high school students are also workers, and research shows that young people are significantly more vulnerable to workplace exploitation, especially young people of color and immigrants. AB800 responds to a growing national child labor crisis by empowering young workers with resources and education about their protected rights as workers in this state and country. 

May is also recognized as Labor History Month in public schools across California, and schools are encouraged to commemorate the month with instruction on how labor movements throughout history have shaped the state and nation. Teaching the history of labor movements in the United States gives students context for how and why their current rights as workers came to exist — these protections were not guaranteed by the original Constitution, but were won by previous generations of activists. In celebrating labor this month, we’ve compiled a list of resources and readings on the history of work, unions, strikes, and boycotts.

CHSSP Resource Spotlights

• Resource Spotlight: Work and Labor History: This Resource Spotlight from 2024 highlights books for teachers and students on work and labor history, as well as several inquiry sets for different grade levels. One inquiry set, Work Long Ago, helps kindergarten students think about how work and jobs (a topic they have some familiarity with already) have changed over time.

• Resource Spotlight: Financial Literacy, Labor History, and Economics: This January 2023 Monthly Highlights page features excellent teaching resources from across the CHSSP network on both labor and economic history, plus more Kate’s Book Club selections. One featured Current Context resource, Waste, the Environment, and a Circular Economy, asks students to consider how we might design an economy more focused on the impact of consumer goods on those who labor to make them.

Other Resources for Educators

• The AB00 What You Need to Know toolkit, designed by the Labor Occupational Health Program and distributed by the Commission on Health and Safety and Workers’ Compensation, gives a breakdown of AB800 and what implementation means for educators. Also includes materials for both teachers and students.

• The Young Workers Education Project, with the UCLA Labor Center, has created a Five Day Learning Cycle for Workplace Readiness Week curriculum guide to help teachers integrate worker rights seamlessly into eleventh and twelfth-grade HSS classrooms. Lesson plans feature scaffolding and detail, as well as extension activities.

• The Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) has a repository of free primary sources and supporting teaching guides available through their project, Teaching Labor’s Story. While the project is still in development, there are multiple sources and lessons available for the years 1890-1970.

• The Labor History Resource Project has an extensive compilation of free resources on labor history for K-12 teachers, including lesson plans, blog posts, primary sources, and more. It’s a great site to peruse to get ideas on easy ways to incorporate more labor history into your existing curriculum.

• If you’re not yet convinced that teaching labor history is important, Facing History & Ourselves has a great explanation on how learning the history of labor movements helps students to better understand their own rights as workers (plus free lesson plans and educational videos!). 

Kate’s Book Club: May Reads

Pies from Nowhere: How Georgia Gilmore Sustained the Montgomery Bus Boycott by Dee Romito, illustrated by Laura Freeman. Georgia Gilmore was a cook at the National Lunch Company in Montgomery, Alabama. When the bus boycotts broke out, Georgia knew just what to do. She organized a group of women who cooked and baked to fund-raise for gas and cars to help sustain the boycott. Called the Club from Nowhere, Georgia was the only person who knew who baked and bought the food, and she said the money came from "nowhere" to anyone who asked. Great example of a grassroots movement of maids, service workers, and cooks who provided food and funds for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Includes recipes for Gloria’s pies!

Side by Side: The Story of Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez/Lado A Lado: la historia de Dolores Huerta y Cesar Chavez by Monica Brown, illustrated by Jose Cepeda. Bilingual children’s book that highlights the history of the farmworker movement.  Also describes who Cesar Chavez was and how he and Dolores Huerta worked together to inspire a national consciousness about the treatment of farmworkers. The book shares the lives of Dolores and Cesar as children and connects their early life experiences to the decisions they made as they grew up (i.e. loss of a home). Also shares that a teacher, Dolores Huerta, became a social justice leader. Together, she and Cesar motivated workers to fight for their rights.

Song for the Unsung: Bayard Rustin, the Man Behind the 1963 March on Washington, A  by Carole Boston Weatherford and Rob Sanders, illustrated by Byron McCray. Picture book biography of Bayard Rustin, the gay Black man behind the March on Washington of 1963 when 250,000 activists and demonstrators came together to march for jobs, freedom, and the right to vote.  FAIR Act opportunity.

Teachers March!, The by Sandra Neil Wallace and Rich Wallace, illustrated by Charly Palmer.  True story of a little-known march during the civil rights era that served as a catalyst for the other marches that followed. Clearly spells out the planning that went into the event (packing of food and toothbrushes in case the marchers were arrested) and the high risk involved for the participating teachers. Great example of how everyday heroes can make a difference.

Recent Scholarship

• Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class by Blair LM Kelley (2023): In the midst of much recent discussion of the “white working class,” Kelley refocuses the narrative on the Black working-class labor that built America. Kelley particularly focuses on the humanity and day-to-day experiences of Black workers, seeing them as more than just laborers or activists. 

• Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism by Allyson P. Brantley (2021): An engaging history of one of the longest boycott campaigns in U.S. history — against Coors beer. Includes oral history interviews with members of the multiracial, grassroots activist movement that used a long-term consumer boycott to protest Coors’s antiunionism, discrimination, and conservative political ties. 

• Migrant Citizenship: Race, Rights, and Reform in the U.S. Farm Labor Camp Program by Verónica Martínez-Matsuda (2021): A history of the Farm Security Administration’s (FSA) migrant camp system, which provided migrant workers with housing, medical service, childcare, education, food, and more from 1935 to 1946. Martínez-Matsuda reveals how migrant families worked with FSA officials to make labor camps an “experiment in democracy,” thus also increasing their political and social representation in the country. 

• The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant (2023): As steel mills in the Rust Belt slowly closed over the twentieth century, cities once dominated by blue-collar work became more and more dominated by the health care industry. Winant shows how health care workers, mostly women and people of color, comprise most of the Rust Belt’s current workforce, yet often labor under poor working conditions for little pay. A deep look at a form of service labor often ignored by historical scholarship — health care.