By: Abbie Cohen, Graduate Student Researcher, UCLA Labor Center, and Ph.D. graduate, UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies
On Marzo 28-29, 2025, Jazmin Rivera, UCLA Labor Center community education specialist, and Abbie Cohen, UCLA Labor Center, graduate student researcher, flew across the country to attend “The Strike: Building Workers’ Power Today,” a conference held at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The timing of the conference was critical, as earlier that same month, President Donald J. Trump illegally fired the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) chair, Gwynne Wilcox, the only Black woman to ever serve on the NLRB.
The day-and-a-half convening offered moments of hope and collective action, providing opportunities for workers to organize and share stories of success and challenges. The conference began with an impassioned speech from Sara Nelson, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, followed by a plenary highlighting strikes from Chile, Sweden, and Northern California.
The following day featured four concurrent sessions for researchers, workers, teachers, and activists to learn together about workers’ rights. Cohen and Rivera led an interactive session titled “Teaching about Unions & Collective Action: A Curricular Perspective” that introduced attendees to California’s AB 800 legislation, which, starting in 2024, requires all California high schools to teach a week-long curriculum on workers’ rights.
“With Trump in office and our communities being affected by the ICE raids, it is important to not only know your rights but also how they can be applied,” said Rimon, a participant from the South Asian Network (SAN). “After seeing how in Chicago, a lot of the people fought back against the ICE raids, it lets you know that all communities should have this information about enacting their rights.”
Jazmin and Abbie invited the 20 adult conference participants to imagine themselves back in their high school US history class and guided them through this five-day learning cycle. The curriculum leads students to critically examine why workers have rights and what they can do when those rights are violated. By experiencing the curriculum for themselves, conference attendees gained firsthand insight into ways they could conduct the trainings in their own organizations. Participants noted that the curriculum’s materials, including the Know Your Rights handout, would have benefited their younger selves or the students they presently teach.
Cohen and Rivera then introduced the group to “Starcups: National Labor Relations Board Election Simulation,” an interactive curriculum modeled after the unionization efforts happening in Starbucks across the nation. The curriculum was co-developed by Nicolle Fefferman of the Young Workers Education Project and staff at the UCLA Labor Center’s Young Worker Initiative. In these lessons, students are asked to roleplay non-unionized staff members, management, an NLRB agent, and community members. In this way, young workers get to experience and practice the distinct ways stakeholders experience a workplace environment.
The UCLA Labor Center training duo ended the session with a discussion about how these curricula can impact attendees’ teaching environments. A college professor shared the way they wanted to adapt the StarCups curriculum in their labor studies course, and a public school teacher and union organizer described how the “KYR” document would be critical for their working students in Massachusetts. An organizer expressed the desire to see legislation like AB 800 get implemented in more states across the country, and a graduate student in labor studies shared how this model of teaching labor rights and history can prepare students for careers as activists, advocates, policymakers, and well-equipped members of the labor movement.
