Teaching LAUSD Students About Their Labor and Workplace Rights: An Evaluation of the Young Worker Labor Curriculum and the AB 800 Workplace Readiness Five-Day Learning Cycle
Understanding California’s youth work experiences—where they work, how much they work, and their overall workplace conditions—is critical for informing labor policy and educational pathways. Teaching young workers about their labor rights in their public high school classrooms fulfills the mission of the UCLA Labor Center—to create and promote educational programs that uplift the most critical issues facing working people today.
For the past 2 years, Nicolle Fefferman, director of the Young Workers Education Project; Janna Shadduck-Hernández, project director of the UCLA Labor Center Young Worker Initiative; and Jazmin Rivera, community education specialist at the UCLA Labor Center, have worked with many UCLA Labor Studies students to create, pilot, and share a curriculum that meets the 2023 Assembly Bill 800 Workplace Readiness requirements. AB 800 mandates that all California high school students learn about their workplace rights before they graduate.
Teaching LAUSD Students About Their Labor and Workplace Rights: An Evaluation of the Young Worker Labor Curriculum and the AB 800 Workplace Readiness Five-Day Learning Cycle report highlights standards-based labor lessons taught in 14 Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) high schools and in multiple social science courses. These curricula have been shared statewide on the California Teachers Federation (CFT) and the California Department of Education’s (CDE) websites. Furthermore, the UCLA Labor Center and the Young Workers Education Project presented this curriculum at an April 2024 CDE webinar for all California school district administrators with Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond.
To evaluate student and teacher participant experiences in these labor-specific lessons, we analyze in-class observation field notes, students’ post-lesson feedback and reflections, and conversation exchanges with LAUSD high school teachers.
