Teaching Activities (Free)

What Rights Do We Have?

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 7 pages.
This lesson teaches some of the nuts and bolts of labor unions and then moves beyond to ask students to consider what rights they have at work, and to recognize that “rights” depend in large part on what people have fought for and won.

Themes: Democracy & Citizenship, Labor, Laws & Citizen Rights, Organizing
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Poster by Ricardo Levins Morales. Read more.

Here students begin to shake up their assumptions about labor and union history. Too often students enter class burdened with stereotypical notions of unions and other worker organizations.

The two student handouts (“What Rights Do I Have?”) in this lesson emphasize that studying labor can be personal.

Students will realize some of what they don’t know about the labor movement, learn important background information about labor history and contemporary organized labor, consider rights that workers have and do not have, and reflect on rights we should have at work, but don’t.

This is one of the 16 lessons available from The Power In Our Hands.

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Related Resources
Teaching Guides

The Power in Our Hands: A Curriculum on the History of Work and Workers in the United States

Teaching Guide. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 1988. 184 pages.
Role plays and writing activities project high school students into real-life situations to explore the history and contemporary reality of employment (and unemployment) in the U.S.