Southeast : Union to Swap Jobs for History Lesson

Give us your children’s impressionable minds and we’ll give them jobs. That was the deal struck this week between the local longshoremen’s union and Long Beach and Los Angeles school districts.

In exchange for giving 200 teen-agers summer work, the union will design a curriculum to teach students the importance of union history. Unions have long complained that the labor movement is rarely discussed in schools.

The plan was approved by the membership of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, which agreed to reserve 200 union temporary casual-worker spots for the teen-agers.

The agreement has been hailed by both sides as a winner, said Marc Coleman, an attorney and chairman of the Long Beach School-to-Work Consortium. The group puts together educators, employers and community members to come up with ideas to put youths to work after high school.

“When the ILWU got involved, they realized they could offer up these casual jobs to young people in the harbor area to give them work experience way beyond flipping burgers for minimum wage,” Coleman said.

The teen-agers will have to pass physical and drug screening tests, then show up at the union hall every morning in hopes of working that day, Coleman said. Most teen-agers will average between one and three days of work per week.

In exchange, the ILWU is putting together a unit of study--most likely to be taught in 11th-grade history classes, Coleman said--that will educate students on union struggles and triumphs, especially during the formative 1920s and ‘30s.

One teaching aid that will almost certainly show up in the classroom, Coleman said, is a film on the life of ILWU’s founder, titled, “Harry Bridges, Working Class Hero.”