Labor Unions—Fighting for Survival

The recent GOP governors' initiatives in Wisconsin and Ohio to balance their state budget included provisos to eliminate or severely restrict union collective bargaining rights.

This has created a firestorm of protests from both labor unions and many other non-union worker groups who are sympathetic with their cause, especially now that the recession has impacted salaries and benefits for the middle class in these and other states in the country.

Protests have spread to many other state capitals, especially to those with public employee unions— the main targets for pay and pension cuts, which GOP members say aredesigned to attack the current deficits. Despite the unions' willingness to accept the cuts, both Governor John Kasich (R-OH) and Scott Walker (R-WI) attached the end of collective bargaining rights for the unions to the budget bill, rights that don't affect the current deficit.

Further igniting the protest movement was the decision of each governor to include tax cuts for business and rich individuals as part of the bill. That decision meant that other programs would have to take a larger cut than would be necessary without this proviso.

The largest and most prominent unions today are public sector employees such as teachers, firefighters, and police. The private sector unions today enroll only 9% of all of their employees—less than half of the number in 1983. Activity by labor unions in the United States today centers on collective bargaining over wages, benefits, and working conditions for their membership and on representing their members if management attempts to violate contract provisions.

Although much smaller compared to their peak membership in the 1950s, unions also remain an important political factor (especially within the Democratic Party), both through mobilization of their own memberships and through coalitions with like-minded activist organizations.

Did you know that May is Labor History Month? To address this timely teachable moment, ProQuest has created a BookCart learning activity: "Labor Unions and Collective Bargaining."

Feel free to copy it into your local collection for students to learn more about the controversy surrounding the viability and future of America's labor unions.

This BookCart is a complete one-stop ProQuest learning activity that you can customize for your students. This saves classroom and library time for more teaching and learning because traditional Internet surfing wastes scarce and valuable time in finding reading level and curriculum relevant information, and then evaluating its credibility.

Each Cart includes examples of essential questions that help students to develop 21st Century critical thinking skills rather than just gathering and reporting facts. It also includes student directions for the learning activity—all of these assignment essentials in one place. Contrast this to traditional research assignments where students have to collect instructions and resources from multiple sources, wasting valuable learning time.

The learning activity for this month is just one of hundreds of BookCarts (revised PDF listing) that teachers and librarians can copy into their local collection and use right away with their students.

Here's how to do it:

• Logon to eLibrary TEACHER EDITION.
• Click the BOOKCART ADMIN tab at the top of the Teacher Edition.
• Click the PROQUEST CARTS tab.
• Type "Labor Unions and Collective Bargaining" in the SEARCH box.
• Click the COPY icon (middle one) in the ACTIONS column to the right of the title of choice.
• Click RETURN TO MY LOCAL CARTS.

Librarians or teachers can edit this BookCart to customize it for their students:

• Click the new BookCart TITLE with the prefix COPY OF.
• Delete "Copy of" and then type your name in the AUTHOR boxes and your initials in the EMAIL box (required info).
• Option: Edit any ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS for your students in the DESCRIPTION box.
• Option: Edit the existing STUDENT DIRECTIONS in the Description box.
• Scroll down and click SAVE.
• Click RETRUN TO MY LOCAL CARTS.

Or, you can use this resource to learn more about creating, copying, and editing BookCart learning activities, or view our very short video overview.

Assign students to write a report of at least 150 words or a presentation of at least seven slides that cites at least three resources from the pathfinder listed below. Students should address the following essential questions for critical thinking (you can add or substitute others):

• What are the benefits of labor unions for workers and companies?
  
  
• What are some of the down sides of labor unions, to workers and companies?
  
  
• What are the reasons for decline in the labor union movement over the last two decades?
  
  
• Do you think labor unions benefit or hurt our economy?
  
  
• Has the decline in union membership affected the general decline of the middle class wages during the last decade? How?
  
  
• What reforms would you propose to make labor unions more viable in today's economy?
  
  
• What impact has the recent Republican governors' attempt to neuter unions had on the public?

Type "Labor Unions" in the Search box.

The results from this search are one of more than 3,600 and growing collection of Essential Pages (short video) created by our crack editorial team. Each is correlated to the most popular student searches of eLibrary. This ensures that students can get results quickly that are relevant, credible, and address topics and issues in all major curriculum areas and standards benchmarks.

To view the Essentials collection, click the Publications tab, then select the new Essential Pages icon to the right.

Your students can use our custom ProQuest models for written and PowerPoint-style reports.

Teachers may be interested in a ProQuest flexible rubrics model for evaluating inquiry-based learning activities.

Educators may also wish to employ the Quizinator Web tool (free, but registration required) for creating a variety of printed resources, including short assessments.