Cute guys serving pizza, cute girls scooping ice cream, a passionate and mostly innocent fling, and a bittersweet march toward the end of August. In the movies, summer job storylines are filtered through a warm gauzy lens. Career experts, too, have a sunny view of summer employment: That’s when young people learn about responsibility, discipline, and teamwork.
But when our sons and their friends had their first jobs, the picture was sometimes less rosy. The manager at a chocolate shop stole a worker’s tips. A neighborhood Italian restaurant required new employees to work unpaid “training” weeks. A theater concession operator paid workers per shift, with hourly rates lower than minimum wage.
How many teenagers nationwide had similar experiences or worse this past summer? How many faced sexual harassment, or were asked to do dangerous jobs without training? Young workers (aged 15-24) are far more likely to be injured on the job than those who are older. In 2023, three 16-year-old high schoolers were killed on the job in a five-week period, at a Mississippi poultry plant, a Wisconsin logging company, and a Missouri landfill.
As they return to the classroom this fall, students will learn nothing at all about dealing with any of these realities, because throughout the United States, we generally have zero required education about people’s rights at work. This needs to change: High schools nationwide should incorporate education about workplace rights.
As it stands, teenagers with summer stints become twentysomethings and thirtysomethings with full-time employment, many also juggling childcare or elder care. (Some of them even become bosses.) All the while, our system assumes people will learn the essentials through … TikTok? Osmosis? A yellowing poster in the break room? Workers’ lack of knowledge creates fertile ground for low-road employers to take advantage, leading to high rates of wage theft, workplace injuries, and more.
Especially now, when federal labor protections are under attack and federal enforcement agencies are being hollowed out, state and local governments will need to play a more active role in protecting workers and creating a fair playing field for law-abiding employers. Incorporating workers’ rights in the classroom is a practical concrete step that states and localities can take, since high school curricula are usually determined at state and local levels. A variety of people and entities could help make this happen in states both red and blue: legislators, school boards, principals, teachers, parents, and community members.
Discussions about requiring workplace rights education would also be a welcome change from the cultural battles now routinely waged in our nation’s schools, since this is content everyone should be able to agree on. Everyone won’t, of course. But when plutocrats, business groups, or culture-warrior parent activists oppose this proposal, let them explain why.
Let billionaire tech executives explain their objection to teaching high schoolers about the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, before many of today’s teens were born. Let them explain why students shouldn’t learn about gig corporations’ tooth-and-nail fight to avoid having to pay even that paltry rate.
And the family values crew? Surely they’d want students to learn that the United States is one of only a handful of countries in the world—and the only industrialized country—that doesn’t require paid maternity or parental leave when a new child is born.
Conservatives want abstinence-only sex education? Then they should welcome training about laws prohibiting sexual harassment, and how to report handsy gropers and creeps.
Culture warriors worry about bathrooms? I do too, but here’s my concern: I want teenagers to know that it’s not a safe workplace if the pace is so fast that you can’t step away to use the bathroom. Work shouldn’t cause urinary tract infections. People should never have to wear diapers on the job, as has been reported at poultry plants, or pee in bottles, as has happened among Amazon delivery drivers.
And a word for teachers, who might fret about adding one more topic to an already-packed curriculum: This content is perfectly suited for the end of the school year. Even antsy seniors will perk up when the subject is managers stealing their tips.
To be sure, a proposal to teach students about employment laws may seem modest in light of the country’s dire situation generally, and in light of attacks on labor more specifically. But people’s utter lack of knowledge about workplace rights is exactly what sets the stage for steamrolling them, at a moment when the federal government is already rolling out the red carpet for exploitation. Plus, workers’ rights education could foster greater skepticism and a heightened sense of agency in relation to mega-corporations that currently have far too much power—both in our political landscape and in people’s everyday lives as workers, consumers and small businesses. Wouldn’t it be just a little healing, too, if we had some positive movement somewhere?
Already one state is leading the way: California in 2003 passed a law designating Workforce Readiness Week, required in all public high schools, during which students learn about child labor, minimum wage, unionizing, workplace safety, and other workplace laws. Incorporating this kind of practical, life-skills content is nothing new; Illinois law, for example, requires basic consumer and financial literacy education, including about debt, banking, and installment purchasing.
Adding workers’ rights education to the high school curriculum is hard-nosed, humane, and long overdue. It reflects some core shared values. First: that high school students need to learn responsibility, self-discipline, and teamwork. And also: that each one of them is a precious, irreplaceable human being, not a line item or a cog. Every young person should start their life knowing they have rights on the job, and that they are worthy of fair pay, safety, dignity and respect.
