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Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center, coaches students as part of the Collective Bargaini

The Collective Bargaining Education Project, initiated by UCLA’s Labor Center with the support of United Teachers Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Unified School District, aims to teach students the importance of labor relations by giving them a simulated experience in labor negotiations.

Founded in 1991 by the Center for Labor Research and Education at UCLA, this nationwide project seeks to provide an educational forum for high school students to learn about the dynamics of labor relations.

“We designed this interactive learning module to give students a better understanding of the whole collective bargaining process,” said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center, which seeks to promote labor studies among both university and high school students.

The Labor Center help set up the project, which now successfully stands by itself with the help of a national grant.

The importance of negotiation in the realm of labor relations has recently been re-emphasized in light of the ongoing contract dispute between the Coalition for University Employees and the University of California.

The Education Project organizes a citywide Collective Bargaining Institute every year, which brings together more than 100 high school students from all over the Los Angeles Unified School District and engages them in mock negotiation sessions.

In these simulated bargaining sessions, students play the roles of unions and management, and are taught how to reach peaceable agreements by their supervising teachers and union volunteers.

The project also employs full-time teachers and consultants who visit every high school in the Los Angeles district to both train teachers and educate students in the art of labor relations.

“Students learn skills of conflict resolution and how to negotiate from a power of strength,” said Linda Tubach, a high school teacher who helped launch the project.

“They are essentially rehearsing the roles of adults in the workplace. And as they handle all the decisions themselves, they learn that individuals can make a difference,” she said.

These sessions also provide students with labor education that they might otherwise not receive in their schools and colleges, said June McMahon, the coordinator of labor programs at the UCLA Labor Center.

“Students don’t even hear about unions in high schools,” McMahon said. “This project exposes them to this method of negotiation between unions and management.”

Negotiations are essentially nothing more than a set of rules that govern the relationship between workers and management. When workers come together as unions, the process of collective bargaining develops.

“Both unions and management use arguments, compromises and trade-offs to solve their problems and reach agreements on issues,” she said.

These issues generally involve wages, working conditions and hours, which are often inherent sources of conflicting interests for union workers and management.

Collective bargaining manages to peaceably resolve these disputes as much as 98 percent of the time, McMahon said.

But, it is the 2 percent that usually makes the news, as is the case with the current contract dispute between the union of university employees and the UC.

“Unions and management are generally able to settle their differences through negotiations,” McMahon said. “Only very rarely do they resort to a threat of strike or lockout, though it’s only this that you see in the papers.”

McMahon also teaches the Management 180 course at UCLA, which deals with collective bargaining and the art of negotiations. “In the first couple of weeks, we organize negotiation sessions and collective bargaining games, and students find it very enjoyable,” she said.

The simulated bargaining sessions met with a similar response in high schools, McMahon said, where students took to their first experiences of bargaining and negotiations like “ducks to water.”

Students began to excitedly resort to collective bargaining on every issue they could think of, she said, even ready to approach their teachers with their own demands.