Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
Page Length: 14
Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 14 pages.
In this role play activity, students assume the roles of union members and attempt to figure out how to respond to a threatened plant closure.
Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
Page Length: 3
Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 3 pages.
This lesson introduces students to Bertolt Brecht’s poem, A Worker Reads History. Students reflect on the creative role of workers in making history.
Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
Page Length: 7
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.
Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
Page Length: 3
Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 4 pages.
Activity for students to write from the point of view of one of the women featured in the film Union Maids.
Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
Page Length: 8
Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 8 pages.
In this playful activity, students utilize the principles of “scientific management” to restructure a burger joint—one that has been run a good deal more democratically and imaginatively.
Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
Page Length: 8
Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 8 pages.
Lesson engages students in a lively simulation that helps them experience some of the pressures that lead workers to organize.
Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
Page Length: 2
Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond.
This lesson uses Charlie Chaplin’s hilarious classic film, Modern Times, to help students think about the impact of “scientific management” on the workplace.
Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
Page Length: 7
Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 7 pages.
Students explore the power of songs to build solidarity and increase understanding. This is the final activity from Bigelow and Diamond’s labor history book, The Power in Our Hands, and draws on the other lessons.
