The General Labor Studies Minor provides students with a foundation for further specialization in areas relevant to their individual interests. Course requirements may vary by campus. Contact the Department of Labor Studies on your campus for specific requirements.
Require completion of 15 credits hours to include:
This course includes coverage of historical development, labor law basics, and contemporary issues. It also discusses a survey of labor unions in the United States, focusing on their organization and their representational, economic, and political activities.
This course explores the struggles of working people to achieve dignity and security from social, economic, and political perspectives. It also explores a survey of the origin and development of unions and the labor movement from colonial times to the present.
This course serves as an orientation for the study of labor history. It explores both critical and historical methodologies based on primary and secondary sources, biases, and interpretations. Discussions focus on selective questions and events.
This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary and advocacy approach of labor studies. Exploring labor’s role in society, the class will look at how unions have changed the lives of working people and contributed to better social policies. Discussions will highlight the relationship of our work lives to our non-work lives and will look at U.S. labor relations in a comparative framework.
Required for all Labor Studies program majors. This course introduces the Labor Studies degree and to the knowledge and skills needed by students to progress toward a degree in a reasonable time frame. Students will learn how to build a plan of study that takes advantage of both credit for prior learning and new learning opportunities.
Emphasis for this course is placed on developing learning
portfolios as foundation documents for academic self-assessment and planning and as applications for self-acquired competency (SAC) credit. This course applies only as elective credit to labor studies degrees.
This course explores statutes and common-law actions protecting income, working conditions, and rights of workers. Topics include workers’ compensation, unemployment compensation, fair labor standards, Social Security, retirement income protection, and privacy and other rights.
This course reviews a survey of the law governing labor-management relations. Topics include the legal framework of collective bargaining, problems in the administration and enforcement of agreements, and protection of individual employee rights.
This course examines federal, state, and local governmental effects on workers, unions, and labor-management relations; political goals; influences on union choices of strategies and modes of political participation, past and present; relationships with community and other groups.
This course examines some of the major problems confronting society, workers, and the labor movement. Topics may include automation, unemployment, international trade, environmental problems, minority and women’s rights, community relations, and changing government policies.
This course examines policies and practices that contribute to workplace discrimination and those designed to eliminate it. It explores effects of job discrimination and occupational segregation. It analyzes Title VII, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and related topics in relation to broader strategies for addressing discrimination.
This course looks at union representation in the workplace. It evaluates uses of grievance procedures to address problems and administer the collective bargaining agreement. It also explores analyses of relevant labor law and the logic applied by arbitrators to grievance decisions. Students learn about the identification, research, presentation, and writing of grievance cases.
This course analyses aspects of the political economy of labor and the role of organized labor within it. It emphases the effect on workers, unions, collective bargaining of unemployment, investment policy, changes in technology and corporate structure. It also explores patterns of union political and bargaining responses.
This course explores the globalization of trade, production, and migration and the effects of these processes on American workers. Through reading, discussion, and problem formation, students will critically think about the ways global processes and policies impact American workers’ daily lives, analyze existing historical and current justifications for offshore production and the dismantling of barriers to trade and investment, and explore alternatives to these policies.
This course reviews elements and issues of occupational health and safety and emphases the union’s role in the implementation of workplace health and safety programs, worker and union rights, hazard recognition techniques, and negotiated and statutory remedies—in particular the OSHA Act of 1970.
This course provides collective bargaining simulations and other participatory experiences in conjunction with L250. L250 is either a prerequisite or a core requisite.
This course explores union organization and representation of state and municipal government employees, including patterns in union structure, collective bargaining, grievance representation, and applicable law.
This course evaluates organizational leadership issues for union, community, and other advocate organizations. It analyzes leadership styles, membership recruitment, and leadership development. It examines the role of leaders in internal governance and external affairs, including committee building, delegation, negotiations, and coalition building.
This course provides an analysis of the growth, composition, structure, behavior, and governmental processes of U.S. labor organizations, from the local to the national federation level. It considers the influence on unions of industrial and political environments; to organizational behavior in different types of unions; and to problems in union democracy.
This course explores the origins of white privilege from the era of industrialization and the rise of the factory system in the US, the manifestations of white privilege in today’s workplace and the mechanisms by which white privilege creates workplace advantages and inequalities. The foundational materials include the scholarship of W.E. B. DuBois (1925), David Roediger (1999-2005), Herbert Gutman (1973), Edgar Schein (1990) and Nkomo (2014). The interrogation of white privilege in the workplace is viewed through the lens of organizational analysis and political economy theory.
This course explores the impact of global supply chains (GSCs) on workers’ abilities to maintain adequate living standards, the regulatory frameworks under which trade, investment and taxation occur, and the strategies/tactics workers can use to create an alternative governing structure which promotes sustainable work and development within the GSC.<strong> </strong>
This course explores various approaches and problems in private- and public-sector organizing. Traditional approaches are evaluated considering structural changes in labor markets and workforce demographics. Topics range from targeting and assessments to committee building and leadership development.
This is a capstone experience for associate degree students.
This course, situated in political economy theory of discrimination, interrogates workplace challenges women experience. Discussions include women’s position and participation in the workforce within the context of race, class, and gender. Strategies and initiatives to correct gender and wage disparities, job insecurity, and sexual harassment and create inclusive workplaces follows.
This course examines media (and, in turn, public) understanding of the U.S. labor movement and analyzes reaction to some specific, highly publicized strikes. News media have rarely served as independent storytellers of strikes. Instead they have told stories that are aligned with the generally antilabor interests of corporate America (including their publishers and parent media corporations). Even among more liberal media, "ordinary" workers are often portrayed as a passive mass that is controlled and directed by unions and labor leaders. It is rare to see any news outlet sympathetic to the beliefs and causes of labor or to striking workers. This course will be driven by the overarching question of why that might be.
This course examines media (and, in turn, public) understanding of the U.S. labor movement and analyzes reaction to some specific, highly publicized strikes. News media have rarely served as independent storytellers of strikes. Instead they have told stories that are aligned with the generally antilabor interests of corporate America (including their publishers and parent media corporations). Even among more liberal media, "ordinary" workers are often portrayed as a passive mass that is controlled and directed by unions and labor leaders. It is rare to see any news outlet sympathetic to the beliefs and causes of labor or to striking workers. This course will be driven by the overarching question of why that might be.
This course will examine the causes, preventions, and individual risks for workers from the real/perceived threat of violence in the workplace. We will identify behavioral, environmental, and administrative factors that contribute or prevent the incidents of violence in the workplace.
This one-credit course will briefly examine all aspects of workplace and academic sexual harassment, including but not limited to definitions, history, federal and state law, EEOC guidelines and procedures, employer and school liability, personnel, school and contract language and policies, and personal perspectives. Reasons for and solutions to workplace and academic sexual harassment will be discussed.
American Dream in an Age of Decline is the interdisciplinary exploration of frameworks within which the notion of the American Dream has been constructed and changed over time in relation to the working class. What is the American Dream? How do the dreamers envision equality in their societies? How do perceptions of and struggles for equality impact definitions of success and happiness? There is no simple response that would be sufficient to these questions. In this course, we will examine what has happened to the American Dream and the life chances of working people. We will focus on the present state of working Americans and see how the standard of living for Americans has been affected (defined) by the larger social, political and economic environments.
Health Care Staffing and Total Worker Health will explore the theory and practice of workforce staffing in health care considering the impact of health care management decisions related to staffing on quality of care for patients and occupational health for workers. Theoretical perspectives, research, union contracts and definitional constructs will be examined and discussed. Participants will work in individually and in pairs to research and explore health care staffing in specific segments of the health care industry and propose an action research project as a synthesis of their learning.
This class will examine the 1993 Family Medical Leave Act law that has given employees new rights to request leave from their employer. We will review the history of the passage of the FMLA and will examine maternity leave, parental leave, sick leave, and protections for disabled workers in US and other countries.
This one (1) credit will examine the dynamics of workplace bullying. We will analyze the factors that contribute to bullying in the workplace. We will examine the types of personalities that allows bullies to perpetrate the harm and how bullies threaten, intimidate, humiliate, and sabotage both targets and workplace productivity.
This course considers ways in which educational researchers and policy makers have identified, examined, and sought to address the goals and challenges of preK-12 public education in the United States. Key characteristics like accountability and testing, desegregation and diversity, school choice and the impact of charter schools, and teachers’ alternative certification are explored. The course is designed to encourage a wide range of viewpoints, and the course readings come from a variety of disciplines including political science, public policy, sociology, anthropology, education, and media reports.
IU School of Social Work Department of Labor Studies
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