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Getting More Than They Bargain For

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Times Staff Writer

The contract negotiators glared at one another from opposite ends of long tables in a dozen stuffy conference rooms, their words -- well, shouts -- rising over shuffling papers and the tapping of calculator keys.

“This is ridiculous!”

“This is all we can offer.”

“You’re being stubborn.”

“Last proposal!”

The intensity was real, but the situation was not.

Every year, about 100 Los Angeles high school students gather for a full day of playing hard-boiled union and management bosses in a simulated contract negotiation. The exercise, dubbed the Collective Bargaining Institute, is a labor version of the better known mock trial for wannabe lawyers.

The students, divided into groups of 10 and then into teams of “management” and “union,” are given a fact sheet with each side’s goals. (In this case, the workers at the mythical for-profit Getwell Hospital wanted a substantial raise.) Participants are expected to reach a resolution by day’s end. Negotiators from labor and management backgrounds act as coaches.

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“It’s like fighting. I’m all shaking,” said Dina Abdelhady, a senior at Canoga Park High School, after her union side won a decent raise just before bell time.

The institute, founded in 1991, is co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Unified School District, the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education, and several dozen local unions. Since 1998, a federal mediation service has provided funding for the related Collective Bargaining Education Project, in which two teachers take weeklong lessons throughout the year to high school social studies and economics classrooms all over Los Angeles.

Together, those programs form what federal government and union officials describe as the most comprehensive effort in the nation to teach high school students about labor issues.

“Collective bargaining is part of our nation’s public policy, actually. This puts students into the adult work world in a sense, introduces them to it and empowers them to address issues that they will probably face in the workplace,” said Linda Tubach, one of the teachers in the Los Angeles project.

For their weeklong programs, Tubach and colleague Patty Litwin teach about labor history and laws. Toward the end, they line up real-life negotiators to coach students in drafting make-believe contracts. The resolutions often vary widely.

“I have to say, really, we need more people doing this kind of thing, bringing the real world into the classroom, and helping the kids use skills they didn’t know they had. It’s thrilling for a teacher,” said Alexa Maxwell, a history and economics teacher at University High School in West Los Angeles who hosted the labor program a few months ago.

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Her students played negotiators at “E-Z Insurance Co.,” where employees had authorized a strike at the end of the day if they were denied generous health benefits. To make matters worse for management, a competitor was trying to buy out the company, promising to give workers stock options.

Milan Brewer, one of Maxwell’s students, said he couldn’t see the point of the exercise at first. “But it was a big race, so as we got into it, it got better. It was a real debate, real professional, and it got heated at times,” he said.

The Education Project was launched with a $100,000 grant from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, an agency that gets called into real high-profile labor disputes. Tubach and Litwin now regularly fly across the country, including to New York and San Francisco, to help other school districts stage similar simulations.

“It shows the students that there are two sides to collective bargaining. They’re learning that there is a cost to health benefits, there is a cost to child care benefits, there is a cost to wages,” said Cindy Gonzalez, a federal service mediator who is based in Glendale and attended the Collective Bargaining Institute last month. “Based on the success of this one in Los Angeles, they are duplicating it on a national level.”

The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service grant calls for any programs it sponsors to balance labor and management perspectives, Gonzalez said. But the teachers admit they don’t always achieve that. Attorneys from management firms serve as simulation coaches but tend to be overwhelmingly outnumbered by union representatives.

“To be honest, there just aren’t a whole lot of management folks out there that have an interest in this,” Tubach said.

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Still, veteran management attorney Willard Carr volunteers as a simulation coach several times a year. “There’s no right or wrong, as long as there’s an agreement. They catch on and run with the ball, and really want to win,” he said.

The highlight of the year is the big one-day bargaining session institute, which draws students from many high schools. It was held last month at the United Teachers-Los Angeles headquarters in the Wilshire district.

As the clock wound down in one room, the tension during the Getwell Hospital negotiations was sometimes palpable.

“It seems like we’re bending over to your every want,” said Venice High School senior Derrick Pearson, with an unsettlingly serious look on his face, during his management team’s session. His side offered a small wage increase in exchange for an on-site child care center. “This is seriously, like, a lot.”

“It’s very close to what happens in real life,” whispered Bob McCloskey, a professional negotiator for Service Employees International Union Local 535, who was coaching in the room.

At the end of the day, the 12 negotiating groups shared their results, drawing boos and cheers for various resolutions. In many cases, management teams trounced their labor counterparts and, astoundingly, one group persuaded labor to take a pay cut.

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But that wasn’t the case for a team that used name tags to make signs reading “Demand Respect” and plastered them all over their clothing. The tactic earned them more concessions.

“Some in the management teams do see themselves as superior to their workers and try to bully them,” Tubach said. “And that comes from a cultural perspective, from society, and we really try to challenge that idea. Our coaches discourage arrogance.”

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