Labor and Employment Studies
Bachelor of Arts, Minor
About this program
The Bachelor of Arts in Labor and Employment Studies helps you study work and labor issues in today’s global world. You explore topics like globalization, labor rights, diversity and corporate responsibility. You build analytical, writing, debating and teamwork skills. You focus on key labor topics through courses, and then choose from electives, a research project or internship and complementary studies outside the major for well-rounded learning.
Program Curriculum and Requirements
Program Scope
The Labor and Employment Studies program provides students with an introduction to and understanding of the study of labor and employment relations, broadly defined. Over the past few decades, the study of labor and employment relations has expanded significantly to include new topics that did not previously exist as areas of academic inquiry: globalization and employment relations, international labor standards, human rights and labor standards, corporate social responsibility and corporate codes of conduct, monitoring and accountability frameworks, global supply and value chains, corporate governance and employment relations, “decent work,” equality and diversity at work, labor and “global cities,” employment relations in emerging economies, high-performance work systems, global corporations, and global unions.
Program Learning Outcomes
- Improve their analytical thinking skills: students will, for example, learn to analyze the effects of globalization on workers in the US and around the world, and learn to analyze individual gendered and racialized experiences of work within larger social structures.
- Improve their reading, analytical, and discussion skills. For example, through various multi-disciplinary readings, students will learn to analyze and discuss distinctive approaches to workplace discrimination such as sociological, social-psychological, legal, and so on; they will learn to analyze issues such as the sub-processes that sustain discrimination such stereotypes, unconscious biasses and micro-aggressions at work.
- Improve their communication skills: for example, students will provide short presentations on several labor and employment-related topics such as the foundational concepts of workplace diversity and structural and ideological barriers to achieving it.
- Improve their debating skills: students will learn to analyze and debate, for example, contemporary and historical feminist positions about women and work; or they will learn to analyze and debate management, public policy and legal approaches to achieving workplace diversity with respect to race, gender and sexual orientation.
- Improve their research and writing skills. On each of the labor and employment issues above, and on many others, students will first develop independent research skills, primarily through finding the most timely, relevant and informative articles on the topics under discussion; second, students will learn how to write concise 800-1200-word articles for potential publication, along with longer 3000-4000-word research papers.
Minor in Labor and Employment Studies
The Minor in Labor and Employment Studies gives you a focused introduction to work and labor in a changing world. You begin with a course like Introduction to the Study of Labor. Then you choose three upper‑division courses — such as Women and Work, History of Labor in the U.S. or Labor Rights in the Global Economy.
Learn more about the Minor in Labor and Employment Studies