Circle: Impact of Trade Union Youth Programs on Young Workers Political Engagement and Participaton

Workplan As grocery stores represent the second largest employer of teenage labor in the US we will concentrate our research efforts in this industry (Tannock, 2001). We propose to test our model in the context of two large locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers (Local 227 and 1099). These locals have a combined membership of almost 38,000 and represent workers in the grocery and packing plant industries. Youth represent upwards of 25% of their membership with workers as young as fourteen and fifteen years of age employed in more than 200 grocery stores located in Kentucky and southern Ohio. In a nutshell, our plan is to.set up a quasi-experimental design where we: 1) pretest a stratified random sample of youth by grocery stores regarding their baseline level of political engagement; 2) randomly select grocery stores for the development and implementation of a social capital building exercise specifically directed at young union members; 3) conduct a post-test of political engagement of the same youth in both the treatment and control groups; 4) empirically test for whether the youth exposed to social capital building activities had significantly higher levels of political engagement than the youth who were not exposed the social capital building activities. The details of the elements of this plan are elaborated below.