“Unions remind us that people deserve to be treated properly,” said Candace Thomas-Rennie, a school counselor at Manhattan’s Leadership and Public Service HS, who participated in the fourth annual Future in Focus career fair at UFT headquarters in Manhattan on Oct. 31. The event, which helped nearly 500 students from city public high schools learn the benefits of unionized careers, was sponsored by the UFT High School Division and the AFL-CIO New York City Central Labor Council.

In the past, said Thomas-Rennie, students received little exposure to career paths that involved joining the workforce right out of high school. The fair, she said, “helped students see that there are different types of trades and unionized careers available to them, even without a college degree.”

UFT President Michael Mulgrew also stressed “options, options, options” and asked the assembled students, “How are you going to make life work for you?” He called on the students to control their own destiny.

The students heard from representatives of several unionized professions during a panel discussion chaired by Natasha Isma of AFSCME District Council 37, the city’s largest public employee union. Panelists highlighted the increased importance of unions at a time of growing wealth and income inequality and called on participants to not only join unions, but to become active union members.

Students saw the topics of the day dramatized in “A Labor Story,” a play created expressly for the event by the Working Theater. They also explored presentations from local unions in four themed rooms covering trades, education, public service, and entertainment, arts and tourism.

UFT Vice President for Academic High Schools Janella Hinds, the event organizer, said the career fair “draws a connection between who we are as educators and who we are as activists” by creating “a phenomenal opportunity to expose high school students to organized labor, unionized careers and the benefit of collective bargaining.”

Hortense Blakey, a career and technical education teacher and the workplace learning coordinator at Brooklyn Studio Secondary School, said the fair offered her commercial arts students a look at “the real world of work.”

“My students loved it,” she said, “particularly the opportunity to understand what unions are really about.”