SPRINGFIELD, Mo.—On March 29, community members in Springfield, Missouri, attended the Springfield Worker Power School. Gathering in Missouri’s most impoverished major city—more so than Kansas City, St. Louis—or our capital Jefferson City. Working people learned from experienced organizers in the Teamsters, Plumbers and Pipefitters, Starbucks Workers United, and the Springfield Central Labor Council about organizing their workplaces from the bottom up.
The school was a coalition of nearly a dozen community organizations including the Teamsters, Starbucks Workers United, Springfield Central Labor Council, Plumbers and Pipefitters, Missouri Jobs with Justice, PROMO, NAACP, Springfield Tenants Unite, Drury Universities’ Black United Independent Collegiate, Drury Allies, Missouri State Universities Advocacy and Alliance, Missouri State Universities NAACP, The Springfield Young Communist League, and the Southwest Missouri Communist Party USA joined to build worker power in a moment where workers are constantly under attack.
Starting the morning with a talk on labor history from Tony Pecinovsky and Stewart Acuff, school members learned about the long processes of the workers’ movement and how our power shifts and adapts to our economic situation from a macro and micro perspective. The lesson specifically talked about how our union movement has shifted from crafts to industrial to now service-based and how we as organizers must meet the moment to organize working people.
Throughout the day, members of the school learned about organizing from start to finish. Attendees heard about labor laws, coalition building, the role of the organizing committee, countering misinformation, public relations and communication, filing with the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board), voting, winning and losing, and other intimate details from experienced union and community organizers.
Members also learned from Stewart Acuff regarding his experience as the National Organizing Director of the AFL-CIO in the early 2000s. The labor activist spoke on organizing in the South, such as shutting down the construction of the Olympics in Atlanta and organizing its workers. Acuff noted that he received death threats from the white supremacist organization the KKK during his organizing campaigns.
This school was a powerful display of solidarity and unity among working class organizations of Southwest Missouri, an area all too often written off and ignored. It is a place where 20% of people live in poverty and where the fascist MAGA movement has sunk its teeth in.
The sentiment coming out of the school was that we will continue to organize, we will continue to fight back, and we will win. The working people of Missouri are determined to move forward together and will not take one step back.
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