Building a Multiracial Working-Class Movement through Civic Unionism and Potluck Dinners

Union Education

The St. Louis labor movement has long fought the business community’s efforts to break its unions. Now some of the unions, seeing that businesses can weaken them by tapping into a vast reserve of non-union labor from St. Louis’ poor black communities, are getting more serious about organizing in those communities.

One such union is the painters’ local, which runs a ten-week Advanced Skills Workforce Center (ASWC) three times a year, along with WES and another local group, People’s Community Action, Inc. Giljum and Neal teach the prospective union members labor history, know-your-rights-on-the-job, and an overview of how St. Louis’ electoral politics system works. Pecinovsky said that between five and fifteen students, almost all African-American men, graduate from the program each term, having learned hands-on painting and sanding, how to get through a job interview, and other skills needed to get and keep a union job. Once ASWC participants graduate, they are placed with a union contractor, making between $15 and $20 per hour plus benefits. They then join DC 58 as union apprentices. More than eighty students have graduated from the program so far.

. . . WES teaches apprentice painters “what it actually means to be part of a collective bargaining unit . . .”

Steve Wayland, business director of the Painters District Council 58 and coordinator of the ASWC, said that WES teaches apprentice painters “what it actually means to be part of a collective bargaining unit and about the formation of unions and the power of a collective as more than just one person.” Wayland adds that he finds the civics education to be particularly relevant for apprentices. They learn “the structures that lie within St. Louis, from the aldermen on up, [and acquire] the knowledge that they have a voice in what happens to their communities through those mechanisms.”

Wayland says he has seen more graduates start to become “mini activists in their communities” in the year and a half that WES has been teaching in the ASWC program. “Before, people were afraid to stand up.” Wayland said small examples of this shift are in evidence in communities around the city: In one community, he said the ASWC graduates organized a group in their neighborhood to clean up a park. Then they brought the problem of the neglected park to their city alderman, demanding action. “They hear what the aldermen are saying, but they don’t see the results,” Wayland said. “They say ‘I can’t even take my children to the park because of the litter and the drugs.’ It changes the whole dynamic.”

Al Neal said he hopes WES can soon raise enough money to start running the classes as an independent curriculum from its headquarters, rather than just having classes available through the unions. He looks forward to “creating militant workers to combat what is likely going to be a majority conservative labor board [or National Labor Relations Board] that is going to roll back labor protections.”

Mobilizing the Grassroots

WES leaders are not simply hoping to create more union members, though. Their ambition is to turn St. Louis into a more progressive city; a key part of their strategy involves getting more people into civic participation. Although WES cannot endorse specific political parties or candidates for office because of IRS rules governing non-profit organizations, each election cycle, the WES volunteers dive into the contests to influence the hearts and minds of the city’s majority black working class.

Thirty-two-year-old Missouri state Rep. Bruce Franks Jr. has seen firsthand the results of WES’ civic outreach efforts. Franks, a father of five and a gun violence prevention activist ² from a black neighborhood hard-hit by poverty and violence, said he was impressed after he approached WES to use its headquarters to hold toy and food drives for his non-profit group, 28 to Life. “They’re predominately white and they fight—for real—for black lives,” he said. “They’re not just using hashtags or saying they are doing things. They actually get out there and do the work.”

As a result [of WES’ efforts], nearly five hundred new voters registered . . .

That work includes hosting community events such as the popular monthly vegan potlucks, which Pecinovsky says have seen over a thousand people in attendance over the past ten months, and punk rock shows that include political teach-ins on issues such as LGBTQ pride and stopping gun violence.

Franks credits WES staffer Shuron Jones and her voter registration operation ³ with having played an important role in November’s election turnout:

They did voter registration all across the city and not just in white neighborhoods. They went into the trenches, into places where people didn’t know them. They knocked on doors. Some people got mad and cursed them out and slammed the door in their faces. But they stayed consistent.

Pecinovsky said the effort was part of what was dubbed the WES Votes campaign/Four Wards Forward, following a conversation with other community groups doing voter education in St. Louis. WES volunteered to take four aldermanic wards as its area of concentration: wards 9, 20, 15, and 8, all of them in the southwest-central part of town. Before mapping their routes, Jones and her volunteers had regular meetings at WES with aldermen and some state representatives to discuss what was needed to maximize voter participation and turnout. As a result, nearly five hundred new voters registered with Jones’ team in 2016. Franks won his race in the 78th state legislative district, and another WES member, Peter Merideth, also won a State House seat in the 80th district. WES member Rasheen Aldridge won a seat on the city’s Board of Aldermen, and several progressive citywide measures passed, including a raise to an $11 per hour minimum wage, which is currently being debated in Missouri’s state Supreme Court.

Reviving Civic Unionism

According to labor historian Rosemary Feurer, early twentieth-century United Electrical (UE) leader William Sentner used a similar approach of civic unionism—interweaving trade unionism, racial justice, and civic action—while organizing the wartime munitions factories of the Midwest. ⁴ Instead of merely demanding a slice of the profits, Sentner and his members stepped back and saw

that capital organizes at the local level, just as they do at the global level, that they need that spatial control. And they came to the conclusion that they had to use the concept of civic unionism, to say that we workers need to control our turf.

Giljum described the model this way:

Sentner organized the unemployed, he organized the renters during the Depression—then that union received . . . tremendous support when they took action against their employers for their members. The community joined in—they knew if the members couldn’t win, they couldn’t win. Even though they weren’t dues paying members, they were very active members of the organization and a backbone to it. That’s where I see labor has to go if they’re to survive at all.

Racial injustice is also a critical issue for WES. Deeply segregated St. Louis has experienced uprisings by members of its black working class. These include the 1964 picketing of the Gateway Arch construction site to demand a fair share of jobs for black workers, ⁵ the 1999 mass march that shut down the I-70 highway to protest the lack of city contracts for black-owned businesses, and most recently the 2014 uprisings in Ferguson over the shooting of Michael Brown by St. Louis police officer Darren Wilson.

A Punk Rock Ethos

Finding enough money is an ongoing challenge for WES, which holds to a “DIY” (do-it-yourself) ethos in its funding efforts. Although WES has a 501(c)3 non-profit designation, Pecinovsky said it eschews the approach of working contacts in the philanthropic world to compete with other local organizations for the same few foundation grants. Instead, WES raises cash from direct donations, fundraiser events, and membership dues.

. . . Sentner and his members . . . saw “that capital organizes at the local level” . . .

Pecinovsky wrote in an email that WES does receive some financial support from various unions in St. Louis, to the tune of around $1,000 per union annually. But that is nowhere near enough to keep all of WES’ programs running or to pay its tiny staff. “The largest chunk of our financing comes from our dues payments and sustainers every month,” he said.

Expecting participants to cover a share of the cost that it takes to run WES may fit with the civic-unionism approach—but it requires WES board members and leaders to be in constant canvassing mode. Pecinovsky estimates that WES has about one hundred “sustainers” who donate between $5 and $500 per month, and WES charges admission to each of the three or four events that it hosts every month. In addition, Pecinovsky said, he or another WES leader will pass the hat during events. In-kind donations are always welcome, too—Pecinovsky said that skilled tradespeople, artists, musicians, and craftspeople show up regularly to help.

Even with such a lean budget, Pecinovsky has clear goals. “Ten years from now I would like to be able to look back and say we’ve changed people’s lives in these four wards,” he said. About the Advanced Skills Workforce Center, Pecinovsky hopes to be able to

say we averaged graduating 50 people a year for ten years . . . that 500 people, mostly African-American men, now have a union job in a trade, making a living wage with union benefits. We need to pay attention to these concrete, tangible ways that we improve people’s lives.

Recently, WES’ work has begun to attract the attention of more well-established labor institutions, including the member unions of the St. Louis Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO, which voted unanimously in January to charter the Workers’ Education Society as a workers’ center affiliated with the AFL-CIO. Pecinovsky takes the move as a vote of confidence in WES’ mission and in the relationships it has built on its way to becoming a legitimate player in the city’s labor and civic arenas. He remarked,

I don’t think it could have happened without the history that we all have. We’re comprised of mostly commies and socialists and labor activists and community activists. Even though St. Louis is kind of a big city, everything still depends on who you know.

Like Pecinovsky, Bruce Franks views building power for St. Louis’ multiracial working class as a long-term project, saying it will take the commitment of people such as the WES staff and volunteers who are willing to fight above their weight. “Whenever you are fighting injustice, there is always someone on the other side protecting the injustice,” said Franks. “But the thing that latched me on to WES was just that love for the people—no matter what you are, gay, straight, black, white, Muslim, whatever. It’s a small group that does the work of a thousand.”