TP

First, while we are an official workers’ center — we were chartered by the St. Louis Central Labor Council in January 2017, and we work closely with a number of unions — we do not take legal action on behalf of workers like some workers’ centers. For example, we do not organize day laborers or farm workers. Nor do we have lawyers on hand to litigate against employers or contractors. That’s not our model. That not our mission. It’s an important and necessary function of some workers’ centers, but it’s not what we do.

Our model is a bit different, and more ambitious, like you said. Perhaps less reform oriented, and more uniquely placed within St Louis’ radical labor history.

We are a worker-education society reminiscent of the ethnic workers’ societies that existed across the country at the turn of the twentieth century, including in St Louis.

Different ethnic groups — Czechs, Germans, Lithuanians, etc. — had different workers’ societies and they served a different role than workers’ centers today. They were often mutual-benefit societies. They offered old-country continuity, while also helping recent immigrants acclimate to the new environment, to the new country. They were also left-leaning and socialist oriented. They were a political home. Many had an affinity towards Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association, the First International, and drew inspiration from that history. So that is part of what makes us different. We’re a political home in the tradition of the old ethnic workers’ societies.

Additionally, we’re more akin to the popular-education institutions led by the Communist Party during the 1930s and ’40s. Institutions like the Jefferson School of Social Science, which offered ongoing adult education geared towards worker activism, unionism, challenging racism and sexism, philosophy, expanding democratic rights, and culture.

At its peak — before the McCarthy-era witch-hunts — the Jefferson School had about ten thousand students annually. And it was only one of the many different schools the party ran throughout the country. This was popular education at its best, not just lectures, or the banking model. It was dialectical education geared towards activating workers, moving them into action while providing a political and historical foundation rooted in Marxism and class struggle.

So we see ourselves as a merger of the traditional ethnic workers’ societies and the Communist Party-led popular-education institutions. However, we’re also very contemporary and offer an array of community services aimed at building what we call a WES Votes constituent base. We have monthly potlucks, community concerts, organizing and training opportunities, leadership development classes, and meeting facilitation, and offer a welcoming space available for community and labor allies. On top of that, we engage in targeted, ward-specific voter registration, education, and mobilization.

We have a number of community engagement campaigns. Our WES Votes campaign is a voter registration campaign. Our Four Wards Forward program specifically targets folks for leadership development in our concentration, or service areas: wards 8, 9, 15, and 20 — the four wards that surround our headquarters.

Due to this targeted approach, our members now sit on the boards of all of the ward organizations, as well as some of the business associations, in our concentration area. And three of the four alder-people in our service wards are WES members, as are the two state representatives whose districts overlap our concentration wards.

Unlike some other workers’ centers, we are attempting to build a ward-based progressive political machine with a solidified base of WES Votes constituents. Voter registration, education, and mobilization in partnership with local unions is central to this effort. So, we’re also a lot like the old ACORN with a constituent base of sustainers and dues-paying members who drive the work of the organization at a local level.

Finally, we assist unions — specifically, the skilled trades — in building membership among people of color and women. For example, our partnership with the Painters’ Union DC58 and their Advanced Skills Workforce Center, has graduated eighty-plus African-American men over the past two years into union jobs.

Mind you, many of these folks were making minimum wage — if they were lucky enough to have a job — prior to their participation in this program. Now they are card-carrying union members making around $20 per hour plus benefits, health care, pension, and vacation time, and they have a have career, a skilled trade they can take anywhere.

Specifically, over each ten-week session WES provides political education, labor history, and a training on your rights as a worker. We even do mock contract negotiations with the students. We prepare them politically. We lay the foundation that prepares them to hopefully become activist members, shop stewards, and elected union officers. That’s our role — popular education geared towards activism. The union, of course, provides the skills-based component, the actual trade skills, the certificate programs. That’s their role.

We see our partnership with the Painters, as well as with other unions, as a mutually beneficial relationship, the hallmark of a healthy left-labor alliance, albeit on a small scale within a geographically defined area.

We are also unique in that it is the skilled trades — a section of the labor movement not always known for its foresight, progressive politics, or attention to race and gender equality — that we work with most. In a sense, at least locally, they see and acknowledge the problem — the history of racism within the trades — and are taking steps to correct this history, at least within those trades which which we work. So that also makes us different.

So those are four very unique aspects of WES and the work that we do.