We’re less than two weeks away from the convening of the 2023 Southern Worker School in Charlotte, NC.
The response to the school has exceeded our expectations, and your support is needed to make the gathering a success – please consider making a donation of any size and sharing this appeal through your networks to help us reach our goal of $7,500.
| Charlotte – known as the Wall Street of the South given it is home to the second highest concentration of finance capital in the U.S. – is the city where the Southern Workers Assembly was founded a little over 10 years ago as a challenge to the Democratic National Convention. Then, hundreds of workers from many different sectors and organizations across the South gathered to speak out and uplift workers’ demands as the DNC met in the city, located in a right-to-work (for less) state with one of the lowest densities of union members in the country and a Jim Crow ban on public sector collective bargaining still the law. That gathering set the tone for our work over the years since – a central focus on organizing the unorganized and building an independent, social movement-oriented infrastructure of workers in the South; emphasizing the leadership of Black workers and the link between the fight against racism and oppression, and the fight to build worker power; and a commitment to developing rank-and-file leadership engaged in collective actions that link our struggles to advance the development of a movement that can challenge capital and the white supremacist political system. |
| The upcoming worker school is shaping up to be one of our largest and most geographically expansive gatherings to date, with workers planning to attend from nearly every state in the U.S. South. And the gathering couldn’t come at a more critical and urgent moment. There’s no mincing words about – our enemies are powerful, have virtually unlimited resources at their disposal, and, particularly in the South, are launching a full scale assault on working class and oppressed people. Capital and its most reactionary political stewards are emboldened and increasingly ruthless in their drive to increase exploitation and sow divisions. At the same time, various sections of the working class are in motion and looking for avenues to fight back. How do we rally our forces to make strategic interventions in this context? How do we unite the various struggles into a broader and powerful movement that has its roots in the workplace and connects these issues together? How do we wage the necessary defensive struggles, while also looking for openings to go on the offensive? The school will take up these and other pressing questions, and offer a strategy to fight back in the development and expansion of workers assemblies across the South. |
| We need your support to make it happen. Please consider making a donation of any size that will go directly towards the many costs associated with the gathering – including printing, food, space rentals, support provided to enable rank and file workers from various sectors to participate in the Southern Worker School, and more. Onwards to build a powerful workers movement and organize the South! In solidarity, Southern Workers Assembly |
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