Scalawag26%
Pedagogy of the Southern Worker 16%
By Inez O’Donnell13% Lindsey Krenzler-Ferreira13%
7/30/2026, 11:13:58 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Anecdotal, and Framing Effect, with Post Hoc (False Cause) as the most egregious example at 14.8% saturation with 538 hits. Analysis detected 4,141 faulty-reasoning hits from 3,628 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 30.9% and a BS Rank of 16% (18,971 of 22,361 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 84.80% of the article peer group.
The Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW) is an organization of workers in the low-wage, high-turnover service industry of the U.S.
South, with members in North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia.
From the beginning, the union has placed political education at the center of its strategic vision.
USSW understands that to transform workplaces and communities, workers must understand the roots of the system that exploits them and develop the skills necessary to fight back.
As with any union or community organization, USSW runs campaigns to win concrete, material victories.
But the real fruit of the union's organizing work lies in the constant political formation within an expanding base of dedicated worker militants.
Unlike the traditional union model, USSW treats political education not as ancillary training, but as a core component of its method; it is a dimension of the union's approach that makes victories durable and transforms workers into long-term leaders.
Having grew up in New York, Tahtebah "Tee" Gonzalez immediately felt the culture shock of working in the U.S.
South.
At Dunkin', his pay was just $9 an hour, just barely above minimum wage and a third of Fulton County's living wage.
The conditions of low pay, overwork, and understaffing boiled over when Tee and his coworkers discovered that other workers in the same shopping center would be paid extra to work a busy weekend in downtown Atlanta during the Dragon-Con convention.
When a USSW organizer visited his store days later, Tee and his coworkers were already agitated and ready to act.
Within a week, they had organized a weekend-long strike.
The action won them a raise they had once considered impossible.
More importantly, it proved to Tee that workers held real power: When they fight together, they can win.
That breakthrough—shifting from isolated frustration to collective action—was the spark of political consciousness.
But in the USSW, the spark does not fade.
Tee's first strike was only the beginning of a longer process of formation, sustained by the union's model of political education and leadership development.
Through Worker Power Schools, collective study, and the discipline of organizing, Tee deepened his understanding of the system that exploits workers and gained the skills to lead others.
What began as a fight over wages became a journey of transformation: from an exhausted service worker into a committed leader of a broader struggle for dignity and justice in the South.
THE ROLE OF POLITICAL EDUCATION IN ORGANIZING
Workers like Tee have been deeply shaped by the USSW's political education program, particularly through Worker Power Schools: residential training programs designed to develop leadership, strategic thinking, and organizing skills among members.
In August 2024, a Worker Power School specifically for Waffle House workers provided a space for analyzing workplace struggles, connecting them to systemic forces, and refining organizing strategies.
Through study, discussion, skills training, and collective planning, Waffle House workers from across the South developed the confidence and skills necessary to lead workplace actions, negotiate with management, and build solidarity across locations.
Two weeks after the 2024 August Worker Power School, spurred on by the connections they made with other workers and the education they engaged in, Waffle House workers from three different locations in Atlanta delivered demand letters to their employers in a coordinated action, marking a bold step in their ongoing fight for fair wages and safer working conditions.
This experience solidified their understanding that their power does not come from isolated complaints but from unified, strategic action driven by political education.
USSW represents a transformative force in labor organizing, particularly within the U.S.
South's politically repressive and union-hostile landscape.
By connecting political education with direct action, USSW provides workers with the tools to take control of their workplaces and reshape their communities.
Understanding USSW's pedagogical framework reveals how political education is a foundation for worker-led struggle, drawing from historical movements, radical traditions, and global organizing models to develop strategies that challenge exploitation and build collective power.
WHY WORKERS NEED A DIFFERENT EDUCATION
Public education in the United States has been under sustained attack for decades, with particularly devastating consequences for the Southern working class.
State legislatures have systematically slashed funding for public schools, forcing districts, especially those in working-class and Black communities, to operate with crumbling infrastructure, overcrowded classrooms, and underpaid teachers.
This disinvestment has coincided with an aggressive push toward school privatization, charter schools, and voucher programs.
The right-wing assault on education has also weaponized curriculum, censoring discussions of slavery, racism, labor history, and gender justice.
These attacks are strategic.
They aim to create a generation of workers unequipped to critically analyze the system or resist exploitation.
For many USSW members, their first true political education comes through the union, not the classroom.
Education, in its dominant form, functions to maintain existing class structures, reinforcing the power of the ruling class while fragmenting workers.
In the South, this has meant a curriculum designed to discipline Black workers while erasing their history of resistance.
Schools produce a compliant workforce, not critical thinkers or organized leaders within the working class.
USSW's pedagogy breaks with this model.
It creates a transformative educational process that prepares workers not only to challenge exploitation, but also to govern society in their own interest.
The union understands political formation as the ongoing process of turning struggle into analysis, strategy, and leadership.
What makes the USSW distinct is that it turns the whole of struggle into a school—on the strike line, in trainings, and in meetings—where workers' voices carry authority and their participation drives the learning process.
USSW also operates as a community union, recognizing that workers' lives extend beyond their workplaces.
The concept of "community unionism," articulated by Beloved Community Center co-founder Reverend Nelson Johnson, reflects this understanding: that the conditions of work and community are inseparable, and so too must be the organizing response.
By affirming the fundamental humanity of all people, especially those who have been stripped of dignity, USSW's pedagogy seeks to restore agency and promote holistic development.
This approach draws inspiration from the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, who defined political education as "all efforts of mobilization, organizing, and training that prepare people to exercise the power which they must necessarily conquer."
In USSW, education is never abstract or detached.
It is inseparable from organizing, ensuring that every act of study, training, or collective work becomes a practical tool for struggle.
THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF USSW'S PEDAGOGICAL METHOD
USSW's pedagogy is organized around four interconnected dimensions: study, militant work, practical training, and Soul.
Each shapes the learning process and reflects the union's core values.
Together, they ensure that political education is not separate from organizing, but woven into every campaign, school, and meeting.
1.
STUDY
USSW leaders study history and politics from the standpoint of Southern workers.
The relationship between facilitator and participant is dialogic but directive, never neutral.
Dialogic education means that learning happens through conversation, questioning, and collective reflection rather than passive absorption.
Directive education means that facilitators guide the discussion with clear objectives, ensuring lessons move from personal problems to systemic analysis.
This practice is not invented from scratch.
USSW builds on a long lineage of popular education traditions that link study directly to struggle.
Freire, whose literacy campaigns in Brazil taught workers to "perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality," captures one dimension of what USSW puts into practice.
The Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST), which continues this tradition, insists that "full human development occurs through the historical process of learning and socialization, intertwined with cultural, ideological, social, and political aspects."
These global insights resonate deeply in the South, where testimony, storytelling, and collective problem-solving have long been survival tools for Black and working-class communities.
Closer to home, Myles Horton of Highlander Folk School cautioned that while education must begin with people's experiences, it cannot end there: "There's a time when people's experiences run out."
USSW study sessions follow this principle: they start with lived workplace struggles and move outward to the broader systems that produce them.
Workers read aloud from history and political economy texts, wrestle with their meaning together, and then ask how those lessons apply to their own campaigns.
The result is not just knowledge but sharper strategy.
Study in USSW is never abstract; it is always tethered to practice.
It equips workers not only to analyze their conditions but to act together to change them.
2.
MILITANT WORK
USSW aims to reclaim the dignity of labor and develop heightened working-class consciousness by reshaping the meaning of work in its fullness.
Every Worker Power School and event requires members to engage in what the union calls "militant work": cooking, cleaning, childcare, and other shared responsibilities.
These tasks are not included as an afterthought or a chore; they are part of the pedagogy itself.
The category of "work" is understood both in the narrow sense of the labor that employees perform in exchange for a wage, and as the uniquely human act of creation – physical, mental, and cultural.
Freire noted that the instructors in his adult literacy programs in Brazil "began with the conviction that the role of man was not only to be in the world, but to engage in relations with the world – that through acts of creation and re-creation, man makes cultural reality and thereby adds to the natural world, which he did not make.
We were certain that man's relation to reality, expressed as a Subject to an object, results in knowledge."
Militant work also connects to Southern traditions where communal work – whether farming, food preparation, or community childcare – has long sustained working-class life and organizations.
In USSW, militant work becomes a political exercise when it is structured with the intention to overcome the alienation of workers from their labor.
This transformation requires overcoming many dynamics that structure current work conditions, including the separation of manual and intellectual work, as well as the gendered and racialized hierarchies that shape labor exploitation.
Historically, women and workers of color have been relegated to the most devalued and underpaid forms of labor, while their contributions have been erased or diminished.
Militant work in USSW creates a collective practice that not only affirms the dignity of all labor but also actively works to disrupt the social divisions of labor that capitalism relies upon.
Militant work in USSW challenges traditional notions of leadership, competition, and workplace hierarchy.
Members intentionally restructure how they relate to their "coworkers" during militant work time, ensuring leadership is rooted in accountability rather than top-down authority typical in traditional workplaces.
This means actively rejecting the behaviors and attitudes of their bosses and cultivating leadership that fosters mutual respect and shared responsibility.
A key aspect of this transformation is acknowledging and uplifting often invisible labor – the essential but undervalued tasks such as taking out the trash, doing the dishes, leading childcare efforts, and maintaining communal spaces.
These acts of care and maintenance are integral to sustaining the organization and the movement and to making political education processes possible.
USSW's dimension of militant work reinforces the idea that all labor, regardless of visibility or status, has value and contributes to the collective struggle.
Key elements of militant work in USSW include:
* Base Group Responsibilities: Participants take on work necessary for maintaining a functional and organized learning environment, through tasks like cleaning collective spaces, meal preparation, etc.
* Cooperative Projects: Community-oriented service; preparing meals, building resource pantries, and maintaining spaces such as the chapter offices as gathering places outside of scheduled events, embodies a vision of labor that serves collective well-being.
As Studs Terkel wrote in his 1974 book *Working*, "Most of us are looking for a calling, not a job.
Most of us, like the assembly-line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit."
USSW's pedagogical model seeks to expand the meaning of work: work for social uplift rather than profit-making.
By engaging in militant work, workers develop a new relationship with labor – one that is not defined by competition, coercion, or exploitation, but by cooperation, a sense of purpose, and solidarity.
It affirms that work can be an act of humanization rather than alienation.
3.
PRACTICAL TRAINING
A strong and sustainable movement requires an intentional structure that integrates political education with leadership development, ensuring that workers are both learning and practicing the skills needed to sustain organizing efforts.
USSW's organizing model is designed to ensure that workers are not only participants in struggle but also leaders in shaping the movement.
At the core of this structure are Base Groups, which serve as both a site for political education and a vehicle for organizing.
Through these groups, workers engage in small group discussions, build relationships, and take on concrete responsibilities that serve an operational role but also strengthen their leadership within the movement.
In USSW, Base Groups play a critical role in both Worker Power Schools and chapter organizing.
In Worker Power Schools, Base Groups include six to eight people and serve as spaces for structured dialogue and reflection, the completion of militant work, and collective accountability.
Concretely, this means that a portion of the day during Worker Power Schools is spent within the Base Group to discuss and build on the lessons from the day, identify areas where there are still questions, and relate theoretical lessons to the practical tasks ahead of them when they return home.
The Base Groups are also responsible for militant work on a rotating schedule during the school year and for ensuring the participation of each member in the school.
In USSW chapters, Base Groups act as smaller mobilization units that help maintain engagement between major campaigns and actions, allowing veteran members to remain active while also integrating new members into the organization's political work.
Facilitation is especially important.
Members are trained to lead discussions, frame debates, and draw out the voices of others.
This is where leadership development and political education converge: learning to facilitate means learning to listen, to analyze, and to hold a room together with clarity and purpose.
Facilitators learn to engage participants in structured dialogue, ask critical questions, and ensure discussions remain orderly and grounded in political clarity.
This process helps workers develop confidence, strategic thinking, and discipline – all essential skills for workplace and community organizing.
Learning to facilitate also reinforces the principle that education is not something imposed from the outside but a collective and reciprocal process that emerges from within the movement.
Every student is a teacher, and every teacher is a student.
Theresa "TK" Kinard, a Waffle House worker from Georgia, embodies this principle.
From speaking up about safety issues at her store to facilitating chapter meetings, TK has used her lived experience to guide discussions and show other workers how to foster courage and skill by example.
For TK, facilitating has become a key tool for her development.
It has pushed her to think critically about the work, analyze feedback, and engage with it strategically.
Each time she facilitates, she sharpens her ability to listen, reflect, and hold space for different perspectives in the room.
Rather than lecturing or leaning on strict scripting, TK brings authenticity, rapport, and personal expertise to her role as a facilitator.
This approach allows her to draw out the voices and opinions of her peers, encouraging them to share their thoughts and insights freely.
Through facilitation, TK not only empowers everyone in the room but also herself by strengthening her public speaking skills.
USSW's use of media also extends this train.
It is used both as a tool for visibility and a methodology for political education and development.
By telling their own stories on their terms, workers practice self-determination, sharpen their analysis, build practical public speaking skills, and develop confidence as leaders.
More than representing the union, forward-facing workers represent their communities, their struggles, and their visions for the future.
Workers speak not just to the media but *through it*, reaching other discontent workers, challenging harmful stereotypes, and putting faces, names, and voices to some of the most overlooked and underappreciated in our society.
Being a spokesperson in USSW isn't about being polished or media-trained.
It is about being honest, clear, and speaking as part of a living, breathing movement, grounded in experience.
Through leadership development as a pedagogical dimension, USSW creates an organizing structure that is sustainable, democratic, and strategically effective.
These structures ensure that workers are not passive participants but architects of their own political education and movement-building.
The development of worker-leaders at every level of the organization allows USSW to build a movement that is simultaneously flexible, adaptive, and disciplined.
4.
SOUL
The final dimension of USSW's pedagogy is what members call "Soul": the cultural, emotional, and spiritual force that sustains collective struggle.
Soul is expressed in many ways.
It's the sound of a Black men's gospel choir and the Dudley High School drumline at the Worker Power Summit.
It's the rhythm of chants and drumsticks hitting buckets on the strike line.
It's the shared meals cooked by members to feed chapter meetings.
It's the poetry, raps, and posters that workers create to express their vision of a different world.
These practices affirm that political education must engage the whole person: mind, body, and spirit.
USSW's practice of Soul reflects the Southern traditions it comes from: the spirituals of enslaved people, the testimonies of Black churches, the culture of working-class families who carried history through stories and lyrics.
At the same time, it resonates with global movement traditions.
The Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement calls this dimension *mística*.
*Mística* – a Portuguese word with no precise English translation – refers to the spiritual and cultural force that binds people together in struggle, recognizing that movements require not only strategic planning but also emotional and symbolic sustenance.
Despite the understanding of the indispensable nature of these moments and practices, there is a natural tendency, particularly in the U.S., to reduce this to chanting slogans and a few spontaneous moments, or worse, deprioritize it in favor of other needs.
USSW has incorporated Soul as a very intentional pedagogical dimension to counter this tendency.
In Greensboro, NC, in February 2025, the member-organized "Worker Fest" showcased this dimension.
USSW members performed original spoken word, poetry, songs, and raps.
One highlight was a fashion show of upcycled clothing made from old USSW memorabilia, designed by Columbia, SC worker-leader Shae Parker and modeled by members themselves.
Set to the song "Are My Hands Clean?"
by Sweet Honey in the Rock, the performance offered a sharp critique of both labor exploitation and environmental destruction.
Worker Fest also featured a powerful performance by a Black gospel choir that included Nah'Shon Blount, a Duke University housekeeper and USSW leader in Durham, NC.
Their voices highlighted the deep interconnections between faith, culture, and the labor movement.
By intentionally incorporating art, music, and performance, Worker Fest was a concrete demonstration of USSW's belief that the union is not just about immediate reforms, but also about reclaiming dignity, celebrating identity, and strengthening the collective spirit necessary for sustained struggle.
THE TASK AHEAD: DEVELOPING "THE THINKER, THE WORKER, AND THE DREAMER"
USSW has shown over the years that political education is not an abstract exercise but a living, breathing process that fuels worker-led struggle.
Through study, workers sharpen their analysis.
Through militant work, they remake their relationship to labor and leadership.
Through practical training, they gain the skills and discipline to guide struggle.
And through Soul, they sustain the cultural and spiritual strength to endure.
Taken together, these dimensions nurture workers who understand their historical role, see immediate fights in a broader context, and are prepared to act strategically to organize and transform the South.
At a time when both public education and labor power face systemic dismantling, USSW's work is an urgent intervention.
The defunding of schools, the suppression of radical histories, and the attacks on unions are not isolated crises but deliberate strategies to weaken worker consciousness and power.
By insisting on deep, historically grounded, and action-oriented political education, USSW challenges these strategies directly.
It ensures that Southern workers are not only resisting exploitation but preparing themselves to govern their own futures.
The pedagogical model of USSW reflects a fundamental truth: education is inseparable from struggle.
Whether through Worker Power Schools, base group organizing, militant work, or the cultural force of Soul, USSW is reclaiming education as a site of empowerment rather than subjugation.
This approach does not simply train workers for isolated fights over wages and conditions; it cultivates the vision, discipline, and solidarity required for long-term movement building.
The history of the Southern working class is a history of resilience, from the Reconstruction-era struggles for land and literacy to the battles of Black labor organizers in the 20th century.
USSW stands in this lineage, building on past lessons while forging new paths.
Its pedagogy makes possible the development of leaders who do not burn out after a campaign – whether won or lost – but remain rooted in a long horizon of struggle.
In his 1946 speech "Behold the Land," W.E.B.
DuBois spoke of the South: "Here, if anywhere on earth, is the need for the thinker, the worker, and the dreamer."
In our moment, these are not separate figures but unified aspects of what it means to be fully human in struggle.
To think critically, to work collectively, and to dream boldly are all necessary to build a new society.
The pedagogy of the Southern worker is not just about survival – it's about transformation.
It's about workers recognizing that they are not just cogs in a machine but the very force that makes the world run.
With the right tools, strategies, and political education, they will not only demand a better world; they will build it.
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