CAFÉ History

CAFÉ’s worker-leadership and deep roots in the South Carolina labor movement make us uniquely positioned to organize workers. CAFÉ traces its origins to the national textile workers organizing campaign that targeted the J.P. Stevens Company in the 1970s. Though not formally affiliated with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, CAFÉ chapters functioned as the community arm of the union. The Charleston chapter of CAFÉ was initiated by waterfront workers and tobacco workers with roots in the 1945-1946 strike at the Charleston Cigar Factory, out of which the gospel song “I Will Overcome” was introduced into the labor and civil rights movements. More recent CAFÉ activists have included leaders of the 1969 Charleston Hospital Workers strike, a powerful fusion of the labor and civil rights movements that brought both Local 1199 from New York and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to Charleston. Before she died in 2015 Mary Moultrie, a nurse and leader of the strike, spearheaded the formation of a non-majority union at the same hospital where she had organized in the 1960s. That effort has been continued by Healthcare Workers United, which also functions as CAFÉ’s healthcare committee.

Beginning in 2009, CAFÉ members joined Moultrie in working with the City of Charleston environmental services workers to demand union recognition. For nearly two years CAFÉ developed worker-leaders, functioned as a defense committee for workers facing discipline, and lobbied the city for stronger employee health and safety protections. CAFÉ also worked with the union’s leaders to organize a city-wide petition drive in support of the workers. The campaign was ultimately stymied by the same state policy that prohibited the hospital workers from winning a union contract forty years earlier. 

From 2014 to 2017 CAFÉ worked closely with national organizers from the International Association of Machinists on their campaign to organize a union at Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner facility in North Charleston. CAFÉ mapped out a strategy for IAM that included the recruitment of faith leaders and progressive groups into a community coalition to support the union. The IAM used CAFÉ’s plan as their blueprint and embraced CAFÉ’s recommendation to hire members of International Longshoremen’s Association, Local 1422 to serve as organizers and to make house visits to recruit Boeing employees into the IAM. CAFÉ has provided similar strategic advice and on-the-ground support for the Fight for $15, the National Union of Hospital & Health Care Employees Local 1199C, and the United Steelworkers among many other unions organizing in South Carolina.

For the past seven years, CAFÉ has worked very closely with Healthcare Workers United with which it has an overlapping membership. HWU defends hospital workers’ rights on the job, advocates for better pay and working conditions, and organizes direct action protests to pressure Medical University of South Carolina officials to live up to their commitment to diversity and inclusion. 

Despite the limitations imposed by the pandemic, CAFÉ co-organized a demonstration in February of 2022 in solidarity with the Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon organizing campaign, and in August of that same year CAFÉ members and thirty ILA members traveled to Brookwood, Alabama, to support the union coal miners who have been on strike at Warrior Met Coal for over a year. Last November 3, CAFÉ cohosted Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh for a conversation with representatives of the South Carolina labor movement. CAFÉ has joined partner organizations in organizing “Friends of Starbucks Workers United” to build community support for Starbucks partners who have recently won union representation elections in several stores across South Carolina. 

In late 2023 CAFE launched the Charleston Workers Center (CWC) to continue and expand its mission of fighting for working-class Charlestonians.