KANSAS CITY, Mo. — After months of failed negotiations and education campaigns with Port KC, the Greater Kansas City Building & Construction Trades Council, a voluntary council of over a dozen local unions representing tens of thousands of unionized workers in the Kansas City-metro, has decided to take action and start an informational bannering campaign across the city. This marks one of the significant escalations in recent regional labor history.
The Greater Kansas City Building & Construction Trades Council has been working patiently to require that projects incentivized through Port KC require contractors to pay prevailing wage and participate in Department of Labor-recognized apprenticeship programs. Anti-union contractor organizations have publicly lobbied Port KC members and testified against these requirements.
The Building Trades intends to informationally handbill and banner dozens of sites across the city starting on February 11, providing the public with information about Port KC’s actions. Mayor Quinton Lucas is scheduled to give his “state of the city” address at City Hall that day. Dozens of “Shame on Port KC” banners and thousands of handbills have been union-printed for this moment.
The Building Trades is not urging any worker to refuse work nor are they urging any supplier to refuse to make deliveries.
The handbills, headlined “Shame on Kansas City Port Authority for Refusing to Implement Previously Agreed-To Wage and Apprenticeship Standards,” that will be handed out include several statements from the organization:
- “In August 2025, the Kansas City Port Authority (“Port KC”) and Greater Kansas City Building and Construction Trades Council (“GKC Building Trades Council”) came to an agreement that, in order to protect local workers and expand work opportunities for the people of Kansas City, Port KC would implement wage and apprenticeship requirements on all Port KC projects.
- GKC Building Trades Council sought for Port KC to implement Missouri Prevailing Wages on all Port KC projects to ensure workers are paid a fair wage that reflects labor standards for similar work in our area.
- GKC Building Trades Council sought for Port KC to implement apprenticeship requirements on all Port KC projects to promote efforts to build a skilled LOCAL workforce.
- For the past six (6) months, GKC Building Council has worked tirelessly to encourage Port KC to uphold its promises, but Port KC has refused, and in turn is contributing to the erosion of our local workforce, area standards and safe working standards.
- GKC Building Trades Council believes that Kansas City, and its workers deserve these basic protections, and believes that Kansas City’s leadership should uphold the promises they make.”
Port KC, run by CEO Jon Stephens, has provided incentives to dozens of projects, worth millions and millions of dollars each. These projects do not require prevailing wage or have apprenticeship language, meaning they do not meet the area minimum wage established for construction work on public projects, and they take away apprenticeship opportunities from Kansas Citians.”
The Building Trades are encouraging the public to contact Port KC CEO Jon Stephens, via phone call or email, and “demand Port KC fulfills its promises to KC and its workers!”
Previous reporting from The Labor Beacon outlined the pro-community and poverty reducing benefits these rule changes are proven to have, their history, and their use in other communities. Kansas City, a purportedly pro-union city, is an outlier in allowing this to continue, seemingly sacrificing the standards and benefits that union members organized for, fought for, and died for, to make projects easier to pencil out for developers.
During its January meeting, Port KC’s board was supposed to finally vote to implement some of these changes after several months with in-meeting delays. That virtual meeting was brought to an early end amidst public backlash towards a decision by Port KC staff to turn off the written chat feature that had been used by the public to express dismay with Port KC in the previous meeting and replace it with a less-public facing alternative that staff could not even seem to smoothly deploy or use.
Councilman Wes Rogers, a previously union-endorsed Kansas City, Mo. council member and member of the Port KC board, suddenly resigned hours before the start of the meeting. Board members Morgan Said and Jack Steadman were not present at the January meeting, meaning the board would have, theoretically, needed only three votes to the pass pro-worker and pro-community changes advocated for by organized labor.
Board member Kevin O’Neill, a longtime champion of labor and current Kansas City, Mo. councilman, is understood to still be actively working to pass the language with his allies on the Port KC board.
It is now unclear if labor now has enough worker friendly votes on the board following the resignation. The board, which now has a vacancy, is appointed at the discretion of Kansas City, Mo. Mayor Quinton Lucas, who has the ability to weigh in on this issue publicly to address the concerns of labor at any point or to communicate his desires to elevate minimum working-standards and expand apprenticeship language in Kansas City.
“I am thankful to the mayor for the opportunity to have served on the Port board. I enjoyed my experience and I learned a great deal about the economic incentive process. That said, serving on the port board requires an enormous commitment and it became untenable for me to remain on the board while investing enough time in my other priorities at city hall such as improving public safety and reducing red tape for small business,” said Rogers in a written statement to The Labor Beacon, who requested he explain his resignation before the vote.
For years now, local unions have decried the failure of Port KC to demand the same standards from contractors on their projects, that are fundamentally incentivized with taxpayer dollars, as other incentivized projects in Kansas City require.
“Port KC can call an emergency meeting on Tuesday and implement the full, pro-worker and pro-community changes we are demanding or we will be on the streets on Wednesday,” said Matt Harris, business manager of Plumbers Local 8, referencing the only instance that the unions would call this off in the union planning meeting for this informational bannering.
“We went down this road six months ago and tried to use diplomacy. We don’t want to do this, but we cannot let this organization continue to gut our communities and undermine the standards we have fought so hard to establish for working people. We are not going to negotiate backwards. We gave them a soft-landing spot where we could have language to build on through and Port KC responded by giving us watered down versions of our already-compromise deal. We hope this ends quickly, but if it doesn’t, we are prepared to and will continue to escalate,” said Ralph Oropeza, business manager of the Building Trades. “Kansas City tax money is being used to fund projects for billionaires, all while developing a workforce that is not made up of Kansas Citians. We hope the public stands with us.”
If you are a union member in Kansas City, the Greater Kansas City Building Trades are asking you to contact your union hall to volunteer for the citywide effort.
The above story can be found in our February 7th, 2026 print edition. Minor modifications have been made to the online story.
Tristin Amezcua-Hogan is the Editor of The Labor Beacon and a member of LIUNA Local 264. Tristin also serves as the Director of Communications for the Greater Kansas City AFL-CIO and the Chair of the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance.
Tristin grew up as the son of a UA Local 669 member in Tecumseh, KS and the great-nephew of George C. Amis, longtime leader of the United Rubberworkers (now USW Local 307) in Kansas. Growing up in rural Kansas as the child of teen parents, Tristin quickly came to appreciate the life-changing benefit of a union job.
Tristin and his partner, Rebeca Amezcua-Hogan, are residents of the Westside, Kansas City, MO's historic Mexican neighborhood. They are proud members of Kansas City's New Reform Temple.
