News - All Departments and Unions

By Richard Myers — 31 July 2005

Most media ink and bytes have been about the split. Important? Sure. But too little attention has been paid to the AFL-CIO's anti-war resolution.

How significant might such a stance be for a labor federation? In the aftermath of the American entry into World War I, just such an anti-war view provoked the systematic dismantling of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in what came to be called the Palmer Raids. Union halls were ransacked throughout the country, and nearly two hundred IWW leaders were imprisoned for opposing the war and for "criminal syndicalism." (Yet the IWW has survived, and hasn't changed its views about war.)

So the AFL-CIO has taken a bit of a radical turn, at least in one dimension. The anti-war resolution is remarkable, if only because it is such a dramatic departure from the past history of the federation.

What remains to be assessed during the mainstream labor movement's current introspection?

We can all agree that the AFL-CIO, and business unionism in general, is a dead-end for the working class in North America. We need a new international labor movement; one that is based on workers’ self-organization and on the recognition of the inevitable conflict between labor and capital.

We of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) have stayed close to our roots and feel that we have some ideas and lessons, learned from bitter experience, for such a new labor movement. We feel that a new labor movement will have to return to the strategies and tactics of the workers’ movement before it’s decent into the bureaucratic quagmire of business unionism if it is to go forward.

We have a few suggestions on how to proceed:

1. Organize the unorganized into self-managed industrial unions. Unions built from the grass-roots by worker organizers. Unions run by the membership to address their own needs and aspirations on the job. Unions that are independent of government and political parties. Unions that welcome all wage workers and unemployed, regardless of nationality, race, gender, political or religious creed, sexual orientation, etc, on the basis of strict equality. Unions in which all officers are directly elected by those they serve and are immediately recallable by the membership. Unions in which remuneration for officers is tied to the average wage of the workers involved; where term limits for officers are strictly observed; and, where the officer returns to the job when their term in office is over. We call this Solidarity Unionism.
2. Re-organize the miss-organized of the business unions via establishment of shop-committees that can take direct action on the job in pursuit of workers’ needs outside of the restrictions of legal collective bargaining agreements. We reject dues check-off because joining a union should be a conscious commitment to solidarity not a “condition of employment”. We reject no-strike deals because we need to be able to act to defend and extend our rights at every opportunity. We reject “management’s rights” because they are inimical to our own.
3. Establish horizontal links between and among unions and shop committees to foster solidarity on a local, regional, national and international level. Build workers’ centers in every community to reach out to all sectors of the working class and unemployed, including their kids.
4. Solidarity Unionism recognizes no restriction on what we should strive for. Health and safety at work, the environmental and social impact of what we produce, shorter and flexible hours of labor, universal health care - everything is fair game! Ultimately, we reject the employing class’s so-called ‘proprietary rights’. We want to gain control of the means of life!

We offer these ideas in the hope that the new labor movement that will necessarily emerge from the shipwreck known as business unionism can avoid the same mistakes of the past that have led us to the present impasse.

Staughton Lynd’s remarks on Solidarity Unionism

To Begin With

The greatest honor I have ever received is to be asked to speak to you on the occasion of the IWW's 100th birthday.

But I am not standing here alone. Beside me are departed friends. John Sargent was the first president of Local 1010, United Steelworkers of America, the 18,000-member local union at Inland Steel just east of Chicago. John said that he and his fellow workers achieved far more through direct action before they had a collective bargaining agreement than they did after they had a contract. You can read his words in the book Rank and File. Ed Mann and John Barbero, after years as rank and filers, became president and vice president of Local 1462, United Steelworkers of America, at Youngstown Sheet & Tube in Youngstown, and toward the end of his life Ed joined the IWW. Ed and John were ex-Marines who opposed both the Korean and Vietnam wars; they fought racism both in the mill and in the city of Youngstown, where in the 1950s swimming pools were still segregated; they believed, as do I, that there will be no answer to the problem of plant shutdowns until working people take the means of production into their own hands; and in January 1980, in response to U.S. Steel's decision to close all its Youngstown facilities, Ed led us down the hill from the local union hall to the U.S. Steel administration building, where the forces of good broke down the door and for one glorious afternoon occupied the company headquarters. Ed's daughter changed her baby's diapers on the pool table in the executive game room. Stan Weir and Marty Glaberman, very much alone, moved our thinking forward about informal work groups as the heart of working-class self-organization, about unions with leaders who stay on the shop floor, about alternatives to the hierarchical vanguard party, about overcoming racism and about international solidarity.