By Jeff Pilacinski, Twin Cities GMB

On Saturday, June 3 we remember the valiant struggle of over 15,000 fellow workers and through our continued agitating in 2006, carry their fighting spirit forward. This date marks the 90th anniversary of the great mine workers strike on Minnesota’s Mesabi, Cuyuna, and Vermillion Iron Ranges – a strike that threatened the economic grip of the U.S. Steel war profiteers and strained relations between several prominent Wobbly organizers and the union’s general headquarters.

After a large uprising was crushed with the help of immigrant strike breakers in 1907, Minnesota mine workers were poised to confront the steel trust once again. In a report to the Minneapolis headquarters of the IWW’s Agricultural Workers Organization dated May 2, 1916, one organizer had “never before found the time so ripe for organization and action as just now.” The appeal from one Minnesota miner in the May 13, 1916 issue of the Industrial Worker summarized the workers’ discontent best as “the spirit of revolt is growing among the workers on the Iron Range,” and that there was a need for “workers who have an understanding of the tactics and methods of the IWW and who would go on the job, and agitate and organize on the job.” Less than a month later, an Italian worker at the St. James underground mine in Aurora opened his pay envelope and raged over his meager earnings under the corrupt contract system, whereby wages were based upon the load of ore dug and supplies used, not hours worked. By the time other miners arrived at the St. James for the night shift, production at the mine was halted. All pits in Aurora were soon shut down as the strikers proclaimed, “We’ve been robbed long enough. It’s time to strike.”

"By building organizations based on solidarity, rather than on bureaucratic chain-of-command, we build organizations that by their very existence help to bring a new kind of society into being." --Staughton Lynd, Solidarity Unionism

For the first time in recent memory wobblies from all over will be meeting with the primary objective of discussing organizing. The Organizing Summit is what many wobs have been wanting for years. It is a chance to focus on organizing in the union and what it means to say, "Every member is an organizer."

The weekend will be hosted by the Austin GMB and was proposed at General Assembly 2005 in the hopes of supporting the work of the Organizing Department Formation Committee (ODFC). The assembly endorsed the Summit and the ODFC has also endorsed the meeting.

This article has been moved to the "blog" section of the IWW website:

• Response to Reactionary Blogger Thomas E. Brewton (Part I)

And two further responses to Thomas Brewton and his apologists have been added.

• Response to Reactionary Blogger Thomas E. Brewton (Part II)
• Response to Reactionary Blogger Thomas E. Brewton (and Rob Hood) (Part III)

Please note that these statements are not official publications of the IWW and as such represent the individual opinions of IWW members. 

This week, we are launching LabourStart TV.

No, it's not a television station.  (That would be nice, but we don't have the money for that just yet.)  But it is a big step forward for us, and I think for the international trade union movement as well.

Basically, we will start collecting the web addresses of videos produced by and for unions the same way we now do with text-based news stories.

That sounds simple enough, and it is.

But we're doing more than just listing what's available elsewhere on the web.

We're telling trade unionists what other unions have done.  We're showing cutting-edge technology that is now fairly widely used in our movement.  And we're encouraging other unions to move forward and use the new technology.

A beta version of LabourStart TV is already online.  It has no logo nor graphics, and the text is not yet finalized, but it will have these by the end of this week.  You can already see it here:

http://www.labourstart.tv

(Don't you just love the simplicity of that address?)

As correspondents, you can already begin adding content now.  We will be announcing LabourStart TV towards the end of this week and it would be great to feature content from unions in your country.  Here's all you need to do to add shows:

By Jon Bekken - Industrial Worker, October 2005.

More than 50 economists and labor activists went to Kansas City Sept. 15 – 17 for a conference on radical economics and the labor movement organized as part of the IWW centenary. Presentations addressed a wide variety of topics, from historical work to studies of recent efforts by Latin American workers to defend their labor standards through strikes and worker collectives. Other papers sought to update IWW and Marxian economic analysis, reported on initiatives to bring radical economic analysis to broader audiences, and explored the intersection between radical economics and economic thinkers such as Galbraith and Sraffa. In addition, there was a tour of Kansas City labor history sites (shortened by bad weather), culminating in a performance of Wobbly songs in the old City Market by Bob and Judy Sukiel. The idea was to bring together economists and labor activists for a dialogue which might restore the dialogue between economists and working-class movements that once posed a vital challenge to the dominance of capitalism’s house economists. As Dirk Philipsen of Virginia State University noted in his presentation on historical struggles for economic democracy, “It is clear that corporate capitalism is not sustainable. It is not realistic to believe that it can survive.” And so there is an urgent need to open a conversation about economic alternatives.

By Alexis Buss - Industrial Worker, September 2005.

In a stunning turn-around from recent decisions limiting workers' rights, the Bush-appointed U.S. National Labor Relations Board issued a June 7 ruling which requires that every trip to the bar, ballpark or café among coworkers should include discussion of wages, hours and working conditions. Otherwise, workers may not have legal protections for hanging out with one another.

Ok, not quite. The case, which originates in a charge filed by SEIU Local 24/7 against Guardsmark, a San Francisco-based security company, was filed to deal with three Guardsmark work rules relating to workers' abilities to talk to one another, and enlist the support of the public, including the firm's clients:

1) A "chain of command" rule, which says that on-duty workers may only take problems up a chain of command in a very proscribed way, and that workers may not register complaints with the company's clients;

2) A "no-solicitation" rule prohibiting solicitation and the handing out of literature while on duty or in uniform;

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.