Disclaimer - The following article is reposted here because it is an issue with some relevance to the IWW. The views of the author do not necessarily agree with those of the IWW and vice versa.
By Jake TenPas - Corvallis Gazette-Times, Sunday, December 4, 2005
Wobblies headline punk show to raise money, awareness of workers' rights
The Wobblies don't mince words. They don't try to dress up their message of socialism, social equality, civil rights and freedom of thought with surreal imagery or overly clever turns of phrase.
Even their name, The Wobblies, is straight to the point. Looking to the (Industrial) Workers of the World union for inspiration, they play a brand of genuine punk rock (not that pathetic posturing Good Charlotte and Blink 182 pass off as punk) that seeks to unify all those left out in the cold by the new world order.
When The Wobblies take the stage at the Elks Lodge on Friday, Dec. 2, then, they will perhaps have even more to say about the topic at hand than the rest of their brothers and sisters in musical arms.
That topic is United Students Against Sweatshops' campaign to put pressure on PT Victoria, a company that until two years ago operated a factory in Jakarta, Indonesia, where the workers were paid 37 cents an hour.
When the workers tried to unionize in an attempt to gain better pay and working conditions, PT Victoria packed their factory and moved to Hong Kong without paying the Indonesian laborers their last wages, severence pay or overtime for the 24-hour shift they were forced to work to complete the factory's final order from Eddie Bauer, who used it as a subcontractor.
Though Indonesia ordered PT Victoria to pay the snubbed workers their due, because the company had already relocated, the government was powerless to enforce their mandate. Meanwhile, Eddie Bauer, which has a corporate policy to force subcontractors to follow the laws of the countries they operate in, continued to order from them for two years until USAS pressured them to desist.
Now, Eddie Bauer is mediating the dialogue between the workers and the owner of the factory, Joe Pang. Unfortunately, until the dispute is settled, there are nearly 900 workers who are short $1.1 million in wages. To say their situation is dire would be an understatement.
That's where Corvallis resident Bjorn Warloe came in. After securing the Elks Club for a concert to benefit the workers, he enlisted the Pipe Layers Union, a grunge-punk outfit that specializes in music Mudhoney might have dug, and the Muckrakers, a sort of local supergroup featuring members of Tourist, Arcweld and the Adequits.
And of course, The Wobblies, Oregon's answer to both Rancid and the Dead Kennedies.
"We're socialists, and our music is definitely political," says drummer Ty Smith, sipping a whiskey and Coke at AJ's Restaurant. "We're a class conscious band.
Well surely there's plenty of work to do here at home, I suggest playfully, without looking over seas for people to help.
"A lot of the problems we're having here are related to this," he quickly fires back, citing the exploitation of workers abroad as a prime example of the way undermining freedom and workers' rights in other countries leads to the slow erosion of similar principals here in America.
"If companies can run rampant over the little working protections they have in those countries, it just makes it that much more profitable," he concludes. "The workers have lost their jobs, their clout."
One listen to The Wobblies' most recent CD, "Flames of Discontent" is enough to know that even before they heard of the plight of the workers in Jakarta, fair trade, freedom (not the kind President Bush mocks with every word, but the kind that real men and women have died for throughout history) and civil rights were concepts they supported with every strum of their guitar.
On the closing track, "Mutiny," singer AJ Smith yells "And at the tip of a dagger you'll hear us say/ as you're walking onto the plank/ grab your cutlasses boys and have a drink/ there's gonna be a mutiny/ let the captain of the ship who led us astray/ fall into the bottom of the sea."
Mutinous words? Words of rebellion and revolution? Perhaps? Words of coercion? Never.
"We're not missionaries. We're not trying to convert people to rabid socialism. We're trying to be a conversation starter," Smith explains.
It isn't the job of the musician to be a politician, but rather the poet of the masses. Generally, I enjoy my music without overt politics, but sometimes, and never more so than in our current political climate, you just want to crank some righteously angry noise.
That's where The Wobblies come in.
The last time I caught the group's live act at AJ's, the cops came knocking to enforce the city's noise ordinance. I don't know how many live shows you've been to, but very rarely are bands in bars told to turn it down.
The Wobblies are loud. Deafeningly so. They require plugs like the ones each of us sticks in our ears every day to avoid hearing the cries of people around the world with less rights than we have here in America.
One person can only do so much, and perhaps those earplugs keep you from losing your mind at the unquenchable fire raging all around you.
But you can take those earplugs out, if only for one night, and chance going deaf to hear the message of the other half. With The Wobblies playing it, it never sounded so good.
So come on Corvallis, grab those stoppers.
Now pull.
Jake TenPas can be reached at jake.tenpas@lee.net or 758-9514.
The I.W.W. Food and Retail Workers Union is an organization of workers at every link in the supply chain of food and retail products- from processing facilities to warehouses to restaurants, cafes, grocery stores, strip malls, big box stores, and other retail shops. We have come together to fight for fundamental change in our industries. In the short term, we seek to build power with our coworkers to win improved wages, guaranteed hours, healthcare, and other crucial improvements to our working conditions. In the long term, we aim to establish industrial democracy through worker self-management of production for human needs, rather than capitalist
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Fellow Workers,
This is a story about a situation that happened at my workplace. Ideally, this will add to a conception of what Direct Unionism is, how it exists in everyday situations, and where we can go with it as an organization. This event happened around a year ago. While some of its impacts were immediate, it took me some time to develop an analysis, and to see clearly how this tied in with the development of class-consciousness. At this point I feel that I can look back, analyze the situation and draw out some lessons.