The Wobblies Resurface in New York, Targeting Starbucks and FreshDirect

By DANIELA GERSON - Staff Reporter of the New York Sun, January 4, 2006

The Wobblies are back. Organizers with the 101-year-old Industrial Workers of the World - a radical union that once included "Big Bill" Haywood, Helen Keller, and "Mother" Mary Harris Jones - recently launched efforts in New York to organize Starbucks, illegal immigrant workers, and the online grocer FreshDirect.

"Abolition of the wage system" is their banner.

Membership, albeit still small, has roughly doubled in the past five years to nearly 2,000 in North America, the union said. In New York City, where it has about 50 or 60 members, there has been a similar rate of growth. Even more significant than an increase in membership, arguably, is the expansion of public actions.

An expert at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Sean Sweeney, said, "They are certainly more visible than they were 10 years ago, when they would be six punk rockers in the East Village." The test now, he said, will be "whether they can negotiate any consequences" by winning contracts and sustaining the membership.

The movement claims to be apolitical, but as in its founding days, many in its ranks are drawn to radical politics, from young anarchist academics to truck drivers, who believe in a direct-action approach to organizing. "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common," the IWW constitution reads. "Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the earth."

Fifteen laborers at EZ Supply Inc. - a Queens company specializing in wholesale foods, the Parthenon coffee cups, Chinese takeout bags, and other disposables for New York restaurants - walked off the job Monday morning. The employees, many of whom said they were illegal immigrants, demanded the right to form a union and claimed they had been subject to verbal abuse, unfair firings, and pay violations. Supporting them in their walkout were a contingent from the IWW that included burly truck drivers in jeans, vests, and full beards; Starbucks baristas; eager community organizers, and other immigrant laborers.

Hugo Flores, a 22-year-old Mexican immigrant who has been lifting boxes for the company since shortly after he stole across the border three years ago, said the store owners often expected 12-to 13-hour workdays, six days a week, for $410 in cash. If workers complained about overwork, they were threatened they would be turned into immigration authorities, Mr. Flores said. EZ Supply's general manager, Florence Chan, denied any labor violations or abuse, though she did say the company paid the workers by a salary and did not provide overtime.

Illegal immigrants are protected by labor laws, but they often do not speak up about their rights because they are fearful of government agencies, the IWW's lead organizer, Billy Randel, said. "They were afraid but they saw the power they have," Mr. Randel, 54, a truck driver and former Teamster member, said.

While the IWW considers the workers at EZ Supply as members, there is a long way to go before they are legally a union. In the case of EZ Supply and Handyfat, the other company where the IWW organized a similar action last year, the National Labor Relations Board must still certify an election in which workers support the union. Then the union would have to try to reach a first contract with the employer.

The IWW plans to expand the campaign to approximately 60 to 70 shops in the wholesale food industry, Mr. Randel said.

The momentum appears to be attracting new members. "One reason I got involved is it does seem to be growing so quickly and it seems to be getting a lot done," said David Graeber, who was recently forced into a sabbatical from his post at Yale University, allegedly because of his work as an anarchist organizer. A Wall Street Journal editorial headlined "Bourgeois Anarchy" yesterday asked Mr. Graeber why, "If his anarchist convictions are sincere, he would seek to join the very employing class that he is otherwise pledged to struggle against?"

Mr. Graeber responded, "I also eat food produced by capitalists. I think the real issue is, say I am a physicist who is an anarchist, would it mean I can't do experiments?"

In the meantime, he said, the IWW, which he only joined six months ago, is just the latest vehicle to express his anarchist ideals. In his view, the turning point for the Wobblies in New York was the Starbucks campaign that "showed that they were relevant in a way they hadn't been before."

With the Starbucks campaign, Mr. Randel said, the response has been, "Wow, the ghost stirs ... The red cards are stirring again."

That campaign went public in May of 2004. The lead organizer, Daniel Gross, said employees chose the IWW because workers would remain in "control." "The IWW solidarity unionism model is uniquely suited to the vagaries of retail work," he said. "We wanted a union where we could form strategy and where we wouldn't replace corporate bosses with union bosses."

The IWW hasn't won an NLRB election yet at a Starbucks, but it claims to represent workers at the chain's stores at Second Avenue and Ninth Street, Union Square East, and Madison Avenue and 36th Street in Manhattan.

New York's Central Labor Council, an umbrella group of more mainstream unions, many of which are affiliated with the AFL-CIO, has taken note of the campaign, meeting with members of the IWW, said the Central Labor Council's director of public policy, Ed Ott.

While Mr. Ott said in his experience the IWW has been "more agitational than they are organizational," he said the Starbucks campaign has been a serious effort. "If they are now declaring themselves to have a better way to organize, I hope they're right," he said. "The labor movement needs new ideas."