'One Big Union' Still Relevant Today
Submitted on Sun, 05/29/2005 - 4:14pm
By John Nichols - The Wisconsin Capital Times, May 12, 2005Six baristas at the Vox Pop coffee shop in Brooklyn went Wobbly in March.
When the people who make lattes and sell books at the shop joined the New York City Retail Workers Union Branch 660 of the Industrial Workers of the World - the Wobblies - they linked up with a union that is celebrating 100 years of radicalism.
There are not many unions that go out of their way to organize workers at independent coffee shops and bookstores these days, and there are even fewer unions that young people think of as cool. But the IWW has always stood out from the rest of the union movement.
Formed in 1905 by the likes of Mother Jones, Eugene Victor Debs, Big Bill Haywood and Lucy Parsons, the IWW declared from the start that it would stand "upon the basic principle that the way to unite the workers is to organize them as a class, upon class interests, and not for the purpose of securing for the present a paltry few crumbs from the table of Capitalism to a privileged few within the pure and simple unions, but that all may enjoy the fruits of their industry and the fullness thereof."
While the fledgling unions of the conservative American Federation of Labor organized skilled workers into individual unions within particular industries, the IWW set out to bring all workers into "One Big Union." The Wobblies proudly declared that they would "march under the banner of rebellion" for the purpose of transforming society into a cooperative commonwealth where the workers owned the means of production.
The IWW organized the great 1912 strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Mass., and became a significant force in the western United States. It also contributed mightily to the cultural traditions of the left, with members such as Joe Hill penning working-class anthems that are sung to this day.
But the IWW's early successes were undermined by the federal government's crackdown on dissidents before and during World War I - the Wobblies were militant foes of U.S. entry into the war - and the "red scare" that followed it. Joe Hill and other prominent Wobblies were executed and murdered, and the union's locals in many parts of the country were broken up.
In Wisconsin, according to local researchers and activists Jerry Chernow and David Williams, the union has a rich, though not particularly well-recorded, history. IWW organizers were active in the northwestern part of the state in the early part of the century, especially in the timber industries of the far north. And there has long been an IWW presence in Madison, a town where the union's radical views always played well with student activists.
In recent years, the Madison General Membership Branch of the IWW played an important role in backing up UFCW Local 538 and its members in their struggles with the Tyson corporation, and in supporting the Teaching Assistants' Association on the UW campus. And, of course, it is encouraging the IWW's national campaign to organize coffee shop workers, which has targeted Starbucks. (For more on that campaign, visit www.starbucksunion.org.)
This Saturday at 7 p.m., Madison activists will host a discussion of the history of the IWW at the Memorial Union. Among those present will be the granddaughter of a Wisconsin IWW organizer and others who can tell the story of the One Big Union.
But it will not merely be a nostalgic look backward, says Madisonian Ron Kaminkow, a member of IWW Railroad Workers Industrial Union No. 520. "Our focus is not simply to honor the past glory of the union, but to promote it and its ideas, strategies and tactics for organization of the working class into One Big Union as viable and relevant to today's struggles inside the mainstream labor movement."
Kaminkow's got a point. With the AFL-CIO struggling to get traction, the IWW's approach - with its emphasis on organizing everyone, its class consciousness and its radicalism - is worth another look. After all, what other union is successfully organizing coffee shop baristas?
John Nichols is associate editor for The Capital Times. E-mail: [email protected]