This Day in History: The Wobblies
One hundred years ago today in the city of Chicago, Eugene Debs, "Big Bill" Haywood, and other union leaders launched one of the most dynamic and radical efforts to organize workers in our country's history -- the Industrial Workers of the World, later dubbed "The Wobblies." Their goal, as stated at the first convention: forming "One Big Union" that could lead to "the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism."
The rest, as they say, is history, and it's a fascinating tale. For those curious about the Southern angle, check out this post I wrote up in May. The IWW is mostly known for their agitation in the Midwest and West, but as historian Philip Foner argued, their successful organizing of lumber workers in the South is one of the IWW's most "interesting and inspiring chapters." (One small example: in De Ridder -- the thriving center of the Louisiana timber industry -- they elected a Socialist mayor in 1912!).
Stories like these are a useful corrective to those who view the South's history as one marked by a never-changing and monolithic conservatism. The Southern IWW timber union, which at its peak in 1912 had over 25,000 members -- half African-American -- is another example of the region's rich progressive history.
Fast forward to today for another Southern tie-in: Wade Rathke, a long-time Southern organizer and now Chief Organizer for the grassroots organizing group ACORN (founded in Arkansas, now national), has put forward an interesting proposal to revive the U.S. labor movement. His idea: create a mass-based American Workers Association that would cut through the jurisdictional and other limitations of current unions.
Sounds a lot like the IWW's "One Big Union" to me.
The rest, as they say, is history, and it's a fascinating tale. For those curious about the Southern angle, check out this post I wrote up in May. The IWW is mostly known for their agitation in the Midwest and West, but as historian Philip Foner argued, their successful organizing of lumber workers in the South is one of the IWW's most "interesting and inspiring chapters." (One small example: in De Ridder -- the thriving center of the Louisiana timber industry -- they elected a Socialist mayor in 1912!).
Stories like these are a useful corrective to those who view the South's history as one marked by a never-changing and monolithic conservatism. The Southern IWW timber union, which at its peak in 1912 had over 25,000 members -- half African-American -- is another example of the region's rich progressive history.
Fast forward to today for another Southern tie-in: Wade Rathke, a long-time Southern organizer and now Chief Organizer for the grassroots organizing group ACORN (founded in Arkansas, now national), has put forward an interesting proposal to revive the U.S. labor movement. His idea: create a mass-based American Workers Association that would cut through the jurisdictional and other limitations of current unions.
Sounds a lot like the IWW's "One Big Union" to me.
2 Comments:
The Wobblies were most successful in the Merchant Marine -- the US had one then -- but also did well in the oil patch and elected a Socialist governor of Oklahoma.
The Wobblies were suppressed largely by the FBI in alliance with state police and militia -- which had been nationalized in 1905.
Today, "one big union" needs to not just cut through the corporate identities of the company unions, but recreate the technical foundations of a militia around, not guns, but strong, trusted means of identification and security -- the "Federated IDentity" alternative to "RealID".
::JRB
I should add two points about Wade Rathke and the IWW. First, in addition to being Chief Organizer of ACORN, he's also the organizer for SEIU Local 100, which if I remember correctly includes parts of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. So he has labor movement credentials.
On the flip side, the current incarnation of the IWW (a shell of the union that thrived from 1905 to 1917, before -- as John points out above -- being crushed by the government in the midst of WWI hysteria) doesn't like Rathke because he has opposed the efforts of ACORN workers to form a union under the IWW banner. See here:
http://www.iww.org/unions/iu650/acorn/acorn35.shtml
Either way, I think Rathke's thoughts on how to revitalize labor are as good as any circulating these days.
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