Rebel Voices
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A second key tenet of solidarity unionism is its emphasis on direct action, rather than competing on the skewed political and legal playing field of the capitalist class. One of the labor movement’s most significant direct-action tactics, the plant occupation or sit-down strike, was a Wobbly innovation starting with a 1906 sit-down at a General Electric plant in Upstate New York.
Utah Phillips, the great Wobbly musician, loved to tell the story of Wobbly timber workers struggling for the eight-hour day. These workers didn’t wait for any ballot box to express their will. The workers got organized, made a plan, and blew a whistle after eight hours of work. The whistle was the agreed-upon signal for workers to go home. They’d report to work the next day, and eight hours later the whistle blows and they’re off again. The workers won their eight-hour day, through their own agency, through direct action.
One of my favorite recent direct actions—simple, elegant, and effective—involved Wobbly baristas at a Chicago Starbucks. Workers had to balance themselves on café tables to accomplish routine tasks like cleaning the ceiling, changing light bulbs, or reaching supplies. It was a dangerous, persistent, and unnecessary strain. Before they had formed a union, workers at the store had made repeated requests for a simple step-ladder to safely accomplish these routine tasks. Management ignored their requests. As union members, the workers took the direct-action approach. They purchased their own step-ladder and placed on it a sticker that read, “Brought to you by—IWW Starbucks Workers Union—for a safer, healthier workplace.” Management was mortified, even panicked, when the workers brought the step-ladder to the store. Senior management was called, and it quickly became clear that the company would not tolerate a valuable piece of equipment in the store bearing that union sticker. Within an hour, after years of the company holding out, Starbucks purchased the workers a step-ladder to work more safely. Management’s absolute power had been checked by worker initiative and a valuable workplace improvement had been won. Most importantly, worker leadership, skill, and confidence had increased—a hallmark of direct action—for bigger fights ahead, on the job and in society.
A final key principle is that the center of the solidarity union universe is the worker not the employer, resulting in two practical effects. First, when a worker in a solidarity union changes jobs, their union membership stays with them regardless of where they end up working. In this way, instead of losing a member, as in the traditional model, the solidarity union has a chance to grow and expand at new companies, and the workers maintain their position as proud Wobblies in the class struggle. Second, workers in a solidarity-union setting organize, struggle, and often win on demands regardless of whether a majority or less than a majority of workers at a given employer have joined the union. Orienting the union to the worker and not the employer is a key factor in the Starbucks Workers Union’s growth and resilience at Starbucks, where other approaches have faltered.
You will find in Rebel Voices that solidarity unionism is nothing but a contemporary articulation of the principles, practices, and theories of the IWW from its earliest days, “building a new society in the shell of the old.”
The revitalized IWW is organizing in territory largely uncharted by the present-day labor movement. In New York City, recent immigrant Wobblies from Latin America and their allies are organizing in sweatshop-corridor food processing and distribution warehouses that provide much of the food purchased in New York City grocery stores and restaurants. Through direct action and grassroots advocacy, workers are successfully challenging and overcoming sweatshop conditions, including massive wage theft, racism, and reckless disregard for health and safety.
In Minnesota, Wobbly sandwich workers at the Jimmy John’s chain are waging a creative, dynamic, and high-performance campaign centered on direct action and leadership development of rank-and-file workers. Like U.S. Starbucks stores, Jimmy John’s had been untouched by any labor union before the IWW campaign.
IWW branches in San Francisco, Madison, Portland, Chicago, and many other cities and towns are growing and functioning at a high level. Wobblies are winning campaigns in social services and recycling, adding value to port truck struggles, and are building an extensive organizing network among construction workers. Outside of the United States, the IWW has seen many exciting advances including among health services workers in the British Isles and foodservice workers in Germany, among others. Inspired and fortified by the martyrs and life-long participants in class struggle found in this book, the future of the Industrial Workers of the World is bright.
Great opportunity for dramatic social change exists today and much work remains to be done. That’s where you come in: you’ll find the blueprint in Rebel Voices.
—Daniel Gross, New York City, July 2011
Introduction: What Is This IWW?
The Industrial Workers of the World was founded in Chicago in 1905. It took that name to declare its hope that organization could end the use of workers against each other anywhere—in the same plant, or in the same industry, or across oceans, in peace or in war, either to cut each other’s pay or to kill each other’s kids.
That is still its aim today.
In 1905 American unions divided workers (except at coal mines) by craft. It was a time of extensive immigration, and many trade union locals turned away newcomers—Blacks and women as well as foreign-born. The IWW wanted to arrange that all workers in the same mine, mill or factory could bargain as one unit and, where it would help, bargain for an entire industry across a large area. They wanted to avoid long strikes and employer starve-out tactics by arranging for support from workers in all industries across the country as One Big Union. Early IWW strikes in eastern textile centers, among steelworkers at McKees Rocks, and in the young auto industry, gave the old unions the choice of either being replaced by this new radical union, or bargaining for these previously excluded workers.
In the far west at that time a largely hobo workforce born in many lands spoke a common lingo and found a common enemy in the employment agencies, or sharks, through whom they had to buy jobs building the country. Sharks split fees with foremen to.get them to fire these workers before they had been on the job long. The IWW took to the soapbox urging wide refusal to hire through the sharks. Employment agencies got the Salvation Army to drown out IWW soapboxers, and the Wobblies responded with their own songs sung to the tunes that the Salvation Army bands played. The cops arrested the IWW speakers, and soon hundreds who had never made a speech in their lives mounted the soapboxes and filled the jails until the authorities decided to allow free speech.
Thus the IWW laid the basis for its complete transformation of the lifestyle of the western lumber worker during the first world war, as well as the organization of copper miners and agricultural workers that brought the enmity of the government and a series of federal and state trials that put many of its active members behind bars for years.
Despite this mailed-fist treatment by employers and government the IWW continued to grow. It started the 1920s with its major strength in the northwest woods, the mines in Butte and on the docks of Philadelphia. Release of the union’s “class-war prisoners” became the number one demand in the IWW shipping strikes of May 1923, the lumber strikes of that year and various construction strikes called primarily for economic purposes.
In 1927 the IWW called numerous one-day stoppages to protest the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, followed by the first strike ever to bring out all three coalfields in Colorado. This was a decade in which unionism on the whole was going downhill, and the IWW, hurt by a 1924 split over such issues as strikes called for non-economic reasons, declined too, especially as the combine replaced the harvest hands whom the union formerly had organized by the tens of thousands each year.
In the big depression the IWW organized the unemployed both for survival and to assure those workers who still had jobs that the unemployed would strengthen their picketlines, not take their jobs, if they struck to resist wage-cuts. For the first time
in history unions grew instead of shrinking during a depression. Wobblies pioneered a new wave of sitdown strikes, first at Hormel in Austin, Minnesota, November 1933, followed by Hudson Body, Detroit, in March 1934.
The IWW pioneered the organization of the Detroit auto industry in 1934 with radio programs, the daily distribution of thousands upon thousands of leaflets (“Sit Down and Watch Your Pay Go Up” was one), soapboxing at plant gates and the Murray Body strike.
In the 1930s depression decade Wobblies organized lumberworkers in Idaho, and tried organizing railroad extra gangs, WPA projects and Boulder Dam. Its major achievement in those years was in the metal working plants of Cleveland, where it built up solid job-control at American Stove and several other plants enduring to 1950. The IWW was also involved in the prolonged defense of miners in Harlan, Kentucky, and of men convicted during the strikes in Cleveland.
IWW metal miners organized and won recognition at U.S. Vanadium in Bishop, California in 1941. It refused to take the wartime “no-strike pledge’’ and won some gains in its Cleveland shops with very brief stoppages. When the Cleveland city government refused to negotiate with streetcar employees, the IWW urged a continuation of service while collecting no fares; rank-and-file streetcar employees favored the proposal and the city agreed to negotiate—the first use of this tactic copied soon after in Japan. IWW Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union 510 won some NLRB elections on the Gulf, and maintained a “Respect All Picketlines” policy during the AFL and CIO rivalries.
When the Taft-Hartley “Slave Labor Law” was enacted in 1947, the IWW urged that all unions undo its restrictions by refusing to sign the silly “non-Communist” affidavits. Since only the IWW, International Typographical Union and United Mine Workers stuck to that policy, the IWW was subject to raiding by other unions.
In April 1949 the U. S. Attorney General, refusing to give his reasons for doing so, added the IWW to his “subversive list.” Throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, the IWW persisted in efforts to require the government either to make public its reasons for putting the IWW on this list, or to remove it. Later this became a dead issue when the Department of Justice killed the list, but it resulted in a prolonged period in which the IWW focused on other matters than organizing and improving the job. In the 1950s its picketlines were mainly of a protest nature.
IWW on-the-job organization revived in the 1960s, initially at small restaurants and other places not covered by the National Labor Relations Act. 1964 brought a new agricultural workers organizing drive in Michigan, where IWW fruitpickers waged the union’s first strike in many years, resulting in higher wages and better conditions on several neighboring farms not involved in the strike. The next year this drive extended to Yakima, Washington, where Wobblies are still active today.
In the 1960s the IWW became an organization of young people with a few old-timers. By referendum in 1967 it decided to accept college students into membership on the basis that they were apprentices to their future work, a policy it still follows. Wobbly students had earlier led a successful free-speech fight at Roosevelt University in Chicago in 1964, and were active in the much larger one in Berkeley, California, a year later. The IWW’s major campus growth was at Waterloo, Ontario, where it successfully bargained for advantages for the student body; there and on other campuses the IWW engaged in extensive support of strikes by other unions.
Beginning in the 1960s and continuing today, workers at many “alternative” and “movement” printshops and periodicals have joined the IWW’s Printing and Publishing House Workers Industrial Union 450. In 1971 the old California Criminal Syndicalism law was invoked against IWW members on the San Diego Street Journal, but was at last declared unconstitutional.
The same year in Chicago a strike at Hip Products won NLRB orders for reinstatement of IWW strikers; in an election at International Wood Products in Long Beach, California, it lost to the scabs. In 1973 some members wanted to bar the IWW general secretary-treasurer from filing the Lan-drum-Griffin reports required for the union to have access to NLRB service, but this move was defeated in a referendum. Organizing at several fast-food outlets around the country won some new members and some gains, but no permanent job organization.
In 1976 IWW assistance to strikers at a nursing home near the IWW office in Chicago led to Wobbly involvement in other strike support, an activity that has continued into the ‘80s as Wobblies have taken part in picketlines, mass rallies and other actions in support of PATCO, P-9 at Hormel, the Watsonville cannery-workers, United Farm Workers, TWA flight-attendants, Chicago Tribune strikers and many others. Through the union’s General Defense Committee, IWW members have also defended imprisoned American Indian activist Leonard Peltier, Black South African unionists, and others.
An IWW-initiated petition drive to exonerate martyred Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill was taken up by the Illinois Labor History Society and other groups and received wide labor support throughout the U.S. and Canada as well as in Sweden. Utah Governor Matheson refused to act, claiming that the Hill case was still unclear. The IWW asked in reply: If the case is unclear, why was Joe Hill executed?
In 1979 workers at University Cellar bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, chose the IWW because they felt it best fitted their needs for union democracy. Under a series of union contracts this job-branch grew to include some eighty workers* until early 1987 when the business was swallowed up by a conglomerate and closed down.
The IWW today has organized shops, general membership branches and/or delegates in some forty cities of the U.S. as well as in Australia, Canada and England. In addition to workplace and unemployed organizing, IWW members have taken part in anti-apartheid and antiwar agitation, and other efforts to help assure the survival of life on this planet. “Two-card” Wobblies—those who also belong to other unions—have been active in the rank-and-file movement against concessions. Bruce “Utah” Phillips and other Wobs have produced notable records of labor songs. During the past year a large exhibition of Wobbly art, organized by Carlos Cortez, has been touring the continent. The IWW produces a yearly labor history calendar and, as this book goes to press, is readying a new printing of the thirty-fifth edition of its famous Little Red Song Book. The monthly IWW newspaper, the Industrial Worker ($4 for a one-year subscription from IWW, 3435 North Sheffield, Room 202, Chicago, Illinois 60657), covers world labor news, rank-and-file activity and other matters of workingclass interest not readily available elsewhere.
Though its membership has seldom exceeded a few thousand, more books and articles have been written about the IWW by labor historians than about much larger unions. Rebel Voices, which preceded most of this literature, will also outlive most of it, for in this anthology Joyce Kornbluh captures, as few historians have been able to do, the zeal with which the Wobblies battled for textile workers in Lawrence, steelworkers in McKees Rocks, lumberjacks and harvest hands, longshoremen and seamen, and incidentally free speech for themselves and others. Here is a generous sampling of the songs and stickers and speeches they made, the news as they wrote it, the poems and cartoons and philosophy they put in their periodicals, with each chapter clarified by an introductory essay.
An updated guide to the extensive literature on IWW history since Rebel Voices was first published appears at the back of this book. Why has so much been written about so small a union? Circumstances—as well as outlook—put the IWW into a pioneering role, organizing the immigrant and lesser-skilled workers that early trade unions tended to exclude, and the industries and areas not then tackled by the larger unions. IWW members (and its members have always been its organizers) were free to try non-traditional methods, and had to do so—thus the stickers (“silent agitators”) and the songs, the sit-down and the stay-in strikes, the thousand-mile picketline and other strategies that the IWW developed. Flexibility and innovation have always been the hallmarks of this union.
These are matters of more than historical interest. Keeping workers in different countries from being used against eac
h other in peace or in war-that old hope of the IWW has become the supreme but neglected imperative of the labor movement today. As multinational corporations shift jobs across continents and oceans, global labor solidarity has become an obvious and urgent need, and it is on this need that the IWW still focuses its spotlight.
Contrary to the premature obituaries that started appearing as long ago as 1906, the Industrial Workers of the World are still doing their best to fan the flames of discontent, to organize the working class, to build the new society in the shell of the old, to make this planet a good place to live.
Joyce Kornbluh brought out this remarkable anthology in 1964. A new edition has long been needed, and it is appropriate that the Charles H. Kerr Company should have the honor of producing it. ‘Way back in the 1910s Kerr books were my own and many others’ introduction to socialism. Kerr published writings by Big Bill Haywood, Ralph Chaplin, Joe Hill, Vincent St. John, Art Boose, Mary E. Marcy and many other Wobblies, either as pamphlets or in its International Socialist Review, and many IWW-related titles have been added to the Kerr list in the last few years.
The Charles H. Kerr Company is proud to start its second century of publishing pro-labor material by bringing out this new and expanded edition of a most significant book.