An article by Matt Muchowski, who was a staff member at the Industrial Workers of the World’s General Headquarters office in Chicago, on some of the tasks and responsibilities he and others carried out. Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (October 2013).
Hi, my name is Matt Muchowski and I’ve been a staff member at IWW’s General Headquarters (GHQ) here in Chicago for the last year and a half. I’ve been a member of the IWW since 2003 when I got a red card at a Labor Day rally in Pittsburgh.
Working here has been hard but fun. I wanted to write a little bit about what it’s like here to help provide a clearer picture of what we do so that members and anyone thinking of running for General Secretary-Treasurer (GST) in the future, or anyone who wants to stop by now and volunteer, will understand what happens at GHQ.
We often talk to potential members who think the IWW is bigger than we are or smaller than we are. I remember one person in Texas called us the “Navy Seals of the labor movement.” The reality is that for a union with members spread out across the United States and the world, we are small, but growing. One of our biggest tasks at GHQ is working on ways to engage members (especially at-large members, or those who aren’t connected with a branch, shop, or local industrial union) and to be prepared to handle future growth.
GHQ’s basic duties involve maintaining and keeping a record of the union’s finances and member list. Day-to-day, that means we process delegate reports, deposit dues money into the union’s bank account, write checks for the various bills the union has (rent, postage, printing and travel costs), receive mail and answer the phone. GST Sam Green handles almost all of the financial side of things while I do a lot of the member list side of things, a job that Sam did before he was elected as GST. The member list entails tracking members’ dues payments and their contact information. So when we receive a piece of mail returned because the address was incorrect, I am the person who calls and emails members to get their correct address.
I also spend some time everyday updating the GHQ Facebook page, communicating with members from different branches about different questions or concerns they have, and mailing supplies to delegates. In the last two years we have started a summer internship program. We make the program very educational for students and have helped some receive school credit and outside funding. Some days we have volunteers who help out with different tasks around the office such as stamping our return address on envelopes, data entry and packing Literature Department orders. People who volunteer even just a few hours at GHQ save us a lot of time and help us respond quicker to the time-sensitive duties that we have.
The IWW does more than any other union in the United States, and probably the world, to keep members informed of how their dues are being used by creating a new issue of the General Organizational Bulletin (GOB) every month. The GOB details the union’s finances and member statistics; GHQ is responsible for compiling it and distributing it every month.
Currently, GHQ shares a space at 2036 W. Montrose Ave. in Chicago with the Literature Department, whose job is to help spread pro-IWW knowledge and act as a fundraising arm for the union. Our storefront looks like a book store, while the back has desks where we handle the work of GHQ and a conference room which I jokingly refer to as the “Joe Hill Memorial Conference Room” because we keep Joe Hill’s urn there with several other historical items. Despite holding onto several items of historical note, including several filing cabinets filled with old copies of the Industrial Worker and the GOB, most of our historical artifacts are at the IWW archive at Wayne State University’s Walter P. Reuther Library in Detroit. While we are happy to talk to the occasional students and labor history buffs that stop by the office, it’s not really our primary duty, as our office is not a library or history center but an active union office.
We are often asked about the scope of our responsibilities, with questions like: Is GHQ the national office for the IWW? The international? GHQ is ultimately the international office for the IWW, however much of what we do in the United States—processing dues, recording members’ status—is handled internationally by Regional Organizing Committees (ROCs), who then send us reports. ROCs play an especially important role in helping to organize internationally, as they are more familiar with the on-the-ground situation.
Sometimes GHQ is asked to pass a resolution on an important or timely issue. However, we don’t set policy. We simply work for the union and its members. The General Executive Board (GEB) consists of elected volunteers of the union, and they set the budget, pass resolutions, and do a lot of other work to provide oversight to GHQ and the various committees throughout the union such as the International Solidarity Commission, the Organizing Department, and others.
Sometimes GHQ receives calls from people suggesting ideas for the union’s newspaper, the Industrial Worker. While the Literature Department handles the finances and part of the administrative work for the newspaper, the editor, Diane, is not based out of GHQ.
While GHQ is engaged in organizing workers into the union, we mainly focus on keeping the administrative side of the union functional and responsive to members. Most of the time when someone calls us and is interested in organizing at their workplace, we try to put them in touch with the organizing committee of their nearest branch, or lacking that, the Organizing Department itself.
In addition to entering delegate reports into our database, I am responsible for providing dues stamps to the several hundred at-large members of the union who pay their dues to GHQ either through the mail or the union’s website.
Regarding at-large members, we are always trying to put them in touch with other Wobblies in their area. We notify all new at-large members about nearby branches and give them a phone and email address of a Wobbly who has agreed to be a new member contact. Among some of the projects we have taken up since GHQ moved to Chicago a few years ago was a plan to call prospective new members who fill out the member application online. We like to touch base with them, answer any questions they have, and try to put them in touch with Wobblies who live near them.
Seeing as how we are the only union that I know of that allows new members to join through our website, we often have people sign up in pretty remote areas. We do not currently have branches in places like Mississippi and Arkansas, yet we have several new members every month in those states. It’s only a matter of time before we have enough critical mass to develop a branch in areas like that. When someone joins in an area without a branch, we like to talk to them to gauge their interest in building a branch. If they are willing and able, we can connect with other members past and present in their area. Many times members join and drop out after a few months simply because there aren’t other IWW members for them to get together and organize with, but if a Wobbly in the area is willing to do the grunt work to make something happen, those former members are usually more than willing to get involved and pay dues again. This is how the Indiana and Alaska branches became so active recently.
The rate of members who drop out is one of our union’s biggest challenges and is something that we hope the union’s new database will help solve. Currently the union does most of our reports on paper, re-copying information and mailing the paper documents from delegate, to branch secretary, to GHQ. At GHQ we have to enter the information twice, once on our accounting software, and then I enter it on our member database to keep track of members’ dues. The union as a whole is duplicating our effort and using time on data entry that could be better spent on organizing. GHQ often gets calls from members or delegates checking the status of a report because these reports can sometimes take a month to be compiled, mailed, and processed at GHQ. It can be especially frustrating when GHQ receives six months of old delegate reports from a single branch at once.
Hopefully when our new database is set up delegates and members will be able to update their information once and GHQ can spend more time doing follow-up and analysis. We’ll be able to focus on helping delegates and branches with issues they might have, engaging members who have fallen behind on dues on what is going on, and better connecting members to each other so we can organize and build a strong working-class movement. If you have any questions about GHQ or the union’s administration, don’t hesitate to shoot us an email at [email protected] or call us at 773-728-0996.
Transcribed by Juan Conatz
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