Recyclers at Community Conservation Centers in Berkeley, California, have unionized into the IWW and have been pressuring management to sit down and negotiate with them. Signed union authorization cards representing a super-majority of the workers were presented to management on Dec. 27 by a group of workers and union representatives. Management refused voluntary recognition of the union and the union reps were physically assaulted. A very tense situation took a strange twist when the police arrived and informed management the union organizers would be allowed to complete their work on the property.

Workers at CCC, also known as The Buy Back, have been organizing for three months, seeking better working conditions, better pay, more vacation time, specific skill level definitions, and more democracy on the job. CCC workers started talking union when IWW members at curbside recycling in Berkeley signed a new contract. Word spread that the curbside contract was a good deal for the workers and the organizing drive picked up momentum through the efforts of a union rep and a curbside worker who left curbside to work at the Buy Back. One crucial concern is health benefits for workers' families. Presently health care is available only to the workers themselves. The lowest-paid workers at the Buy Back are making $8 an hour, which during economic boom times is scandalous. Additionally, CCC workers want a union to gain respect on the job. They say there hasn't been much up to now.

CCC general manager Jeff Belchamber agreed to consult with the union, but ultimately refused to recognize the union or to agree to abide by federal labor laws. The workers brought signed cards to the National Labor Relations Board in early January. The election is scheduled for Feb. 7. As of now management has yet to engage in blatant union busting tactics. Management did turn the list of eligible voters over to the IWW and the NLRB on schedule.

Workers are still asking the Community Conservation Centers board of directors to voluntarily recognize the union and immediately begin negotiating a union contract. If they refuse, organizers are confident that they will win the NLRB election set for Feb. 7. It appears that the board is split on the issue of voluntary recognition and has so far opted for the election process.

Buy Back workers have been meeting with union organizers once a week to strategize and prepare for the election. Wednesdays are union solidarity days. Last Wednesday, every worker was given a sticker that said Union Si or Union Yes as they entered the plant gate. They wore the stickers all day. Wednesday is also the day of the week that the election will take place.

The union, NLRB and management have agreed to a 45-minute election period Feb. 7th. The facility will shut down early and management will leave the property.

CCC will become the second recycling shop represented by the IWW in Berkeley. The IWW also represents the curbside recyclers at the Berkeley Ecology Center. The Buy Back is where curbside recycling is unloaded and sorted. Individuals can also recycle their plastic, glass and metal at The Buy Back and receive cash.

Javier Ceja, Buy Back worker and strong union supporter put it best. He said simply, "The union benefits us all, for our families and for ourselves."

Originally appeared in Industrial Worker #1630 (January/February 2001)

After five and a half years, the strike against Detroit's two major dailies has ended - and ended badly.

The strike by 2,500 unionists against the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News cost the papers an estimated $200 million, as circulation dropped by a third. Yet it was the unions that in the end cried uncle. Of the settlement, announced on Dec. 17, a union representative indicated that the unions didn't salvage much, "But it's better," he said, "to have a contract than no contract at all."

At 2 percent, the wage improvements are about half the current official rate of inflation. Moreover, wages have been slashed for some workers. For example, mailers (Teamsters) who once earned $16 an hour are now paid about $11 an hour. About 185 workers are waiting for openings before they can return to work; and if the companies have their way, 200 more will not be rehired at all.

The unions also agreed to an open shop, meaning that scabs hired during the strike and new employees do not have to join the union or pay agency fees for the cost of representing them as a condition of their employment.

Of course things didn't have to end this way. Early on unionists from all over Detroit turned out to the picket lines to stop delivery of scab-produced newspapers. But the unions capitulated to court injunctions and abandoned effective picketing in favor of a boycott, which failed to force the bosses to settle. Now that the battle is over the unions have agreed to help the papers to rebuild circulation in exchange for bonus money.

Originally appeared in Industrial Worker #1630 (January/February 2001)

Detroit was once another name for solidarity - unionism - unity - standing up for working people's dignity. No more!

Whether it is fighting for a living wage for unjustly fired and locked-out workers, for diverse union membership, for education and health care, for community needs and for respect, union leaders have the responsibility to their members and their community to foster justice. Instead, they have decided their interests are the same as the companies', betraying workers' struggles as they get all they can for themselves and fight to stay in control.

After five-and-a-half years on the street, the Teamsters union - the last to hold out - surrendered totally rather than face Gannett's racketeering lawsuit, the ongoing drain on strike funds, and the difficulties of prolonged struggle. Gannett told the unions it would never take the fired workers back, and demanded a vote before Christmas.

The contract had nothing for the fired or locked-out workers, nor did it offer back wages or seniority. It took away $5 an hour for all mailers, while giving one percent pay hikes and the chance to grovel for merit pay to others. There's no sick leave, and scabs can not be bumped from their positions. TheDetroit newspapers will be scabby, open shop sweatshops.

Many workers were outraged and walked away as the Executive Board said it was the worst contract they had ever seen but told us to ratify it anyway. The vote in the 1,138-member Teamsters Local 372 was 139-46, in the 255-member Teamsters #2040 it was 36-33. The other unions - the Newspaper Guild, Printers, Pressmen and Engravers - broke rank months ago, settling for equally bad contracts.

During the strike/lock-out, some religious leaders and politicians rallied constantly against the newspapers' union-busting, but now who speaks when union sister and brother turn their backs on the fired and locked-out left without? At the end of January their benefits will be cut off and workers with years of seniority will be left scrambling for whatever jobs they can find.

Gannett pulled its RICO suit off the table in exchange for the unions promising to tell all that the strike is over and everyone who canceled their subscriptions in solidarity with the workers to restart. I, as a most active participant, see no honor, no dignity and no justice - only corruption, deceit and treachery.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker #1630 (January/February 2001)

Whereas on April 20-22, 2001, the Summit of the Americas will convene in Quebec City; and,
Whereas the government and business concerns attending this Summit plan to begin establishing the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA); and,

Whereas the proposed Area would, in essence, expand the provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to cover all of North, South and Central America and the Caribbean, with the exception of Cuba; and,

Whereas the documented effects of NAFTA in Canada, Mexico and the United States include increased unemployment, depressed wage levels, weakened environmental regulations, increased consolidation of industry through corporate mergers and buyouts; and numerous harms to the working class in these countries in result of these conditions; and,

Whereas the Industrial Workers of the World has affirmed since its founding in 1905 that the working class and the employing class have nothing in common; and,

Whereas the groups and individuals comprising the Summit of the Americas Welcoming Committee/Le Comite d'Accueil du Sommet des Ameriques (CASA) and the Anti-Capitalist Convergence/La Convergence des Luttes Anti-Capitalistes (CLAC), along with many others, have called for international solidarity in resisting the Summit of the Americas;

Therefore be it resolved:

That the IWW condemns the Summit of the Americas as another act of war by the employing class against the working class of the Americas; and,

That the IWW pledges to resist implementation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and

That the IWW supports those who stand in resistance against the Summit of the Americas, and encourages IWW members to join in demonstrating their resistance to global capitalism.

IWW General Executive Board, January 2001

For information on protests in Quebec City, e-mail: [email protected] web: http://www.quebec2001.net tel: +1 514 526-8946 post: 2035, St. Laurent Boulevard, 2nd floor, Montreal, Quebec H2X 2T3 Canada

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker #1630 (January/February 2001)

Montreal Wobs win union recognition

The recently organized Montreal IWW now claims 15 members and should be applying for a branch charter soon. The two workers of the CFS-Q (a student union) have joined and are preparing to negotiate their first contract.The IWW is also close to securing a majority at a local vegetarian grocery, and has several Wobs working at a large marketing research firm.

They have also been busy translating IWW literature into French, and have distributed 1,000 copies of a "Direct Action Gets the Goods" newsletter.

IWW organizing Pitzer College

The General Executive Board has chartered an Industrial Union Branch for faculty at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. The Pitzer faculty began organizing in October, and now have more than a third of the faculty signed up and have begun reaching out to faculty at nearby colleges.

A member of the Boston Education Workers IU 620 Branch met with several Pitzer Wobs in January, discussing strategies for reaching majority status and possibilities for organizing effective solidarity actions for Pitzer faculty and cafeteria staff (who have been struggling for union recognition for several years).

Industrial union organizing summit

The East Bay (California) IWW hosted an industrial union organizing summit the weekend of October 15th, which kicked off with a discussion of industry-wide versus individual shop organizing. In the long run, participants agreed, organizing industry-wide is the more practical approach.

Other discussions addressed the challenge of how Industrial Union and General Membership Branches can more effectively support each other. Although the IWW generally begins by organizing GMBs and working to build Industrial Union Branches from that base, Seattle and Portland began with industrial campaigns in the food service and nonprofit sectors with some success.

Participants were interested in targeting a few industries, such as education, restaurants, construction, and transportation, for organizing. This will require developing issue-based campaigns and networks of activists as we work to build a base in these industries capable of making our presence felt.

Another union café

Workers at Madison's Café Assissi lined up in the IWW in December, bringing the number of job shops in the city to three. (The other two are Lakeside Press and the UW Greens Infoshop, an independent educational resource center.) The café serves natural foods, and has a space for performers and film showings. It is the only unionized coffee house in Madison.

Boston actions hit sweatshop labor

Several members of the Boston IWW joined demonstrations outside Niketown and the Gap December 16, joining over a hundred protesters with our banner and exhorting passersby in Boston's toniest shopping district to take a stand in solidarity with our fellow workers overseas.

We were soon joined by a horde of police who decided the Wobblies were blocking an entranceway too effectively and shoved us aside. Police were much rougher with a follow-up demonstration the next week, preventing protestors from congregating on the public sidewalks in front of the stores.

IWW elects general officers for 2001

In balloting last month, IWW members have voted to re-elect General Secretary-Treasurer Alexis Buss to serve a second one-year term. The 2001 General Executive Board will include: Sam Adams (Minneapolis), Jeff Brite (New Orleans), Mark Damron (Cincinnati), Joshua Freeze (Austin), Breeze Luetke-Stahlman (Lawrence), Mickie Valis (Atlanta), and John Persak (Seattle). Jon Bekken (Boston) was elected to edit the Industrial Worker.

The International Solidarity Commission members will be Liam Flynn (Baltimore), Ron Kaminkow (Chicago) and Peter Moore (Ottawa). Eric Chester (Western Massachusetts) is first alternate.

Elected to the union's Conflict Mediation Committee were Bill Bradley (Portland), Heather Hall (Winnipeg), Robin Hood (Detroit), Betsy Law (Louisville), and Mona Tapp (Louisville). Mark Damron will also serve as secretary of the General Defense Committee.

The IWW's 2001 General Assembly, at which members come together to discuss union policy and nominate officers for the coming year, will be held the first weekend in August in Boston, Massachusetts.

Constitutional amendments to reorganize the General Defense Committee, streamline the union's election process, and speed the issuance of recall ballots in the event that members petition to remove an officer were approved. A proposal to make it more difficult to press internal charges against union members was defeated.

Farewell, Fellow Workers

Fellow Worker David Miller, who lived in the Sierra Nevada foothills near the old Gold Country, died Dec. 14. He rejoined the IWW about 18 months ago. Last time I spoke to David, he was looking for suggestions on how to organize loggers at Sierra Pacific Industries to try and oppose clear-cut logging.
Fellow Worker Dave Johnson, formerly of IU 510, Marine Transport Workers in San Francisco, is dead at 57. A deck-hand at Red & White, he was a great guy, always friendly and amiable.

They will both be missed.

-- Steve Ongerth

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker #1630 (January/February 2001)

The IWW has always taken a dim view of arbitration, recognizing that no union ever won something from an "impartial" arbitrator that it was not strong enough to win through its own power. Arbitration promotes the illusion that problems at the workplace can be resolved through an appeal to fairness or to some objective standard of the exact degree of exploitation and degradation the worker should have to endure. Fundamentally, it is based on the premise that the interests of the workers and the bosses can be reconciled, if only by an outside "expert" who dispassionately weighs the evidence for both sides.
So, Wobblies are reluctant to entrust individual grievances to the hands of an arbitrator. But the notion of letting an arbitrator decide the conditions under which all of us will work is even more repellent, and I don't know of an instance where an IWW branch has ever agreed to do such a thing. However, many unions are not as particular as we are, and it is not uncommon - especially in the public sector, where there are often fairly severe legal limitations on striking - for unions which have been unable to reach a contract agreeing to submit the matters in dispute to binding arbitration.

As just one example of the narrow-minded, class bias typical of arbitrators, who are most usually chosen from the ranks of lawyers, consultants and others who will never have to work under the conditions they impose, Arbitrator Frank Keenan recently dismissed a grievance from Steelworkers Local 14734 on behalf of a worker suspended for three days without pay. His crime? Giving the finger to management in a photo snapped to commemorate his fifth-year anniversary. The arbitrator ruled that "conduct disrespectful of supervisors and the institution of the Company" is grounds for discipline. When's the last time you heard of a supervisor or a CEO losing pay for being disrespectful of the workers on the line?

Quite often workers have emerged from these arbitrations vowing "Never again," yet unions don't simply repudiate the results of an arbitration process into which it had voluntarily subjected itself, no matter how repugnant. The bosses, it seems, are under no such moral compunction.

Last year, Hawaii public school teachers submitted their salaries to binding arbitration after years of stagnant pay. The arbitrator agreed that some measure of relief was called for, issuing an order giving the teachers far less than they had asked for during bargaining. The state government has simply refused to pay up, claiming that it doesn't have the money (though it has no difficulty finding the funds for an endless series of tourist-oriented boondoggles).

Closer to home, for me, Philadelphia firefighters have long been demanding compensation when they are exposed to Hepatitis on the job, a serious disease which has hit many firefighters in recent years. The city has refused, and so the matter went to arbitration as part of their new contract. The arbitrator figured that when firefighters were injured on the job, they were certainly entitled to compensation. The city simply refused to accept the arbitrator's ruling, instead rewriting the contract to suit its own tastes and imposing that on the firefighters. The firefighters sued, but as usual the courts ruled that workers have no rights that the bosses are obliged to respect, and overturned the arbitrator's award for sick leave for workers ill with the virus.

If workers refused to follow an arbitrator's ruling (or a court ruling, for that matter) on the grounds that they couldn't afford it (they, after all, have to pay rent and childcare, pay for our food and medical bills, etc.), the back-to-work orders and contempt of court jailings and firings would hail down on their heads until they lay battered and bleeding on the street. But the bosses can pick and choose what orders they follow. Binding arbitration, it seems, is binding only on the workers.

-- Alexis Buss

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker #1630 (January/February 2001)

The New Rank and File by Staughton and Alice Lynd, ILR Press (Ithaca, NY), 2000. Available from IWW Literature Dept. for $15.95.

It's rare that a sequel exceeds the original, but in The New Rank and File, Staughton and Alice Lynd have at least equaled their 1973 Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working Class Organizers. In an inspiring series of pieces by rank-and-file activists and organizers from many sectors of the labor movement, the Lynds demonstrate the type of grassroots approach that the labor movement needs if we are to achieve the strength needed to win against a global, wealthy and well-armed foe.

Directed at two groups, rank-and-file workers and young people dedicated to service to the labor movement, the book directly takes on the ideology of business unionism. Condemning old guard and reformers alike, the Lynds write in their introduction: "These leaders are committed to what labor historians call `business unionism': the goal of signing collective bargaining agreements complete with management prerogative and no-strike clauses; the dues checkoff as the means of funding union bureaucracies; the protection of jobs in one's own nation at whatever expense to workers in other countries; and the capitalist system as the desired context of all of the above. Therefore the labor movement must find ways to be more visionary, more inclusive, more democratic, and more willing to take risks than the union movement can be expected to be."

The book is divided into four sections, each titled with a line from Ralph Chaplin's "Solidarity Forever." "The Union's Inspiration" shows stories of union organizing, both for new shops and to win demands, demonstrating the effect of direct action as opposed to primary reliance on labor law and government agencies. "The Ashes of the Old" examines the recent context of globalization, capital flight and disinvestment. "Anywhere Beneath the Sun" takes a look at unionists outside the US and the need for the labor movement to be transnational if it is to fight modern capital. Finally, "In Our Hands is Placed a Power" presents rank-and-file unionists fighting and winning battles by creating horizontal support networks either without or in opposition to the leadership of their business unions.

Those from the IWW school of unionism will see their reflections in the workers of this book. Far from viewing unions strictly as a tool to get better pay and benefits for their members, they show that solidarity and the vibrancy of working class culture is what makes a union, not the contracts or officials.

The story from Mia Giunta, an organizer for United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers in Connecticut demonstrates this best. UE organizers were not sent from place to place, but would set down roots in an area. "The organizer took part in the negotiations at the place he orshe had organized." She says "I was a better `organizer' because I was also a `servicer' and a better `servicer' because I was also an `organizer.'" At one factory she helped organize, they had a radically different response to a reduction in work. Instead of laying off the workers with the least seniority, "Somebody suggested, `we'll all work a few hours less each week. That way everybody can stay. Everybody can have health insurance.' And they took advantage of the vacation and maternity leave, and that became the tradition at that factory."

Ed Mann, who passed away in 1992, and to whom the Lynds dedicate this book, worked in steel mills in Youngstown, Ohio. He was a member of the IWW and of the Workers Solidarity Club, a militant retirees organization. Mann believed that workers have "too much contract." He believed the proper way to solve problems was direct action. "I think the first three months I was there [on the open hearth], they must have had ten wildcat strikes. `We want rubber tire wheelbarrows.' ... `We want a relief man.' ... `We want cold water.' ... `We need safety masks today.' `Hey somebody got burned. We want safety jackets or we aren't going to work on those furnaces.'

"The grievance procedure wasn't working. That's why we had wildcat strikes. We weren't going to get tied up in paperwork. The wildcats didn't last long: a day, two days at most, maybe eight hours."

An activist in the Hebron Union of Workers in the West Bank of Palestine provides a contract for one of their workplaces, that not only provides for certain rates of pay and workplace insurance, but also: "On the ninth day of each month, there is a general strike against the occupation. If on that day the worker can not come to work or is late coming to work, nothing will be subtracted from their pay," and "Transportation to and from work must be paid by the employer." This union has only volunteer executive committee members and, "in each factory the union deals with the employer, not by someone from here [the executive] going to discuss for them, but by a committee of the workers themselves."

Martin Glaberman tells a funny story from the Dodge Main plant in the 1970s: "There was a joke in Hamtramck, where the plant was located, that an optimist is a Dodge worker who brings his lunch box to work. Day after day, some department would wildcat, and by the middle of the day the plant was shut down."

And on and on, the worker tell their stories. They're not all victories and these rank-and-file activists do not have stars in their eyes about their work, but the stories do provide hope and a reminder that we are not alone in the class struggle. The Lynds have done a fantastic job of pulling together workers into a book that provides innumerable examples of strategies that work, not in someone's theory about organizing, but in actual jobs. If you want to read about the IWW's ideas, then read this book.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker #1630 (January/February 2001)

[This article by Robert P. Helms originally appeared in The Industrial Worker of January/February 2003. Some of its phrasing was edited to make it more accessible to the non-guinea pig readers of that labor newspaper, and that has been preserved here.]

I am one of the hundreds of thousands of healthy people in the United States who serve as paid volunteer test subjects in clinical trials that determine the safety of experimental drugs. Our work falls between the legal status of a hospital patient and a temp worker. Our compensation is based on the time involved, how many procedures are needed, and how invasive and discomforting the procedures will be. We pay taxes on our earnings as "independent contractors," and our relationship with the research facility lasts only as long as the "informed Consent" document stipulates. However, we are not discussed as employees in medical literature. Instead, the focus is on protecting (or failing to protect) our rights and safety, just as though we were hospital patients.

In early December 2002 I entered a study at Philadelphia's Thomas Jefferson Hospital, in a group of 20 men. We were given low doses of an anti-anxiety drug (enough to cause some drowsiness but too little for a mood change). We were obliged to defecate in a basket so that the staff could search through the stool for the remains of the drug tablet. A catheter tube was also inserted into a vein and we gave about 15 blood samples during each period. The diet was regulated so that we all got the same very dull institutional meals.

The schedule had five sections in which we stayed in the hospital for four days, and then we were released for 36-hour periods, except for the break over Christmas and the New Year. We were obliged to refrain from drinking alcohol or using any other drugs (not even aspirin or vitamins) for the entire duration of the experiment which, with pre-screening and follow-up appointments, lasted seven weeks. The hospital was conducting the experiment for Merck Pharmaceuticals, the company seeking government approval to market the new drug.

Because the experiment was fairly long and called for an unusually distasteful procedure, the recruiters invited only the most experienced and reliable guinea pigs on their list. A newcomer to the trade is prone to misunderstand the whole affair and not complete a study for any of a hundred reasons. I've done at least forty studies at Jefferson alone, and most of the others had as much or even more experience than I do. Three of us happen to know each other well, and most of us knew each other slightly from earlier studies.

I was also known both to the other volunteers and to the Jefferson staff for my journal Guinea Pig Zero, which deals with this very subject. In 1996, in fact, I evaluated Jefferson as the best of six research units for its respectful, excellent staff. My high regard for the place has not changed since then, but now they have policies regarding me: the journal and its anthology are not allowed in staff work areas and they may not buy publications directly from me. I don't mind, because other units have barred me entirely from their premises.

The pay we originally agreed to for this study was $3,350. Before the first segment of the study was over, every one of us agreed that the pay was too low. As veteran lab rats, we knew that the rate should hover around $200 per day, with some variation from one facility to another and the details of a given study. During the screening period, some staffers could not deny that the pay should have been higher, and guinea pigs were comparing it unfavorably to other ongoing gigs in the area. We all knew of stories where lab rats had done something to pressure the company for more money or better conditions, so our situation provided a good opportunity for a concerted effort. A few dates into the study, I wrote up one-page memorandum that respectfully said we wanted to re-negotiate the package and thought we should get $4,500.

When gathering signatures and pitching it to management, I took pains to avoid giving the impression that the argument was coming mainly from me. Another guy walked the paper around the ward, and I signed my name in the middle of the list. Within a day or so we had all but one man's name on the sheet, and the lone holdout went to the boss after we had handed it over and asked to see it so that he could sign it too. Thus he went from being the most shy to being one of the boldest among us. When we made our presentation to the head nurse and the unit director, about six of us did the talking.

When the job was planned, it was to spread over a longer period in the fall season and be all over before Christmas. The breaks were to be three days long and each week was to have the same schedule. Various delays occurred, but the sponsor still wanted the job completed in 2003, so the schedule was compressed into a much shorter period (the staff wound up doing long overtime shifts and often sleeping at the unit). We volunteers were now expected to refrain from drinking through the whole holiday season. The feces collection exposed us to unpleasant smells that had not been considered in the compensation. An old fringe benefit had been phased out before this study began: the volunteer telephone was now restricted to local calls instead of allowing long-distance on the "honor system." Despite all these changes, the payment had not been adjusted.

Other strategies were used to boost the pressure. We kept referring to better-paying studies that would soon begin within a mile of Jefferson. This meant that some of us could drop out mid-way through the study, screwing up the science and causing a major financial catastrophe for the researchers. Anyone who bolted would be paid pro rata for the time he had put in. I suggested we ingest flexible vinyl propaganda scraps, so that the staff would find little notes reading "more money" in our poop, but many found the idea too vulgar –- go figure!

We were promised a yes-or-no answer before the holiday break, and the bosses assured us that they basically agreed with our request. It remained for them to get the drug company to agree. The promised deadline neared, and tension increased as unrelated issues came up. Two guys were caught breaking the dietary rules by burglarizing a cabinet and gobbling down snacks between meals. Staffers remarked that those guilty of such bad conduct didn't deserve a bonus. In response, we loudly talked about pulling a hunger strike or refusing to eat outside our rooms, in order to keep the pay issue clear of any other concern.

On the evening before the first sub-group was to leave for the holidays and we guinea pigs were making more and more noise about being blown off, the unit director summoned everyone to the lounge for an announcement. They had gotten the nod from Merck two days earlier, but they had only just received a signed agreement over the fax machine. The payment would be increased by $800, which is less than we asked for but plenty of money. We all cheered. Before the meeting broke up, the head nurse emphatically stated that we could not just "band together" and put the sponsors over a barrel in the middle of an experiment. She said that this was an unusual case, and that she herself had miscalculated the figure because of special circumstances.

Over the years I have been asked whether human guinea pigs would start a union, and I've said that it's logistically farfetched and that we would suffer a lowering of status if we were to be included under the Labor Relations Act. Patients and lab rats hold a stronger hand in the courtroom than workers do, and the effort I have just described would have been a failure had it been aimed at union recognition or had we used a union rep to speak for us. However, the head nurse was wrong when she said we couldn't do this again. The guinea pig workforce may be too fragmented and fluid to form even an unofficial union, but the drug industry is extremely cash-rich and competitive. This makes the industry able to throw a bone to small groups of savvy volunteers.

The victory at Jefferson demonstrates that healthy lab rats certainly can and should "band together" and demand changes in their contracts when the need arises.

Human Guinea Pigs Organize and Win

[This article by Dave Onion appeared in defenestrator (Philadelphia's anarchist newspaper) and the PhillyIMC website in April 2003.]

The drug study is familiar to many Philly anarchist activists. Often with too much going on to be able to work regular jobs, some of us find ourselves choosing the alternative exploitation of leasing our bodies to huge pharmaceutical companies as human guinea pigs for monetary compensation.

Early December, right after the start of a study to gain the multinational drug company Merck FDA approval for a yet-to-be-released anxiety medication, 20-odd subjects of the study got together in the lounge of Jefferson Hospital's Clinical Pharmacology Unit and complained angrily about the nature of the study we'd just started. Though it initially seemed to pay near average ($3300), the study was much more intense than any of us had expected. For one, it stretched out over Christmas and New Years (during which time we were allowed no alcohol or coffee) with the first period ending immediately before Christmas making most guinea pigs' Christmas preparations especially difficult. Our single day off every four days was near worthless free time considering we would spend the day scrambling to catch up on our daily lives and then not even be allowed to hit the bar afterwards. On top of this, our "PK days" every four days were grueling, with blood draws nearly all day. Also the pay, once we'd calculated our hourly wage equivalent, was a measly $6 an hour. Further vexation came from Merck. As one of the largest and richest corporations on the planet (raking in over $8 billion in profits in 2000), Merck was cutting costs in the unit to the point of trying to scale back on $5 meal tickets given to guinea pigs after a screening (usually after fasting from the day before).

The study was made up, for the most part, of seasoned veterans in the study world, including three anarchist activists, though most of us knew each other from past studies. After some discussion, during which our feelings of getting screwed proved mutual, Bob Helms, Philly's local anarchist historian (also in the study) drafted up a letter to Merck demanding an additional $1500 for the study. The letter cited our pay, the intensity of the study and reminded Merck we were aware of the going conditions and pay rates for other studies going on. The one guinea pig who wouldn't sign on later enthusiastically asked for the letter back after some subjects suggested to him the possibility of appropriating his unearned scab pay on the way home from the bank. Now everyone was on board. The letter was sent off to Merck via the unit's head nurse with a verbal message that a good number of us were seriously considering not returning for the second leg of the study if our demands weren't met, in effect putting hundreds of thousands of Merck money on the line.

In the meantime, despite the relative misery of consistently terrible food, TV over-saturation, bruised arms from failed subcutaneous vein searches, the study became territory for unusually interesting interactions, partly inspired by the unusual conditions of guinea pig work place class struggle. A good amount of dialogue took on a very political character. Represented in the study were blacks, whites, Moslem, anarchist, Christian, queer, a number of let's just say "extreme heteros," even a belligerent right wing capitalist (with a weakness for civil liberties). With CNN and the insane president looming constantly on the screen, the seemingly inevitable war against Iraqis became a constant theme of discussion, with near unanimous agreement that the boy king was off his rocker. At one point frustrated with a near total abstention of imperialist fervor in the study, our capitalist friend (incidentally very enthusiastic about our demands to Merck) left the room screaming "Is there not one fucking American in this study?" Another brief moment of inspiration came while watching In the Name of the Father, a film on the struggle of a Irish man framed as an IRA combatant. Mostly taking place in prison with a theme of struggle for justice and prison conditions, the film was a constant reminder of our own situation. Life in a drug study is strangely reminiscent of life locked up. The aesthetics, the boredom, the covert exchange of small (in our case, food) items, the people you meet ... (though food at CFCF [a city jail–- Ed.] is without a doubt better than that at Jefferson). Given the nurses' un-prisonlike treatment of us, our voluntary status and that we were getting paid for this, we tactfully refrained from a "unit riot."

It was some time before we heard back from Merck. As a fair number of us were seriously considering walking out for more profitable or simply less grueling activity, we wanted an answer before the end of the first period. As this date approached, guinea pigs became increasingly restless and we started talking about ways to step up the pressure. One suggestion was to ingest notes reading "more money" which the nurses would be obliged to fish out of our shit. But many of the nurses, already working long hours and with their own beefs with Merck (having to retrieve half digested pills from our shit for instance) were on our side. And for the most part we mutually recognized each others' conditions. Some were starting to feel the head nurses were stalling or simply hadn't even passed on our note. Finally, just a couple days before the end of the first period we were called into the lounge and the announcement was made that Merck agreed our study deserved better pay and would add an extra $800 to our checks. Needless to say, we were jubilant. Not quite the $1500 we'd asked for, but most of us expected less if anything at all.

Taken from the Guinea Pig Zero website:
http://www.guineapigzero.com/

The IWW-affiliated South Street Workers Union is organizing retail and food service workers along Philadelphia's South Street corridor, implementing a model of solidarity unionism focused on helping workers create their own shop floor and district-wide organizations to confront low wages, poor working conditions, and the lack of workplace rights.

Since the union began organizing in August 2003, the South Street Workers Union has organized health, tax and workers' rights clinics; social events; a district-wide grievance committee that has helped workers claim unpaid wages and develop strategies to improve working conditions; and organized a campaign against proposed mass transit fare increases and service cutbacks.
Seventy union members and supporters marched down South Street February 27, demanding support for mass transportation funding -- culminating a two-week campaign in which they approached business owners along the strip asking them to sign a letter to the legislature demanding adequate transit funding.

The SEPTA system faced a $49 million budget shortfall, which it planned to meet by raising cash fares from $2 to $2.50 (on the way to $3), and slashing night and weekend service.

The cuts and fare hikes were averted the next day when the governor diverted highway funds to cover operating expenses through June.

Marchers stopped at five of the seven South Street businesses that had refused to sign the letter, gaining two more signatures to bring the total to 99. The march ended with a short rally where the letters were delivered to State Rep. Babette Josephs, who told the crowd that as the only member of the legislature who didnÕt own a car, she recognized the importance of mass transit.

"If we saw this kind of protest in every shopping district," she added, "the legislature would find a way to solve the transit crisis."

South Street workers depend on mass transit, delegate Andrew Rothman noted, adding that proposed fare increases "would be devastating to people who are living at or below the poverty line." Marchers echoed that sentiment, chanting "Raise our wages, not the fares."

The march was covered by three television stations and in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The South Street Workers Union's next event is a tax clinic, where accountants will be on hand to help workers prepare tax returns and claim the earned income credit many are entitled to because of their low earnings.

Most South Street workers earn little more than minimum wage (and some not even that). Although the corridor -- which includes a mix of chain stores and locally owned businesses ranging from small boutiques to large, multi-level stores -- is one of Philadelphia's busiest shopping district, its wages are sometimes lower than those paid in other parts of the city.

One owner monitors workers from her home with surveillance cameras. Another operates a 2,000-square-foot store with just one worker per shift. What these businesses have in common is low wages, benefits that run the gamut from inadequate to non-existent, and high turnover as workers jump from one crappy job to another.

The union was formed to help change these conditions, and currently has members at eight stores along the corridor. It has helped workers at a national franchise outlet end management's practice of demanding unpaid clean-up time, and defended workers threatened with losing their jobs. Several members also traveled to Brooklyn to build relations with workers involved in a similar campaign among immigrant workers there.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (April 2005)

Originally posted: May 11, 2005 at iww.org

The AFL-CIO suffered a devastating split as it celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding July 25-28, with three unions representing nearly a third of its members quitting, and two others refusing to participate in its biennial convention. The Teamsters and Service Employees unions withdrew on the eve of the convention; the United Food and Commercial Workers quit the Federation as delegates were leaving Chicago.

The Change to Win Coalition kicked things off with a high-energy press conference packed with union staffers. The presidents of all six CWC unions - SEIU, Unite-HERE, Teamsters, UFCW, Laborers and United Farm Workers - spoke to an enthusiastic crowd, but the surface unity quickly dissolved when things got down to specifics. Four Coalition unions boycotted the AFL convention, two said they would participate. The officers were unwilling to say whether their unions would formally quit the AFL-CIO; the decisions trickled in over the next few days.

While CWC representatives said the split was over the need to "restructure" the Federation to focus resources on organizing, the closest thing to a specific illustration of differences on offer was when SEIU President Andy Stern contrasted the wording of the AFL leadership's and CWC's resolutions: where the AFL-CIO resolutions employed the word "should," the Coalition used the word "shall." Such momentous differences can not help but inspire a movement.

AFL-CIO officials, meanwhile, scrambled to hold things together in back rooms as a succession of politicians delivered stump speeches from the podium, chasing after what remains of a very lucrative gravy train.

There was no debate over the future of the labor movement, or over anything else of import. AFL officials agreed at the last minute to a resolution calling for the "rapid" withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq rather than face a floor fight. Rather than allow a contested election for officers, they cut a deal with veteran labor writer Harry Kelber in which he withdrew his candidacy in exchange for three minutes at the podium. (An attempt to rule him ineligible fizzled when Kelber produced records documenting his union membership.) Reports on the AFL's substantial stock portfolio took up time badly needed to develop a vision of unionism that recognizes the reality of the current class war. Politicians mouthed empty platitudes about unity while AFL-affiliated airline unions prepared to scab on the independent union representing Northwest mechanics.

Faced with the loss of $30 million a year because of the disaffiliation of the Service Employees, Teamsters and Food and Commercial Workers, delegates approved a 4 cent increase in the monthly per capita tax each international union pays the AFL-CIO. The convention also made permanent a special 8 cent per capita assessment earmarked for the AFL's political program. Much of this money will be used for the 2006 congressional and 2008 presidential elections.

Resolutions that had been proposed in an effort to placate CWC unions were also adopted, including establishing a more powerful Executive Committee dominated by the largest affiliates and creating Industry Coordinating Committees to oversee organizing targeting and set contract standards among unions in industry clusters.

Although the Coalition unions put forward a 10-point program they claimed would position the labor movement to rebuild its industrial power, in the end the debate collapsed into an argument over how much money unions should pay to support Federation activities. The larger unions that formed the Change to Win Coalition said the AFL-CIO should rebate half of their dues money to fund strategic campaigns to organize new members (not that the UFCW or Teamsters do much of that). AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said the federation should increase spending on organizing, and also spend even more on politicking. But neither advocated any fundamental change in how the AFL does business, even if they did hold very different views of who should run the operation.

Former United Auto Workers regional director Jerry Tucker noted "how shallow, myopic and unplugged from today's worker reality the so-called debate has remained... This has been a ping-pong match between guardians of a failed legacy - a faction fight to see who can best restore business unionism and labor's junior partnership with capital."

Leftists who've entertained visions of Change to Win as a scrappy ground-level organizing outfit should have been discomfited by Hoffa's talk of "staffing up" and professionalization of organizing (even if that might be a welcome contrast to the patronage hacks who have been in charge of the Teamsters' pitiful organizing attempts), but now that Change to Win has hired 55 public relations specialists and appointed as its executive director Greg Tarpinian, who's made a career of "consulting" for some of the Teamsters' most calcified old guard, it's hard to talk about challenging the status quo with a straight face.
Former AFL-CIO staffer Bill Fletcher notes that the entire debate misses the point: "Our unions suffer from a profound conservatism, a failure to recognize the kinds of changes that are going on... We have to be prepared to talk about something we've been afraid to say out loud - that capitalism is harmful to the health of workers. Something is fundamentally wrong with the priorities of this society, and we have to be courageous enough to say so."

Meanwhile, the business unions continue their collapse. Less than 8 percent of private sector workers are now unionized, and it seems unlikely that the UFCW's brand of minimum-wage unionism is going to inspire many workers to risk their jobs by unionizing. Neither side in this heated debate called for more internal democracy (something notoriously absent from the unions that dominate the Coalition), or offered any vision of how a just society should be organized. There was only the faintest hint of recognition of the need for international solidarity to confront an increasingly global economy.

There was a lot of talk about more independence from the Democrats on all sides, but the only concrete difference between the Coalition "reformers" and the AFL-CIO is that the "reformers" are giving more of their money to Republicans. Direct action and solidarity were not on the agenda, and for all the talk of the need to reform labor laws neither side appears to have given any thought to how to build a union movement that helps workers to organize on the job and defend their interests without the official recognition that is increasingly hard to get.

In short, it's business as usual at an AFL-CIO now much smaller than it was a month ago, while the Coalition unions are moving to launch a competing federation that, if anything, looks to be more boss-friendly than the one they have left.

The merger of the Congress of Industrial Organizations into the American Federation of Labor fifty years ago marked the end of an experiment in which business unions tried to adapt the tools forged by the IWW. In the process, they built unions in many sectors that were generally undemocratic but did deliver better wages and benefits in exchange for channeling workers' rebellion into safer (for the bosses) channels. With the merger, those unions that refused to surrender the vestiges of a broader social vision were left in the cold, and most soon collapsed or were absorbed into the business unions.
So workers have little reason to mourn today's split. But neither is there cause for celebration. Neither side in this bureaucratic struggle has anything to say to workers struggling to revive the labor movement.
Labor councils' rebellion

The Afl-CIO has backed down on orders to state and local labor councils to expel locals of the seceding unions. Sweeney acted in response to a growing rebellion from councils that would have been crippled by the expulsion order. Some suggested they might become independent rather than expel unions that, in many places, form the backbone of local labor councils.

Instead, the AFL is creating "solidarity charters" under which independent unions will be allowed to join labor councils if they pay a 10 percent "solidarity" surcharge. However, their members could not be elected to top office. It is unclear whether this compromise will be sufficient to quell the rebellion.

New labor federation forming

Three unions that withdrew from the AFL-CIO have announced plans to launch a new labor federation Sept. 27 in Cincinnati. The SEIU, Teamsters, and United Food and Commercial Workers are expected to participate. The Carpenters, which withdrew from the AFL-CIO in 2001, may also attend.
Three other Change to Win Coalition unions - the Farm Workers, Laborers, and Unite Here - remain in the AFL-CIO. Unite Here has been a leading Coalition member but is unlikely to quit the Federation, if only because its Amalgamated Bank relies heavily on union deposits and could be bankrupted if AFL unions withdrew their funds. The Communications Workers pulled $60 million earlier this year as a warning shot.

Some independent unions have expressed interest in the new grouping, but appear to be waiting to see how it develops.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (September 2005)

Originally posted: October 9, 2005 at iww.org

Hundreds of thousands of workers face untold misery after they were displaced by Hurricane Katrina, and the flooding that wrecked much of New Orleans in its aftermath. It may be months before many of those displaced from coastal Louisiana and Mississippi are allowed to return to what remains of their homes. However, things are looking much more promising for business. Owners of office space throughout the Gulf Coast region are doing record business; hotels are charging top dollar for shabby units; oil companies are enjoying windfall profits as the wonders of capitalism transform their damaged (and fully insured) refineries and drilling platforms into a price bonanza for energy suppliers.

Stock prices for major contractors Halliburton and Baker Hughes - which also have been making out like bandits from the carnage of the Iraq war - skyrocketed as they joined in the scramble to profit off this tragedy. A Sept. 6 story in the New York Times celebrated the business opportunities, even as it cautioned that some "are wary about seeming too gleeful in light of New Orleans' misery."

"I always hate to talk about positives in a situation like this," Tetra Technologies CEO Geoffrey Hertel told the Times, "but this is certainly a growth business for the next 6 to 12 months." Tetra repairs oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.

Let no one believe this was a natural disaster. The hurricane itself may have been a force of nature, although most scientists who study the earth's changing climate believe that the frequency and intensity of hurricanes has increased sharply as a result of global warming - that is, as a result of the capitalists' reckless plundering and destruction of our planet. (Similarly, the flooding was worsened because the government has for years ignored environmentalists' warnings that the wetlands and harbor islands needed to buffer New Orleans from storms were being destroyed.)

But there was ample opportunity to evacuate before the hurricane struck, and even more time before the flooding that caused the bulk of the carnage. Hundreds of thousands loaded their possessions in their cars, grabbed some cash, and headed out of town to wait the storm out. A few refused to leave their homes. But tens of thousands had no choice. They did not have cars in which to make the journey, nor funds with which to buy fuel (the price of which was already skyrocketing), nor credit cards with which to book a hotel room in some strange city, far from family and friends. This was a private-sector evacuation, open only to those with the economic means to participate. The poor were left to fend for themselves, as best they could.

To be sure, the city told them to take shelter in the Convention Center and the SuperDome, but once there they were abandoned to their plight, without food or water or medical attention. Quite simply, to those who make the decisions in this society their lives were of no importance and they were left to die.

But they refused.

People broke into stores and took what they needed to survive. (Some, it seems, may also have taken some of the luxuries which had long been denied them.) They shared what they found, and treated each other's injuries as best they could.

In the hurricane's aftermath, the media spread lurid reports of looters shooting down rescue helicopters and raping children in relief shelters. Most of these reports turn out to have been fabrications. The NPR radio show "This American Life" broadcast interviews with hurricane survivors prevented from escaping the disaster zone by armed police looking to keep African-American survivors out of their white suburbs. "Thank God for the looters," one conventioneer said, noting that they not only provided desperately needed food and water but also ferried children and sick people to evacuation centers.

Meanwhile, as people were dying in New Orleans of dehydration and disease, state officials pulled police and National Guard from rescue efforts; instead, they were given "shoot to kill" orders and dispatched to protect property.

We saw two contrasting visions of society in this disaster. Thousands rushed to aid the victims, not asking if there was a buck to be made but rather doing what they could to respond to the urgent human need. People opened their homes to refugees, traveled into danger zones, and emptied their pockets. Meanwhile, gas stations and hotels raised prices to take advantage of the desperate refugees, while politicians left those unable to escape New Orleans to die.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency turned back truckloads of bottled water even as thousands of survivors had gone for days without food or water. FEMA officials ignored reports of thousands of people jammed into the New Orleans Convention Center and on overpasses throughout the city, told the Red Cross to stay out of the city, and left people to die until media coverage forced them to take action.

The one million people from New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast suddenly tossed out of their jobs by Hurricane Katrina are now fanning out across the South and the rest of the country looking for work. In San Francisco, a few have been hired to scab on striking health care workers. Others can hope for work rebuilding the highways and buildings leveled by the storm and flooding. But most were low-wage workers in the casino and tourism industries, filling jobs that will not exist until the region is rebuilt. Before the hurricane hit, nearly a fourth of New Orleans residents lived below the poverty line.

Concerned that the bosses might have to pay too much for that reconstruction work, President Bush has waived a federal law requiring construction contractors receiving federal funds to pay prevailing wages to their workers. Employers have long sought to repeal Davis-Bacon Act requirements, claiming taxpayers could benefit by sending construction work to the lowest bidder and paying rock-bottom wages. Eliminating prevailing wage requirements also has the advantage of creating huge cost differentials between unionized and non-union contractors, effectively replacing union workers with workers who lack union protection and so must cut corners and do slip-shod work to meet the bosses' demands for more profits.

As always, there is money to be made (and votes to be hustled) off human suffering. These parasites will be with us so long as we tolerate an economic system based upon greed and exploitation.

But we can see the basis for another system in the actions of those who continue to reach out to aid those in need. As always, they are the vast majority, but it is the parasites who hold the levers of power. In this time of crisis, we must of course extend our solidarity to our fellow workers; but let's also ask why we continue to tolerate an economic system that inflicts such misery on so many.

A directory of grassroots organizations in New Orleans, Biloxi, Houston and other affected areas providing immediate disaster relief to poor people and people of color can be found at http://katrina.mayfirst.org/

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (October 2005)

Originally posted: November 2, 2005 at iww.org

Northwest mechanics and cleaning crews remain solidly united as their strike against massive concessions that would cost most workers their jobs enters its second month. Unable to entice strikers to cross the picket lines, Northwest began hiring permanent replacements Sept. 13, and has contracted out nearly all of its cleaning work.

Delta and Northwest airlines filed for bankruptcy Sept. 14, after unions balked at the carriers' demands for another round of deep pay cuts, lay-offs and other concessions. While Northwest has said it will refuse to deal with the mechanics during the bankruptcy proceedings, this stance is illegal.

In the most recent round of contract talks, Northwest said it was willing to keep only 1,080 mechanics' jobs; most mechanics and all aircraft cleaner and custodian positions represented by the union would be outsourced, eliminating 3,181 positions that existed before the strike. Northwest had originally demanded "only" 2,000 lay-offs, so it is clearly feeling emboldened by the way other union workers have been waltzing across the mechanics' picket lines.

Even though it would cost more than three-fourths of its members their jobs, the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association negotiating team said it was willing to present Northwest's proposal for a vote, but ultimately withdrew from contract talks when Northwest refused to offer an acceptable severance package for the workers who would lose their jobs and insisted on intolerable working conditions for the survivors of this industrial carnage.

Although dozens of baggage handlers, ground crew and flight attendants have honored AMFA picket lines, massive union scabbing has allowed Northwest Airlines to keep its planes flying with a mix of 1,200 scabs, about 350 managers who are licensed mechanics, and outside maintenance firms - even if at such a heavy cost that the carrier has been pushed into bankruptcy.

The Machinists and pilots unions have directed their members to scab; the independent Professional Flight Attendants Union (which only represents workers at Northwest) officially supports the strike but is not honoring picket lines. The Teamsters have told their members they are on their own as far as the picket lines go, but have had the decency to cancel staff travel plans on the struck carrier.

Since the strike began, the AFL-CIO has issues mealy-mouthed statements of support for the workers, while refusing to support the strike itself. On the eve of the strike the AFL issued a memo warning that, "AMFA may ask CLCs and State Feds for support: food banks, money, turnout at AMFA picket lines and at rallies etc. StateFeds and CLCs should not provide AMFA with such support, unless the national AFL-CIO instructs them to do so." Far from encouraging solidarity, AFL-affiliated unions have been doing all in their power to disrupt local solidarity efforts.

The newly independent Change to Win Coalition unions, which include thousands of airline workers in their ranks, have made no official mention of the strike.

Meanwhile, the CWA-affiliated Association of Flight Attendants is trying to raid the independent union which represents 9,600 Northwest flight attendants, making not-so-veiled threats that other airline unions will scab should they be forced to strike, leaving them to fight alone just like the mechanics. This threat might be more persuasive if AFL-affiliated unions had a better record of honoring each others' picket lines.

Northwest is demanding more than $150 million a year in concessions from the flight attendants, including outsourcing international flights to cheaper overseas crews and hiring nonunion crews to work small aircraft. The changes would eliminate more than half of flight attendant jobs.

Growing solidarity

Despite attempts to isolate the Northwest strikers, solidarity actions are slowly taking root. Thousands of strikers and their supporters rallied across from the Northwest hangar at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International airport Aug. 27, including many uniformed Northwest flight attendants. The flight attendants' union president spoke at the rally, and the union is encouraging members to join solidarity rallies and defending flight attendants who have been fired for refusing to cross AMFA picket lines.

The United Auto Workers have donated $880,000 in strike relief funds. In an implicit rebuke to other unions which have been actively undermining the strike, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger said, "Northwest Airlines' behavior toward AMFA is blatant union-busting and an insult to every American worker. The UAW is proud to offer this support to AMFA members."

Members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union have been joining AMFA picket lines on the West Coast, and labor councils in Alameda County, San Francisco and Northwest Oregon have passed motions of support. (The IWW has also adopted a resolution, which is published on page 6.)

Hundreds of supporters joined striking mechanics at San Francisco International Airport on Labor Day. Airline mechanics and flight attendants from American Airlines, United Airlines and other carriers not only joined the rally but spoke in solidarity. Most significantly, IAM strikers and local union officials joined the rally. The Machinists' NWA Grievance Committee Chairperson Janice Sisco spoke, saying that all units were threatened by the attack on the mechanics. AMFA District Council 9 President Joe Prisco also spoke, declaring that AMFA would honor all picket lines as a matter of principle no matter what union was involved.

Absent were Bay Area AFL-CIO and Change To Win leaders, even though they had acceded to rank-and-file pressure to pass a resolution supporting the strike.

In Detroit, IBEW, IWW, UAW and other unionists had been planning an August 27 benefit for the strikers at IBEW Local 58's hall, which they have used for several labor solidarity events over the years. When Machinists officials learned of the event, they called the local to demand that it be cancelled. Local 58 officials explained that they had rented the hall to a community organization, so the IBEW international stepped in and ordered them to lock the hall to prevent the event from taking place.

A new venue had to be found and publicized on 30 hours' notice, and it was. A local bar lent its kitchen for the cooking and two Detroit night spots opened their doors Saturday evening, accommodating 500 strike supporters. Outraged IBEW officials demanded that the local turn over the burglar alarm company's records to prove that the hall had not been used for the purpose of supporting workers fighting to defend their jobs.

Many Northwest aircraft may be unsafe. A Federal Aviation Administration inspector who raised serious concerns about maintenance problems in the first days of the strike was reassigned after the airline complained. Minnesota-based FAA inspector Mark Lund wrote that the situation at Northwest "jeopardizes life or property." The FAA downplayed the warning, noting that Lund is active in the union representing inspectors.

Despite the courageous actions of dozens of workers to honor the AMFA picket lines (more than offset by union scabbing that has gone far beyond the normal treachery - in one case a Northwest pilot actually moved equipment on the ground in order to get his scab plane ready for take-off), the picket lines have not shut the carrier down. Northwest is canceling many flights, and on some days more than half of its flights have been delayed by 15 minutes or longer. And in order to fill its flights, Northwest is increasingly relying on code sharing (particularly through its Delta partner) and budget booking systems (which do not identify the carrier until after tickets are purchased) to lure passengers onto its planes under false colors.

Yet while the growing solidarity is heartening evidence that many rank-and-file workers are repulsed by the union scabbery and jurisdictional squabbling that has left the mechanics to fight on their own, if the strike is to be won the airline will have to be shut down. Ideally this would be done by other Northwest workers honoring the picket lines. If not, mass picketing will be necessary. If AMFA is defeated in this fight, it will touch off a renewed wave of concessions demands throughout all industry. In this case, as is so often the case, an injury to one really is an injury to all.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (October 2005)

Originally posted: November 2, 2005 by iww.org

Every November we remember the rebel workers murdered by the employing class; a long list which grows longer every year. Fred Thompson used to speak of an IWW soapboxer whose rap went something like this: 'Workers are being fired for joining the IWW. Workers are being killed... Join the IWW.' It demonstrated, Fred used to say, a fine sense of solidarity but was not necessarily the best way to sign up new members.

The IWW has contributed more than its fair share of labor's martyr, because we have always been in the forefront of the struggle for workers' rights. By some accident of the calendar, many of our fellow workers have fallen in November, from the Haymarket Martyrs murdered Nov. 11, 1887, to the Nov. 4, 1936, death of FW Dalton Gentry, shot on an IWW picket line in Pierce, Idaho.

Some, like Joe Hill (killed Nov. 19, 1915) are famous; others, like R.J. Horton, largely forgotten. Fellow Worker Horton was shot down by a Salt Lake City cop Oct. 30, 1915, while giving a speech protesting the impending execution of Joe Hill.

Some died in prison, like Samuel Chin (March 1910) in Spokane, or Thomas Martinez (March 3, 1921) in Guadalajara, Mexico. Some were murdered by vigilantes, including Joe Marko (April 8, 1911) in the San Diego free speech fight and Wesley Everest (Nov. 11, 1919) in Centralia. Others were killed by police, such as Steve Hovath (August 2, 1908) in the McKees Rocks strike or Martynas Petkus (Feb. 21, 1917) in Philadelphia.

It is a long list, even if too many are unknown, including the Stettin, Germany, dockworkers murdered by the Nazi regime, or the fellow workers who fell to military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and Peru. A researcher is uncovering the names of Wobblies who died in Spain, fighting the fascists in the 1930s, but who will recover the names of the Wobblies murdered as they rode the rails, organizing the harvest stiffs?

In 1973, Frank Terrugi was killed by the Chilean junta; the next year the Philippines army killed FW Frank Gould. We can not forgot those who while grievously injured were not killed, through no fault of the bosses, such as Judi Bari who survived a 1990 assassination attempt but spent the rest of her life in pain, or the 15 Tulsa oil workers who survived a lynching party Nov. 7-8, 1917.

The November 1996 Industrial Worker printed a long list of IWWs killed on picket lines. The list includes Roy Martin, Decatur Hall, Ed Brown and J. Tooley murdered by gun thugs in May 1912 in Grabow, Louisiana; Anna LaPizza and Joe Ramey killed the same month during the Lawrence strike; John Smolsky (Lawrence), FW Donovan (Missoula) and Nels Nelson (Marysville CA), strikers killed Oct. 19, 1912; Felix Baran, Hugo Gerlot, Gus Johnson, John Looney and Abraham Rabinowitz killed Feb. 2, 1915, in the Everett Massacre (several more disappeared overboard that day); James Brew, murdered July 12, 1917, during the Bisbee Deportation; John Eastenes, Nick Stanudakis, Mike Vidovitch, J.R. Davies, E.R. Jacques and G. Kosvich, all killed Nov. 21, 1927, in the Columbine Massacre...

However long we make the list, it falls short by the thousands. But the victims we honor for asserting themselves are but a handful compared to the millions victimized by the meekness of the working class: miners killed in unsafe mines, seamen lost in ships they knew were overloaded, construction workers killed because safe practices cost too much, textile workers who succumbed to brown lung, the millions who have died in the bosses' wars, and the millions more who have died of hunger in a world of potential abundance. Consider these numbers next time someone tells you it doesn't pay to stick your neck out.

Every right we possess today we possess because our fellow workers fought and died for it. We owe it to them not simply to defend the rights and conditions they won, not just to preserve their memory, but to carry the struggle they began forward - to bring an end to this brutal system built on murder and exploitation.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (November 2005)

Originally posted: November 2, 2005 at iww.org

It's been more than eleven years since the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico said 'ya basta' or 'enough' to neo-liberalism and initiated a struggle for self-determination.

Today, the Zapatistas are creating a variety of participatory economic institutions to meet community needs: women's artisan co-ops, communal corn farming organizations, fair-trade coffee cooperatives and a non-sweatshop boot cooperative.

On a sunny day last year, myself and a delegation of foreign solidarity activists tramped the muddy hills around Oventic Caracole, in the Los Altos region, to visit the 1st of January boot co-op. Rafael Hedez, a leading activist with the co-op, and several other compañeros welcomed us with Cokes and bowls of snow-tire tough beef soup stewed on an open fire.

Inside the workshop, basically a barn with corrugated iron roof, one of the higher-end buildings in a region of thatched farm cuts, a dozen or so men busily cut leather, stick patterns and heat branding irons, large blue flames erupt as glue is melted to stick on the soles.

After showing us around, Hedez begins speaking proudly about ownership structure at the workshop, "We have no owner. Here we are all equals," he said.

"When there is something necessary, or when problems arise, all jobs have problems, then we have a meeting or a discussion in general. If we want to make something without consulting the rest, we can't do that. We must present that job on behalf of everyone," said Hedez.

The co-op started Jan. 1, 1998, when two activists traveled from Chiapas to Mexico City spending six months learning the trade. The independent workshop that trained Hedez and others has since shut down, due to a huge influx of low-cost footwear from China.

Its first priority is to provide high-quality, low-cost footwear for the surrounding communities. "We sell to the indigenous for 150-220 pesos (approx. US$25), just enough to recuperate the cost of the materials. Here in San Andres there are shoes for 100 pesos, but they will only last for a season," said another co-op member.

With significant national and international interest in Zapatismo, the cooperative decided they could use sales to non-indigenous to help finance the development of the workshop. "We sell high boots to foreigners for 350 pesos and medium for 300. This is the price for those who are in solidarity with us, who are also Zapatistas," said Hedez.

Before ending his presentation, Hedez stressed the praxis of the organization, "This is the factory for everyone. We are all the owners. We are the coordinators who coordinate the workshop."

"We try to organize ourselves along the same principals as the 1st of January Co-op," said Amanda Smith, a member of the Black Star Boot Cooperative, a Canadian organization helping to find markets for the boots and solidarity grants to improve the factory.

"Organizing cooperatively is certainly trying," said Smith, an anthropology student from Halifax. "None of us have experience working with boots. It's a little disorganized, frustrating and often inefficient, but the project came directly from the Zapatistas, and at this point, it seems like the most useful thing we can be doing," she said.

"It's less about selling boots than it is about the example we are trying to set; economic interaction based on international solidarity and workers producing quality goods without bosses," she said.

Since the uproar against sweatshop abuses in the early '90s, major textile corporations have spent millions on public relations to showcase "good corporate citizenry" - as if such a concept were possible.

Some positive examples of non-sweat apparel production have sprung up in the last couple years: Sweat X was paying "living" wages to U.S. workers (until it shut down) and American Apparel, which recently opened a store in Toronto, pays workers in Los Angeles decent wages to produce unbranded high quality t-shirts and other clothing.

Commendable as these examples are, their praxis is fundamentally flawed. They seek a return to the post-war settlement, naively hoping decent-paying 9-5 factory jobs can thrive again in the era of neo-liberalism. And although workers have more say over their lives at the American Apparel factory than in a Nike or Adidas outsourcing operation, the non-sweat factories still operate on a centrally planned hierarchy.

In a sense, the Zapatistas, basically an agrarian movement, have leap-frogged the entire wage system with their forays into 'industry.' Co-op members receive no salary for their labor; all profits are invested back into entire community, mostly for public services, specifically health promotion.

"We have a difficult situation," admits Hedez, who is married with several children. "We sustain ourselves through what little we can grow in our milpas (corn fields). We have two days a week for working in the fields. We also buy various things, but very little."

On the outset, working roughly a 40-hour week as a volunteer seems over-zealous, if not downright exploitative. But factory activists have realized they can't individually pull themselves out of poverty. Key pillars of Zapatismo like health, education, work and dignity demand collective action, cooperation and mutual aid.

While boot co-op activists work in their little factory, other community members cut grass and do repairs on public spaces, provide health care, grow shared food, administer justice and take on other tasks in the public interest. Like most political movements, some Zapatistas end up doing more work than others but all people involved in the movement are expected to contribute as best they can.

The 1st of January Boot Workshop is not a perfect model of economic democracy. The component parts for the boots - soles, laces etc. - are bought from coyotes (middlemen) in San Cristobal de las Casas and are presumably imported from China.

And, in the Chiapas highlands, the 'glory' of worker-self-management exists beside deplorable poverty the Mexican government characterizes as 'acute marginalization'; many of the workshop activists can't afford shoes for their own children.

Poverty is ubiquitous in Chiapas (and most of the world), stifling possibilities for participatory economics; you can't make something from nothing. The workshop wants to expand production but it's unlikely they'll get a bank loan for new capital; a 1994 memo from the Chase Manhattan Bank urging the Mexican army to "eliminate the Zapatistas" elucidates how global capital evaluates those who seek alternatives.

Still, the workshop's production is based on a key principle of Zapatismo, 'Everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves.'

"Those of us with the privilege of a Canadian passport, who are 'also Zapatistas' by Rafeal's definition, have a responsibility to help build participatory structures in re-developing areas," said Black Star organizer Dennis Hale. "Not just for because we're nice guilty liberals, but because we need them more than they need us."

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (November 2005)

Originally posted: November 2, 2005 at iww.org

This is a story about a situation that happened at my workplace. Ideally, this will add to a conception of what Direct Unionism is, how it exists in everyday situations, and where we can go with it as an organization. This event happened around a year ago. While some of its impacts were immediate, it took me some time to develop an analysis, and to see clearly how this tied in with the development of class-consciousness. At this point I feel that I can look back, analyze the situation and draw out some lessons.

I worked on the sunrise shift at a parcel moving company represented by the Teamsters. At this company, and in this industry in general, every package is timed out to the last minute. Every day lost in not delivering a package costs this company money. The precision of the timing and the workers' role in maintaining the schedule furthers the opportunity for strategic opposition. This was especially true on my shift where the large majority of the packages being unloaded were on the last leg of their journey. These packages are going directly from us to the trucks that deliver things to your home.

Thus workers in the unload department were in a strategic position in effecting production. This was not immediately apparent to everyone working that section, but the realization eventually took hold. Over the course of roughly four months the unload crew, which consisted of about ten people, developed some pretty tight bonds. Everyone respected and trusted one another.

Day in and day out, the boss' goal is to get workers out after three and a half hours. The Teamsters negotiated into the contract that the company has to guarantee three and a half hours of work. At $8.50 or $9.50 an hour, this amount of time is not enough to live on. Moreover, the amount of work they expect people to get done in three and a half hours is easily four or five hours worth of work. In order to crank it out there are numerous methods. Making work into some kind of sport is one way, or just riding the hell out of people. I have even heard supervisors offering twenty bucks to certain stooges in order to make them work even faster.

In response to this constant speed-up at these low wages, our crew began to drag out the day and slow down as much as we could. All of us understood that being there for four or four and a half hours was important, and just as important was not letting the boss set the pace at which our bodies worked.

For obvious reasons, management did not like this so they began a series of restructuring efforts. They brought in different supervisors, trying to get the most hard-nosed bastard down there, or the friendliest your-older-brother-on-the-line type. None of this worked. Next management began to bring in new hires. It was around the time of the year when new hires are usually brought in, so it may not have been a method to destabilize us as a group. Whether deliberate or not, bringing on an extra set of hands could have undermined our informal production rate.

This particular cat that was brought in, young, straight out of high school, looked every bit to management like someone who would not fit in with our group. The most important aspect was that cat still lived with his folks, and was only working there for the education assistance UPS offers (the establishment of this is a side story of using student labor to pre-empt and undermine workers' power but I won't get into that here). The rest of us, although young, lived on our own and were supporting ourselves. So it seemed at first like he would not be down with the dynamics that existed. Quickly this proved not to be the case. Rather than hang out with supervisor training you at break during the first few weeks, which is customary as this is the only person you know and basically you're cornered into it, he would come chill with us in the break room. He was loud, talked good shit, and openly defied the boss.

It is hard to say what bothered the bosses more - Willy hanging out with us, or his refusal to go the pace they demanded. This pace varies between 23 and 30 boxes a minute, pretty staggering in general. He kept his pace right around ours, which varied from person to person but was much lower than the boss's numbers. It got to a point where management began threatening to fire him. He came to us. Our advice, which was probably a mistake but stuck within the confines of the union contract, was pick it up until you hit the end of your probation period. It takes a new hire 70 working days until he is a "member" of the union, and under its protection from discipline. This is 70 days of speed-up, manipulation and harassment, during which time the union can only look the other way. As a shop steward once explained to me, "If he's under 90 days I can't touch the situation.

He took our advice, but it proved to not be enough. Even though he was exceeding their production numbers at a pace unbelievable to the rest of us, they were still on his ass.

It got to a point where management decided to restart his training at the beginning. Even though it had been well over a month, it was obvious that this was meant to break him away from our group. This led us to respond with some kind of collective action.

This group had been the driving force throughout the escalating conflict but never had we decided to define ourselves as a group, the line had never come down.

Everyone was at the boiling point in the break room that day. The discussion quickly moved beyond statements like "how could they do that?" It quickly became how were we going to respond and help this cat out.

Driven both by our feelings for Willy and by the realization that this attack on him was an attack on us as well, we resolved to take action. It was known from previous experience that the shop stewards would not help as they were confined by the contract. We resolved in the break room to confront out supervisor after break during the PCM (a communication session usually reserved for safety things, or general company cheerleading). Our demands were pretty simple: We wanted an end to the harassment of Willy, and specifically we wanted this supervisor named Chris who had been training Willy kicked off the belt. It was never openly discussed how we would ensure that these demands were met although the term "strike" was mentioned. No one seemed ready to go that far until after we presented our demands.

So we sat down on a belt that still wasn't moving as we did every day, everyone nervously glancing at one another to figure out who would speak up first. No one had been designated to speak. As the supervisor, Drew, began to talk his bullshit he was quickly silenced, I don't remember by whom, with the announcement that we were going to talk and he was going to listen. This was the first time we had defined ourselves as a group, an act within itself with certain implications for management. A shift in floor power definitely occurred and people felt it immediately.

Drew's jaw dropped to the floor as we poured forth out demands. Each person who wanted to speak did so. Our demands were presented. His reiteration, spoke in a shaky voice was that it wasn't our business to say what supervisors did and that we should get back to work. Someone threatened some kind of strike action. Ears perked up, and Drew really went to shit. Demanding that we all go back to work that instant. None of us jumped up, but rather looked around for some kind of understanding where the others were. We went back to work a few seconds later.

For the next little bit people felt great and no one was thinking about the repercussions. Until we saw a swarm of supervisors coming around the trailer. People began to get fingered out by Drew and one by one called out of trailers. A shop steward was down on the floor along with upper management. The main supervisor stood with his arms crossed while the other one did the berating. The supervisor, whose usual demeanor was all about being buddies, threatened to immediately fire the whole belt if he had to if ever anyone said anything about a strike again. During my berating session, as I tried to clear up the situation by reiterating our demands (which only seemed to make them more pissed) I continuously looked at the shop steward for some support. Nothing coming. Afterwards he pulled me aside, shook my hand, and tacitly gave approval to what we had done.

That's what a union is he said, us workers sticking together.

Well, the next few weeks were great. Chris got transferred off the belt and people began to leave Willy alone. We all felt great about coming to a place most of us had hated only six months earlier. The bosses did not try any retaliation - not even a write-up, they seemed to not want to bring it up. Which of course did not stop us from bringing it up.

This story does not end however on a happy note. I think having seen our group as a force the bosses began to move against it, with increased vigor. Most of the tactics we didn't really see coming. Isolation was a big one. Individuals were sent to different parts of the building or began getting some overt special treatment. The union and the contract were used as a way to isolate one person from the rest of us, based on seniority and disciplinary matters. One cat in particular, due to threats from management and a refusal from the union to have his back anymore, went from being outspoken to silent due to a real fear of losing his job.

Personal problems between workers were also used with management openly trying to incite waives of shit talking between people. It went from a situation of friends who had each other's backs, to acquaintances that didn't trust one and another. Management set this up with the goal of breaking us apart. However, we could have countered each tactic used by management with some foresight and some training. But due to inexperience this did not happen. Lastly, we were isolated from a movement or from other shops with similar situations. We were away from other people who were struggling in a similar way against their bosses and the union. Being connected to such a group could have given us the foresight and resources to counter management's attack.

This incident and the months leading up to and preceding it had a major impact on my thinking. Certainly, although not at the time, it taught me a lot about autonomous worker organizing. Workers on their job site form bonds and create an informal work group, that naturally go against the isolation that work aims to impose. Groups form naturally among diverse people who may not have ever conceived of laughing and bullshitting with other workers. These groups then quite easily become the grounds for struggle against the bosses. This is based on the ability of workers to simply come together and air their beefs, realize the commonality, and trust one and another enough to engage in struggle. This was evident in my experience. I do not mean to make it seem like we were all best friends.

Some people got along better than others, occasionally people might have a falling out, but at the end of the day it was clear there was a group and it was composed of us workers. Stan Wier and Martin Glaberman, two working-class writers and revolutionaries of the late twentieth century, wrote about similar topics. It is to them and fellow workers around me, as well as my experience that I owe my current understanding of informal work groups. This experience also shaped my idea of formation of class-consciousness.

By this term I mean workers identifying themselves as such, and recognizing that they have different interests with the bosses. How is this shaped? What I realized it that class-consciousness is shaped by two threads in my story. First and initially being involved in labor and recognizing that this labor is being also taken up and affected by those around you form it. The basis of informal work groups is the initial basis of class-consciousness.

A second component, and in some ways is created by the first, but goes beyond it is struggle. This is the recognition that not only are you part of a group, but a group that relies on each other. Class-consciousness manifests itself on the shop floor, sometimes in subtle ways, a quick fuck you to the boss for example. Other times it is the willingness to take on the problem of the cat next to you as if it were your own, and taking action based on this. That it is important to stand up for the cat next to you, not just out of your personal relationship (what if you think the guy is an ass) but because in the process you are standing up for yourself. Moreover, when workers define themselves as a group and confront the boss in any manner, it furthers their understanding of what that group is and what power it has. Collective action reinforces that group understanding and forms class-consciousness. While this has been my experience, the writings of Martin Glaberman have definitely helped this understanding along.

It is important to realize that the potential for and the actual occurrence of these actions are widespread. It covers every shift everyday in every shop. How can we see these actions and offer assistance when it is needed? A good place to start if by simply being there. The models of Direct Unionism I see discussed are the way to begin moving towards this.

We could have organizers in these groupings, observing and mapping what is going on, in contact with others in the same shop or industry, this would form the basic shop committee. This grouping would be part of a larger industrial organizing committee. The Industrial Organizing Committee could connect what would otherwise be isolated struggles. Out of the IOC made up of members of the shop committees would be a grievance committee, whose aim would be collecting grievances, doing research and strategizing how to deal with them. The ability would then exist to move with actions and offer assistance, sometimes maybe even to coordinate. I see this model being applicable in a situation where no union is present (as is the majority of situations in the US) or even as in my situation where a union is present.

At the present it seems like these models only exist in people's head or floating around in conversations. But as I hope my story illustrates the core of these models, the shop committees, to some extent already exist in informal work groups. Thus this organizing model develops not out of some purely theoretical framework, but out of how work and workers are organized by capital. And more importantly how workers resist capital where it means the most, on the job.

From the Stumptown Wobbly, reprinted in the Industrial Worker, December 2005

On Nov. 1, Local 810 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters lost an NLRB election for the roughly 300-worker transportation department of New York City internet grocer FreshDirect, LLC. The local had lost an election in 2004 for the same unit. Despite having won the support of over 100 workers who could have been organized into a powerful union presence, Local 810 abandoned the field after that election.

FreshDirect, of course, soon broke the promises it had made during the campaign. Transportation workers grew increasingly dissatisfied, and, in June of this year some of them contacted the IWW's New York City General Membership Branch. New York Wobblies mapped out an ambitious industrial campaign to line up the entire FreshDirect workforce - about 1,200 workers - along with workers in other nearby wholesale and retail foodstuffs establishments. With help from other members of New York's rank-and-file May Day Coalition, the Branch began gathering contacts and agitating for the union.

No sooner had the IWW hit the streets than Local 810 reappeared, having been tipped off by a loyal FreshDirect driver, and began circulating authorization cards. Soon they filed for an election with the local NLRB office, alerting management to the existence of their organizing drive and prompting a tepid anti-union propaganda campaign by the company. IWW organizers continued their campaign regardless, telling transportation workers that they would support whatever decision the workers made. Now that the cat was out of the bag, however, they openly confronted management, agitating publicly in front of the FreshDirect plant and refusing to be driven away by security guards.

The IWW campaign received considerable encouragement from many of the drivers, helpers and runners who make up the FreshDirect transportation department, as well as from workers in other departments. Many transportation workers were attracted by the IWW's democratic structure, low dues, and emphasis on workers' power on the job. These expressed skepticism of the Teamsters, whose organizer showed up only rarely in his black Continental, formed no organizing committee within the department, and failed to hold even a single meeting of workers.

Other transportation workers, however, had the impression that the election was "in the bag" for the Teamsters. As the election neared, workers failed to show up for several scheduled meetings with the IWW. A rumor circulated that the IWW had been paid by FreshDirect to split the ballot and hand management a victory. The IWWs therefore decided to suspend our efforts in the transportation department during the last weeks before the Teamsters election.

The election was held on a Tuesday. Ballots were impounded and were not counted until the next day. The final count was 133 for the Teamsters and 164 for no union, with three void ballots and two challenged ballots. The IWW campaign continues to gain steam in the other departments of FreshDirect, most notably in sortation which assembles grocery boxes for delivery to customers' homes.

Rank-and-file coalition grows

The New York City GMB is at the heart of a growing informal coalition dedicated to building democratic, worker-run organizations. Other coalition partners are Se Hace Camino al Andar/Make the Road By Walking, the Harlem Tenants' Council, and members of the Million Worker March Movement and the United Electrical Workers.

The coalition, dubbed the May Day Coalition, is the brainchild of IWW member Billy J. Randel. Randel conceived of the idea in connection with efforts to revive the observance of May First as the international workers' holiday here in New York. "We are building a family of workers, supporting each other in the struggle for workers' power on the job and in the community," said Randel.

Recent coalition activities include support of the 318 Restaurant Workers Union, protesting abusive conditions at the Golden Bridge restaurant on the Bowery, an informational picket at Uncle George's restaurant in Queens, where Hispanic workers complain of humiliating mistreatment by the boss, and continuing support for the IWW's campaign to organize the foodstuffs industry in the New York metropolitan area.

CORRECTION - An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the Chinese Staff & Workers' Association as a member of the May Day Coalition. While the CSWA has provided valuable help and solidarity to the Coalition, it is not a member. We regret the error.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (December 2005)

Originally posted: December 16, 2005 at iww.org

It was so incredible: I never saw the beginning of the march, nor the end. I didn’t hear one speech and never even made it to the Loop where the march was supposed to end. There was just this sea of humanity gathered in the streets, flowing in the same direction with the same object in mind: defeat the new, draconian immigration bill known as “The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005” (HR4437).

On March 10 at least 300,000 people took the day off work or school and converged in Chicago’s Loop to protest this bill, which would turn undocumented workers into “aggravated criminal felons” and those who assist them, such as priests and nurses (and unionists) into criminals as well for “aiding and abetting” them. The bill passed the House of Representatives just before Christmas, it is currently being debated in the Senate.

While the crowd was predominantly Latino there were also substantial contingents of Polish, Irish, Korean, Arab and other immigrant communities.

Chanting “¡Si, se puede!” (Yes, it can be done) and “¡El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido!” (The People United Will Never be Defeated), factory workers, dishwashers, carpenters, high school students and even small shop-keepers marched from Union Park two miles into the Loop. They carried hand-lettered signs saying: “We are America,” “My Mexican immigrant son died in Iraq,” “I’m a dishwasher – not a criminal” and “Don’t deport my parents.”

More than 100 factories in the Chicago area shut down for the day because so many workers had told their bosses that they were planning on taking the day of for “the general strike,” according to Jose Artemio Arreola of the Coalition Against HR4437.

The predominant colors of the day, however, were red, white and blue as U.S. flags were evident everywhere. There was even one small group who insisted on chanting “USA, USA.” (Were they being ironic, I wonder?) Undoubtedly many were eager to show their fellow Americans that they were just as patriotic as them – that all they wanted was to work, pay their taxes, raise their families and partake of the American Dream. “We are all America” and “We Pay Taxes” were other signs in evidence.

At the rally at the Federal Building local Democratic Party bigwigs spoke to those who were actually able make it there. Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Mayor “Little Dick” Daley, Senator Dick Durbin and Congressmen Bobbie Rush and Luis Gutierrez all denounced the pending legislation noting that the city of Chicago was build by immigrant labor. Employers are undoubtedly concerned that this legislation will cut into their profit margins by depriving them of low-wage labor and the politicians want those Latino votes.

A small group of the anti-immigrant Illinois Minuteman Project held a press conference in Grant Park at 10:00 a.m. Their Latina-token front, Rosanna Pulido, declared, “I don’t care if there’s three million people out there, if they are illegal they do not have a voice in America.” What a putz!

The Chicago GMB voted at our March 3 meeting to endorse the protest, at the request of Union Latina. Unfortunately, we were not able to mobilize a visible contingent in so short a time. A call was sent to our e-list to meet up at the edge of Union Park but when I got there with my IWW flag there were already so many people it was impossible to find any other Wobs. Several people, however, did ask me what IWW meant. When I informed them that it was “Trabajadores Industriales del Mundo, mi sindicato” they nodded in appreciation.

March 10 was the largest workers’ demonstration in Chicago history. Not since 80,000 workers marched down Michigan Avenue in 1886 to demand an 8-hour workday has there been such a demonstration of solidarity in the streets of the Windy City. Still, in many ways, it was a conservative movement, aimed at preserving the chance at the American Dream for this new wave of immigrants that was enjoyed by those of past generations. On the other, hand it graphically showed the potential power of immigrant labor when united in a common cause.

Hopefully efforts to organize immigrant labor in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs will be given a boost by this show of solidarity. It should certainly awaken local Wobs up to the need to strengthen our connections to immigrant workers.

Originally appeared in Industrial Worker (April 2006)

Reino J. Erkkila, a leading figure in the San Francisco Finnish community and in the maritime labor movement, passed away at his home April 5, at age 93.

Born Oct. 2, 1912 in Oulainen, Finland, he immigrated to the United States with his parents a year later. Reino spent the next ten years in Butte, Montana, where his father worked in the copper mines. Many of the Finnish miners were involved with the IWW, including his father who was an avid reader of the IWW daily Industrialisti.

In June 1917, 190 miners died at Anaconda Copper’s Speculator mine in Butte, many of them Finns. The miners struck over safety conditions and in July IWW organizer Frank Little came to help out the strikers. In the middle of the night on August 1, suspected copper company vigilantes broke into Little’s boarding house room next to the Finnish Wobbly hall, where he was nursing a broken leg, dragged him out, tied him to the rear of a car, and dragged him through the streets several miles out of town to the Milwaukee Railroad trestle where they hung him.

Incensed by the brutal murder, thousands of miners and their families walked in a funeral procession from downtown to the cemetery, the largest ever seen in Butte. Reino Erkkila, then 5, distinctly remembered walking with his parents in that demonstration, replete with union banners.

The Erkkilas moved to San Francisco in 1923, where Herman worked as a longshoreman and was active in the 1934 strike. Reino Erkkila joined his father on the docks and in the ILWU in 1935. In 1943 he became chief dispatcher in ILWU Local 10, and was later elected president of Local 10.

Reino was proud of his Finn Wobbly family background and it motivated his own years of activity in the labor movement.

He was one of the people on my IW “paper route” here and always enjoyed reading the paper. I recited two bilingual poems at his memorial. He was a great, generous-hearted guy. I’ll miss him.

Thousands of businesses across the country closed their doors May 1st -- some because there were no workers, others because managers preferred to avoid a fight with their employees that they could only lose. Many more worked short-staffed.

In Latino barrios throughout Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago and Miami, thousands of restaurants, warehouses, newsstands, and money transfer services were closed. Many McDonald's outlets cut hours or shut down.

In Los Angeles, hundreds of sweatshop garment factories were closed. The strike paralyzed construction sites and industrial food production plants across the country.

"It was one thing to march," said Armando Navarro of the California-based National Alliance for Human Rights, referring to the earlier wave of immigrant protests. "Now we're going to hit Ôem where it hurts Ð in the pocketbooks."

Cargill, the country's second-largest beef producer, closed seven meat-processing plants employing 14,000 workers. Tyson, Perdue and other meatpackers followed suit. Tens of thousands of farm workers stayed out of the fields, and the American Nursery and Landscape Association estimated that 90 percent of the half million workers in its industry took the day off.

According to Jack Kyser, an economist with the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp., the economic impact of the strike could total $200 million just in Los Angeles County. No one has done similar calculations for the rest of the country, but the total would have to run more than a billion dollars.

While several companies threatened to fire or discipline workers who took off work for the day, and some carried out those threats, many employers' associations urged caution -- warning that such actions could lead to further actions.

"Law firms have been advising their clients that the immigrant labor boycott is protected by the National Labor Relations Act, even though it isn't specifically a union action," reported the May 2 Wall Street Journal, which had real-time coverage of the May Day actions in its online edition.

Originally appeared in Industrial Worker (June 2006)

On Saturday, June 3 we remember the valiant struggle of over 15,000 fellow workers and through our continued agitating in 2006, carry their fighting spirit forward. This date marks the 90th anniversary of the great mine workers strike on Minnesota’s Mesabi, Cuyuna, and Vermillion Iron Ranges – a strike that threatened the economic grip of the U.S. Steel war profiteers and strained relations between several prominent Wobbly organizers and the union’s general headquarters.

After a large uprising was crushed with the help of immigrant strike breakers in 1907, Minnesota mine workers were poised to confront the steel trust once again. In a report to the Minneapolis headquarters of the IWW’s Agricultural Workers Organization dated May 2, 1916, one organizer had “never before found the time so ripe for organization and action as just now.” The appeal from one Minnesota miner in the May 13, 1916 issue of the Industrial Worker summarized the workers’ discontent best as “the spirit of revolt is growing among the workers on the Iron Range,” and that there was a need for “workers who have an understanding of the tactics and methods of the IWW and who would go on the job, and agitate and organize on the job.” Less than a month later, an Italian worker at the St. James underground mine in Aurora opened his pay envelope and raged over his meager earnings under the corrupt contract system, whereby wages were based upon the load of ore dug and supplies used, not hours worked. By the time other miners arrived at the St. James for the night shift, production at the mine was halted. All pits in Aurora were soon shut down as the strikers proclaimed, “We’ve been robbed long enough. It’s time to strike.”

40 striking workers from Aurora, along with their families, then marched through other mining communities on the Iron Range and discontent spread like wild fire. By month’s end, almost 10,000 mine workers were out on strike. Frustrated by previous experience with Western Federation of Miners and having been ignored by the Minnesota State Federation of Labor, the disorganized strikers appealed to the Industrial Workers of the World for assistance. Wobbly organizers, including the likes of Carlo Tresca, Joe Schmidt, Frank Little, and later Joe Ettor and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn arrived to help local strike leaders draw up a list of demands. IWW membership in the Metal Mine Workers’ Industrial Union swelled amongst the strikers with the following list of demands crafted: an 8 hour working day timed from when workers entered the mine until they were outside; a pay scale based upon the day worked; pay days twice a month; immediate back-pay for hours worked upon severance; abolition of the Saturday night shift; abolition of the contract mining system. With a majority of the strikers being non-English speaking European immigrants, IWW and local leaders conversed with the workers in their native language - from Polish, German, and Croatian to Finnish and Italian. This commitment to engaging workers in the language of their homeland was sustained through IWW publications and the Work Peoples College well into the 1970s.

Without asking for union recognition or IWW affiliation, the strikers closed the mines that shipped vast quantities of iron ore to plants producing the highly profitable materials of the great European war – iron and steel. This direct threat to wartime profits forced the employing class to mount an all-out attack against the striking workers. U.S. Steel companies on the Iron Range deputized 1,000 special mine guards and strike breakers to keep the picket lines open. Bloodshed soon followed.

In the town of Virginia (where the strike was headquartered), armed company thugs confronted a group of pickets holding signs of “One Big Union, One Big Enemy” and opened fire on them. When the smoke cleared, a Slovenian striker by the name of John Alar was dead from gunshot wounds. Despite city bans against mass marches, several thousand mourning workers marched from Virginia to the fairgrounds in Hibbing where speeches in many different languages urged the strikers to maintain the struggle and fight back in spite of company repression. With this show of boldness by the workers, the U.S. Steel bulls struck back and raided the Biwabik home of a Montenegrin miner in search of a “blind pig” or illegal alcohol still. Violence ensued, leaving one deputized strike breaker and a bystander dead. Philip Masonovich and his wife were arrested along with three immigrant boarders in their home. Within a day of the incident, a number of IWW organizers (who were at strike headquarters in Virginia during the scuffle) were also jailed on the grounds that they were accessories to murder. It was claimed that their impassioned speeches against the bosses encouraged chaos. Despite violent repression and with strike leaders locked up, the miners’ struggle pressed forward.
The mining companies refused to recognize any of the strikers’ demands and instead red-baited the workers by calling them IWW revolutionaries and vile anarchists in the newspapers. After futile negotiations between U.S. Steel and local businessmen/public officials in support of the strikers, the workers looked to the federal government to mediate. Mediation broke down, and with winter fast approaching, the Iron Range locals of the IWW voted to end their strike on September 17, 1916. Though heralded as a defeat for the workers, their bold confrontation struck fear in the companies, who by mid-October granted a few of the strikers’ primary demands. In November of 1916, only two months after the strike’s end, large wage increases were introduced by all of the mining companies. The bosses claimed these increases were meant for workers to benefit from wartime prosperity, but the IWW and even the otherwise hostile local papers realized what prompted this action. The Duluth News Tribune accepted that the concessions by the bosses were an “answer to the threat of a renewed IWW strike on the ranges next spring.”

Attentions then turned to defending those still in jail from the Biwabik episode. A large defense campaign was mounted, with support coming from the IWW’s AWO office in Minneapolis and other workers from around the country, including Eugene Debs. Shortly before the murder trials were to begin, a settlement was reached between prosecutors and attorneys speaking on behalf the IWW whereby Masonovich and two of his immigrant boarders would plead guilty to manslaughter, and all others would be released. Masonovich and the two immigrants accepted the offer with the understanding that they’d serve one year. However, the three were handed terms up to twenty years with parole eligibility after one year served. This outcome angered Bill Haywood, the IWW’s General Secretary-Treasurer for what he saw as a betrayal of the workers in exchange for the freedom of the Wobbly organizers. Haywood lashed out at Gurley Flynn and Ettor, who in turn criticized the IWW’s leader of withholding much needed defense funds for the case while transforming the organization into a top-heavy bureaucracy. Some say this tension led Tresca, Ettor, and Gurley Flynn to withdraw from IWW involvement. Whatever the organizational fallout from the legal settlement, the workers on Minnesota’s iron ranges continued to participate in IWW agitation, with many of the 1916 strikers involving themselves in the great lumber workers struggle the following year.

With the 90th anniversary of the strike upon us, Twin Cities and Duluth IWWs will host a public event on Saturday, June 3rd in the old Virginia Socialist Hall, where the 1916 strike was headquartered. The program will feature music, historical presentations, poetry, and the stories of area residents about the strike. The event is free and open to the public. Area residents with old stories from the strike or the IWW are encouraged to attend and share.

We gather to remember those who came before us, and also to celebrate the renewed organizing efforts on Minnesota’s iron ranges. Fellow Workers, we’ve been robbed long enough. We must continue to bite the hand that robs us of the products of our labor.

Originally posted: May 30, 2006 at iww.org

To a business unionist, perhaps the strangest thing about the IWW is our opposition to the dues check-off. After all, many people in the labour movement consider the union shop along with the employer checkoff to be the two of the greatest gains the labour movement has ever made. Typically, pro-employer groups try to undermine these two benefits by advocating an “open shop.”

The open shop is a strategy aimed at weakening unions, and creates an opportunity for some workers to get a free ride from the sacrifices of their fellow workers who chose to struggle for better working conditions. It is also a way of weakening unions by removing the steady, reliable income that a dues check-off provides.

But the dues check-off that comes with the union shop model also weakens unions. Below I would like to explain why.

An accountable union

Dues check-off has a way of making unions less accountable to the rank and file. For instance, if collecting the dues and accounting for them are the responsibility of the workers themselves, corruption is much more difficult. It is more difficult because of the greater number of people involved in the process: all the delegates who collect funds report at every meeting; the financial secretary reports all the finances every meeting; and since spending decisions are made at every meeting, few decisions are made without the direct involvement of the rank and file. In the event of a crooked delegate (which has been known to happen), all one needs to do is compare membership cards against delegate reports to see how much money is missing and who is responsible. Because of all of these checks and balances, corruption, while not impossible, is very difficult and not worth the effort.

Voluntary dues collection also puts the money directly into the hands of the organization of workers rather than passing through the bosses. This not only makes workers less reliant on their employer, it also helps workers see that the union is something that they are actively participating in, rather than just another deduction on their pay stubs.

Solidarity is like a muscle – if it is not exercised, it atrophies. By managing our own affairs (especially our finances), and not leaving them in the hands of specialists and paid reps, members are kept in constant contact with each other. The more contact we have with each other, the easier it is for us to mobilize quickly around shared grievances.

The voluntary collection of dues cannot solve all our potential problems though – and it does have problems of its own. Collecting dues in a workplace where the workers have very little contact with each other can be burdensome. Also it can be tough for a small organization to do something like make the rent for an office without having a steady income to count on. There are some creative solutions that can minimize this problem, e.g., encouraging members to pay several months of dues in advance, or setting up voluntary bank withdrawals, with a delegate still meeting with members to make sure their cards are updated. A monthly withdrawal approach is used by many charities, NGOs, and political parties to raise funds. Such strategies could help smooth out union finances and make income a little more predictable.

Voluntary membership also means that sometimes numbers, and therefore finances, will fluctuate quite dramatically. Membership will often increase during times of job action, and decrease following resolution of the issue. While we of course want to build the organization, we also want to avoid the path of the service model business unions, where bargaining units exist as legal entities long after any rank-and-file participation has stopped. This does not mean we shouldn’t do our best to retain members, but coercing workers whose interest is flagging will not get us very far. Rather, we need to figure out ways to maintain militancy and to continue direct actions around new issues even as old ones have been resolved.

Self-Management

It would be a mistake to think that voluntary dues collection is an archaic way of doing things or the result of an interest in historical reenactment. The reason that some unions (including the IWW) take this approach to dues collection is because of a belief in self-management. We believe that workers should use unions to better their lives, and that unions should not use workers to build up their organizations. After all, the division between leaders and the led is just as prevalent in the business unions as anywhere else.

If we are serious about building a better world within the shell of the old, managing our own finances is a first step.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (July/August 2006)

Jenny (Lahti) Velsek, 93, passed away April 18 in a nursing home at Tucson, Arizona. She was born March 4, 1913, at Eagle River, Wisconsin, the fifth of seven surviving children of Finnish immigrant parents.

Her parents were part of the Finnish- American labor movement, active with the Finnish clubs associated with the Industrial Workers of the World. Jenny described her father as an avid reader of Industrialisti, the Finnish-language IWW newspaper.

As a young woman, Jenny attended classes at Tyovaen Opisto (Work Peoples College), the Finnish IWW school for labor activists near Duluth.

Most of her life she lived in Chicago. She was married to Charles Velsek, secretary of the Czech branch of the IWW, who died in 1979. Jenny then became a companion to anold friend, Fred Thompson, whose Finnish- American wife Aino had recently passed away. Thompson was a well-known figure in IWW history as an organizer, labor historian and educator, and as an editor and writer. In the 1930s, he had been a director and teacher at Work Peoples College, after classes at that institution began to be conducted in English.

After Fred Thompson died in 1987 at age 87, Jenny moved to Springfield, Missouri, to be near a niece. Later she moved to Tucson where she had a brother and his family, and where she lived for the remainder of her life.

Labor singer Joe Glazer died Sept. 19 at age 88, after more than 60 years of sing­ing and writing songs of solidarity, justice, unions and workers. Among his 30 albums was a collection of IWW songs, reissued for the centenary and available from the IWW Literature Department ($15).

Born in New York City in 1918, Glazer’s father was a member of the Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. After Glazer took a job with the Textile Workers Union in 1944, he and his guitar were dispatched to picket lines in the south where he began writing labor songs, sometimes based on gospel hymns. Among his best-known were “Automation,” “The Mill Was Made of Marble,” and “Too Old to Work.”

In his memoir, Labour’s Troubadour, Glaz­er described leading strikers around a textile mill singing those songs. They were “basi­cally one-line verses that could be quickly changed” to suit any situation, he said.

“I was born in a country considered to be free – in New Zealand,” said William Trautmann, when he accepted the position of general secretary at the IWW’s founding con­vention in Chicago in the summer of 1905. Although he left New Zealand at an early age and never returned, Trautmann seems never to have forgotten his connection with his country of birth. He would no doubt have been proud to learn that his many publica­tions on industrial unionism strategies, and his achievements as a Wobbly organiser in the United States, became well-known and influential in New Zealand as well as in many other countries, and that a book published in New Zealand this year finally recognises his contribution to the rise of the Wobblies in his homeland.

William Ernest Trautmann was born on 1 July 1869 in Grahamstown, a gold rush settlement on the Coromandel Peninsula, in New Zealand’s North Island. The town was then just a year old but already had a popula­tion of 18,000, mostly miners who worked by candlelight to hack gold-bearing rock from poorly ventilated shafts in mines which bore their owners’ optimistic names – Queen of Beauty, Lucky Hit, Bright Smile. To prevent the theft of ore, those owners forced each miner to strip naked at the start and end of each 10-hour shift, and cross a passageway separating their street clothes from those they wore in the mine.

One of the first miners to arrive in Gra­hamstown in 1868 was the German-born Edmund Trautmann, who had earlier been a ‘miner, forty-niner’ in the California gold rush. By 1874 Edmund and his wife Augusta had four small children. In May of that year, during a graveyard shift, Edmund Trautmann died after entering a pocket of poisonous gas in the Crown Prince mine. His work mates formed a committee to send his ailing wife and her children, ranging in age from seven years to nine months, back to their relatives in Germany. Ernest, the second of these children, was left there in the care of a mili­tary orphanage while the rest of the family departed again, this time for New York.

Ten years later, at the age of 14, Ernest moved to Poland and began an apprenticeship in a brewery owned by a distant relative. The apprenticeship was pure peonage as Traut­mann was required to work unlimited hours, at the beck and call of the brewmaster. After qualifying, he moved to Dresden, Germany, where he agitated on behalf of child workers in the bottling shops. He emerged from these experiences with an anarchist’s allegiance to individual liberty and a Marxist’s certainty in the class struggle.

Trautmann worked his way through East­ern Europe as far as Odessa in Russia before returning to Germany. En route he encoun­tered traditions of European radical thought from which he would draw throughout his life. After agitating on behalf of the most abused workers in the brewery industry, he was expelled from Germany as a dangerous radical in 1890, and followed his family to the New World, which proved to be indis­tinguishable from the Old.

After settling in Massachusetts, Traut­mann became active in the United Brewery Workers Union, the first major industrial union in the United States. In 1900, he be­came editor of the union’s German-Eng­lish newspaper, Brauer-Zeitung, where his dedication to the principles of socialism and industrial unionism soon put him in conflict with the American Federation of Labor. His vocal opposition to the increasing political conservatism of the AFL cost him his posi­tion as editor, and he was forced out in the spring of 1905.

Between 1900 and 1905 Trautmann combined his experience of the U.S. labour movement with his knowledge of intellectual currents in the European working class to de­velop ideas which later formed the theoretical framework of the IWW. One labor historian has suggested Trautmann “played the most central role in the founding of the IWW... [H]e provided the ideological starting point of the revolutionary industrial unionism of the IWW.” In 1904 Trautmann was appointed to the three-member committee that drew up the Industrial Union Manifesto calling for the formation of the IWW “as the economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party.” At the IWW’s founding convention in 1905, a suc­cession of tributes testified to Trautmann’s broad knowledge of international labour movements, his dedication and his personal qualities (“he stands almost peerless in the way of a personal sacrifice to the interests of the working people”).

In its first years the IWW had fought numerous industrial skirmishes without winning a single major strike. Trautmann looked to break this pattern by concentrating his organising ef­forts among his fellow European migrant workers in the industri­alised eastern states. In 1909 he told readers of the IWW newspa­per the Industrial Worker, “I am off for McKees Rocks, perhaps to face the bullets of the foe.” McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, was a steel company town. When employers introduced an unpopular change to the pay system, five thousand workers, mostly eastern Euro­peans, spontaneously walked out of the mills. Violent clashes followed when the company’s private police force tried to bring in scab labour. As the violence escalated, the Pennsylvania state constabulary charged and clubbed picketing workers.

In response to a call from a group of exiled European revolutionaries, Trautmann arrived to head the strike organi­sation. He cautioned against further violence, but tensions in the town were already at breaking point. A gunfight broke out in which several strikers and five state troopers were killed, and Trautmann himself was arrested. Thousands of strikers thronged the town to demand his release and with a full-scale riot threatening, he was taken from his cell to an improvised courtroom, tried and acquitted. Two weeks later the strike was settled, the company compromising on most issues.

In the few exultant years following this victory Trautmann criss-crossed the eastern industrial states in response to a flood of requests to lead direct actions and set up IWW locals. In the northern winter of 1912, he joined Big Bill Haywood and other lead­ing Wobblies as an organiser of the textile workers’ strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the legendary ‘Bread and Roses’ strike. The strikers, mainly women and children, were opposed by a mounted militia of vigilantes, local businesspeople and students, who rode down the picket lines with bayonets and ba­tons. Using a pedal-powered printing press, Trautmann and his team deluged the militia with pamphlets, urging them, with some suc­cess, to covertly support the strikers.

The same period saw a surge of revo­lutionary industrial unionism in his home­land. As Trautmann had rightly observed in 1905, New Zealand at that time could only be “considered to be free.” A long period of liberal, mildly progressive government had introduced better conditions for workers, but required all unions to submit to compulsory arbitration of their disputes. This regime meant real wages fell during the early 20th century, and workers were chafing under a paternalistic form of state socialism. However, from about 1908 an influx of seasoned labour agitators from the United States, Canada, the UK and Australia introduced IWW-style direct action strategies and side-stepped the arbitration system by negotiating directly with employers, through strike action if necessary. The response from miners, wharf workers, drivers, labourers and thousands of other mainly unskilled workers was immediate and enthusiastic. Branches of the IWW were set up in major cities and mining towns, helped by the distribution of large quantities of revolutionary literature, some of it written or translated by Trautmann.

In 1912 a prolonged strike broke out just a short distance from Trautmann’s birthplace in the company town of Waihi, which was run by a foreign-owned gold-mining consortium. The Canadian Wobbly J.B. King played an active part on the strike committee. After several months, the company persuaded the government to send in large numbers of strikebreakers reinforced by armed and mounted police. These police were soon labelled ‘Cossacks’ by the strikers, a term first used to refer to the mounted troops at McKees Rocks. The police deliberately en­couraged violent riots between the strikers and the scabs, which culminated in the death of striker F. E. Evans.

The following year a strike on the Wel­lington waterfront spread to most of the port cities of the country. The ‘Great Strike’ of 1913 saw the greatest civil unrest ever seen in New Zealand, before or since. Tens of thousands were on strike, headed by Wobblies such as the English-born Tom Barker who produced a weekly paper with regular articles in the Maori language. However they were con­fronted by police, military and large bands of strikebreakers from the rural districts, armed officially with long wooden batons and unof­ficially with Army revolvers. As at Waihi, this combination of state-sponsored violence and organised mass scabbery caused the defeat of the strike, and most of the Wobblies were forced to leave the country.

Trautmann’s autobiography shows that he considered his greatest achievement to be the many publications that helped spread the revolutionary industrial union­ism movement throughout the world. Today, he would find that despite such efforts his country of birth remains unfree. Gold is still mined in the hills above Coroman­del, where a vast and ugly open-cast mine disfigures a landscape which is otherwise one of the most beautiful in a very beautiful country. Some locals defend the mine for the jobs it provides, yet the average income for Coromandel people is lower than elsewhere in the country, as the foreign owners of the mine siphon off the profits.

We close with a Maori salutation: No reira, e te kaituhi o te Uiniana o Nga Kaimahi o te Ao, ka whawhai tonu tatou, ake ake, ake. (Loosely: Therefore, to the one who wrote on behalf of the IWW, we will carry on your struggle for as long as necessary.)

Mark Derby lives in Wellington, Aote­aroa/NZ, and wrote “The Case of William E. Trautmann and the role of the Wobblies” in Revolution – the 1913 Great Strike in New Zealand, ed. Melanie Nolan, Canterbury Uni­versity Press, 2006. Jay Miller is author of “Soldier of the Class War – the life and writing of William E. Traut­mann,” a Ph.D. dissertation completed in 2000 at Wayne State University, where Trautmann’s unpublished memoir can also be found.

Jay Miller is author of “Soldier of the Class War – the life and writing of William E. Traut­mann,” a Ph.D. dissertation completed in 2000 at Wayne State University, where Trautmann’s unpublished memoir can also be found

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (November 2006)

Peter Cole, editor, Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly. Charles H. Kerr Publishers, 2007, 149 pages, $15, paper.

This long-awaited collection is the first book-length documentation of the life of African-American IWW organizer Benjamin Fletcher (1890-1949). Fletcher played a key role in organizing Philadelphia’s dockworkers into the IWW. He was sentenced to ten years in Leavenworth prison for his efforts. He died a Wobbly in good standing after nearly 40 years service to the cause.

Intertwined with Fletcher’s life is the story of the IWW’s Marine Transport Workers Local 8, which exercised job control on the Philadelphia waterfront for a decade and was the country’s first fully integrated longshore union.

Ben Fletcher opens with Cole’s 43-page biographical introduction pointing to Fletcher’s role in organizing a multi-racial waterfront union that boasted some 3,000 members at its peak, and won Philadelphia’s dockworkers job control and the best working conditions and pay in the country for a decade.

Local 8 was decimated by a combination of Communist disruption, employer-government collusion, ILA union scabbing, and a disastrous defeat in the 1922 lock-out. That dispute arose when Wobblies decided to impose the 8-hour work day through direct action. They were unable to maintain the necessary unity in the face of ILA union scabbing and the government’s U.S. Shipping Board, which guaranteed the employers’ profits during the dispute.

In the aftermath of that defeat, the employers succeeded in replacing the IWW with the AFL-affiliated ILA. Unlike in other ports where it relegated African-Americans to segregated locals, the Philadelphia ILA formed an integrated local with a black president.

The IWW continued to organize on the Philadelphia waterfront through the 1920s, offering an alternative to workers dissatisfied with the ILA’s harmonious relations with the employers, its undemocratic structures, and its acquiescence to the employers’ reintroduction of segregated work crews (something the IWW had refused to tolerate).

When the IWW was ultimately driven from the docks, Fletcher ceased working as a longshoreman, but he remained a Wobbly for the rest of his life.

The second half of the book consists of 51 brief documents (some extracts) including all of Fletcher’s known published articles, his remarks at the 1913 General Convention, articles from the IWW press and other publications (notably The Messenger) about FW Fletcher’s organizing efforts, obituaries and reports on Fletcher’s funeral, recollections of him by other radicals, and four letters and a short history (separated from the letters here and mislabeled as being from 1920) discussing IWW organizing efforts that FW Fletcher sent historian Abram Harris who was seeking material for his 1931 history, The Black Worker.

In addition to his organizing, Fletcher was well regarded as an orator; in 1931 an AFL official wrote of being captivated by his speech during a New York City street meeting.

“I have heard all the big shots of the labor movement... and it is no exaggeration when I state that this colored man, Ben Fletcher, is the only one I ever heard who cut right through to the bone of capitalist pretensions... with a concrete, constructive working class union argument.”

I would have preferred more extensive notes placing the documents in context, and source notes for the introduction. As welcome an addition to the literature on the IWW as it is, the book suffers from heavy-handed editing that appears to have introduced extraneous material into the text, inadequate proof-reading, and poor “printing”. I believe the book was actually photocopied as it does not bear a union label. There are a number of errors ranging from incorrect documentation in the texts (usually corrected in the separate bibliography) to the claim that only 101 IWWs were indicted in the Chicago espionage trial. Many of these problems might have been fixed had the publisher sent proofs to the author for review before publication.

Despite these shortcomings, Ben Fletcher does important work in gathering the surviving primary sources on FW Fletcher’s life and reminding us of the IWW’s pioneering work organizing workers across racial lines to build a stable industrial union that, through direct action and solidarity, dramatically improved their lives.

Unfortunately, as the IWW realized at the time and tried to address by sending Fletcher and others on organizing trips up and down the coast, one port, no matter how well organized, could never be strong enough to withstand the employers on its own.

Fletcher and Local 8’s story will continue to be told. I look forward to Cole’s history of Local 8 slated for publication next year.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (February 2007)

IWW member Colin Bossen delivered a talk on the IWW’s Chicago Couriers Union at the Provisions Library in Washington, DC on June 8. The Institute for Anarchist Studies and Provisions Library supported his work along with the CCU organizers interviewed. This article is an edited version of his presentation.

What is solidarity unionism?

Solidarity unionism is a term and an organizing strategy coined by the labor historian and activist Staughton Lynd in his book of the same name. He defines solidarity unionism as “relying, not on technical expertise, or the numbers of signed-up members, nor on bureaucratic chain-of-command, but the spark that leaps from person to person, especially in times of common crisis.”

Lynd’s solidarity unionism has six basic characteristics: voluntary membership, no dues check-off, no paid officers or staff, democratic decision-making with everyone empowered to “criticize frankly and fully”, a focus on direct action rather than collective bargaining agreements, and internationalism that seeks to build networks of workers “across boundaries of nation, gender, and religious faith.” Lynd contrasts solidarity unionism with the business unionism of the large AFL-CIO and Change to Win unions.

Lynd identified three characteristics inherent to business unions: being government- sponsored monopolies that [try] to force all persons working in a particular shop to join the union and deducts dues directly from a workers’ paycheck; agreeing to collective bargaining agreements that grant management exclusive power to make the crucial on-the-job and investment decisions alongside a no-strike clause prohibiting direct action of all forms during the contract; and, undermining and preventing the formation of independent labor parties, locally and nationally. Business unions are “organized from [the] top down,” devoted to keeping the labor peace and relying on paid staff who don’t include workers in processing grievances or making decisions.

While past IWWs may have practiced something like solidarity unionism, this organizing theory was introduced to the IWW in 2000 by the IWW’s then- General Secretary-Treasurer Alexis Buss.

“We must stop making gaining legal recognition the point of our organizing. We have to bring about a situation where the bosses, not the union, want the contract. We need to create situations where bosses will offer us concessions to get our cooperation,” said Buss in her Industrial Worker column.

A union is not a union because it gets legal sanction from the government or a contract from the boss, said Buss in another column. Rather, a union is simply any “organized group of workers” that comes together to have “more potential power than unorganized individual workers.” This redefinition of the union shifted the power back to workers. In the United States, any group of workers engaged in concerted activity has legal protections under the National Labor Relations Act. These rights include presenting grievances, working together, making demands on the boss, seeking meetings, and even striking.

Buss also encouraged wobblies to look at the work of two of Lynd’s mentors, Stan Weir and Martin Glaberman. Weir and Glaberman were both working class intellectuals who wrote about the structural problems of the American labor movement. Weir spent much of his life working as a sailor, a longshoreman or an autoworker in California. Glaberman was a Detroit autoworker.

Glaberman’s work focused on the problems inherent in union contractualism specifically how labor contracts could turn the union into a cop for the boss, enforcing discipline among the union’s members. Glaberman had a second key insight that “activity precedes consciousness.” This meant that people respond to workplace situations emotionally before they respond rationally and often take actions in a way that contradicts their presupposed beliefs, and in the case of unions, contractual agreements. Glaberman’s favorite example of this was during World War II when workers at the autoplants would sign no-strike agreements with management and then would spontaneously go on strike over safety issues.

Weir, in his essay “The Informal Work Group,” reinforced this idea that consciousness comes from activity and the experience of working and socializing together. These informal work groups, the social groups that people form at work, were for Weir the heart of the union, with each having its own culture, “informal leadership, discipline, and activity.”

First steps to organize

The campaign to organize what is now the Chicago Couriers Union began among young members of the Chicago General Membership Branch of the IWW who decided that they wanted try to organize a solidarity union. In Fall 2003, several members of the Chicago IWW met and decided to organize the courier industry in Chicago.

The couriers had no union or prospect of a business union interested in organizing them. The industry’s high turnover and unique subculture seemed to be well suited for a solidarity unionism campaign. At the same time, these traits made winning a National Labor Relations Board-sponsored election at a single company unlikely. Chicago has dozens of messenger companies.

Messengers also potentially have an enormous amount of power on the job. Packages must be delivered in a set amount of time; it was possible for a courier to use direct action to delay and disrupt a company’s business. In theory, couriers could be organized around specific grievances rather than the idea of a union contract.

The IWW also had a recent history of organizing in the courier industry. From 2000-2002, Wobblies in Portland had built a union of bike messengers that succeeded in winning a number of substantive demands, including a pay raise, at Transerv, one of the larger messenger companies. Only the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in San Francisco, had created a similar organization. The Chicago IWWs felt this experience would give the IWW legitimacy among messengers and that they could draw directly on the wisdom gained by other IWW organizers through their own struggles. IWW members had begun already to develop a few relationships with messengers. This meant that getting a foothold in the industry would be easier.

Bike messengers at a 2004 union picnic. (Source: CCU file photo/Industrial Worker)

Although no one in the IWW knew it at the time, members of the bike messenger community had been shopping around for a union for several months before conversations between messengers and IWW members even began.

In June 2003, there had been an effort to create a Windy City Bike Messengers Association (WCBMA). The effort was led, in part, by Andrea Murphy and was the third attempt at creating a bike messenger association in the city. Murphy had participated in the WCBMA with the clear intent that it would become a union and had even gone so far as to attend a weekend training put on by the AFL-CIO.

Under Murphy’s guidance, the first act of the WCBMA had been to invite a trainer from the AFL-CIO Organizing Insitute to meet with messengers. While about 40 people attended the meeting nothing substantive came of it because the AFLCIO trainer told the messengers they needed to organize before even approaching a union for help.

The initial purpose of the WCBMA had been “to tackle on-the-job issues” but after the AFL-CIO meeting this focus was eventually lost. As the WCBMA unravelled, the IWW stepped into the vacuum. Conversations between the remnants of the WCBMA and the IWW’s organizing committee resulted in the decision to bring IWW organizer and former bike messenger ‘Lil Pete out from Portland for a week. During Pete’s time in Chicago, he spoke with Chicago messengers about organizing with the IWW and the union held a public forum to discuss the idea.

After flyering and word of mouth, a publicity a forum was held in mid-December 2003. At least 40 people came, many were veterans of the industry. There was both excitement and fear about the possibility of forming a union. Grievances began to emerge, in particular, several people were upset about being independent contractors rather than employees. There was also talk about next steps and a general sense that security was important. Messengers feared losing their jobs. At the meeting, Pete outlined a basic strategy for building the union. He argued that the first two tasks of organizing a union were to develop a social map of the industry and gather a contact list for as many workers as possible, so it was best to keep the organizing quiet. The meeting ended with plans to hold another information meeting and proceed from there. A questionnaire was circulated, but few people filled it out in time for the next meeting. The information asked for was the number of people in the company, their names, contact information, demographics and social groupings, and the owner of the company.

The second information meeting was held in a messenger’s home. More than 20 people came. Few people had filled out the survey, so discussion turned to their working conditions and what could be done about them immediately. Arrow Messenger Service had recently instituted a policy that called for messengers to cover their tattoos and remove piercings. Chicago bike messengers, particularly white messengers, tended to have a lot of piercings and tattoos. People were pissed off. The IWW organizers at that meeting wanted to build infrastructure and lay campaign groundwork, rather than do a strike or job action so the meeting ended without a clear plan of action.

The IWW organizers decided to build the courier union’s infrastructure, map the industry and gather contacts. The organizers also recognized they lacked the experience, so petitioned the General Executive Board for funds to bring in Pete to kick start the campaign. With the funds approved, Pete planned to come to Chicago from late March to mid-June to teach workers how to organize, handle grievances and devise strategy.

‘Hot Shop’ at Arrow

Before Pete arrived, things began to get hot at Arrow. A few of the messengers had reached a breaking point and wanted to strike over the new tattoo and piercing policy. They invited two of the IWW organizers to attend a meeting where they discussed what to do. The organizers talked them out of striking, reasoning that they did not have the support or organization to win. In retrospect I cannot help but wonder to what extent we performed the function described by Glaberman of keeping workers in check in that case. On the other hand, the messengers in question probably would have never thought of striking without having talked to the IWW in the first place. In her final report as a CCU organizer Andrea Murphy is critical of the IWW organizers.

“A couple of messengers at Arrow were feeling exploited enough to want to do the most daring thing they could do in their position. In the end, the outcome was no different than it would have been had they been fired [most of the messengers in question quit Arrow]. Because of the desire to keep the campaign undercover and the (imagined) responsibility they assumed for the results of the campaign, a genuine passion to do something was stifled.

“I challenge every organizer...to think about how best to direct energy rather than subduing or controlling it. Consider what it might look like to lead from behind. I caution against talking anyone out of doing anything, as this requires too much influence over the passions of peoples,” said Murphy.

Problems with top-down organizing

In this instance, the IWW organizers had begun to make decisions about the direction of the campaign without real input from workers in the industry. We wanted people to think and act strategically while they often wanted to solve their problems immediately. As organizers from outside the industry, we were not initially accountable to the messengers. They had not elected us and the power that they had over us essentially amounted to whether they participated in the activities that we organized or not. It took several years to break this pattern.

Our strategies would prove later on to have limited, if any, success. With organizing at Arrow stifled, we began the task of building an Industrial Organizing Committee. We selected a group of four workers to be its first members. They were chosen because we thought them to be leaders within the messenger community. All four of them were white and all former WCBMA members. One of the first tasks we set for the group was to recruit members who more accurately represented the demographics of the messenger industry. About half of the couriers in Chicago are black and we realized that we would never be able to organize the industry without a union that reflected the people in the industry.

We also developed a larger strategy for the campaign based on Pete’s experiences in Portland, the theory of solidarity unionism and studying the industrial union structures of the IWW in the twenties and thirties. Our idea was that we would organize two types of committees. The first would be shop committees composed of members of the union who worked at a particular company. They would handle the grievances that arose at that workplace. Each shop committee would elect a member to serve on an industry wide organizing committee that, in turn, would handle the grievances that could not be dealt with on a company by company basis.

Once the union got strong enough the industrial organizing committee, we would issue a set of demands for industry- wide standards and then go about trying to enforce these through direct action. The members of the industrial organizing committee selected the other members of the committee, often with heavy input from Pete, MK and I.

Chicago Couriers Union pickets the Lasalle building in 2007. Photo by X353650.

The goal was to develop the shop committees to the point where they would elect their own representatives to the IOC. This never happened, probably because the structure we wanted was imposed upon the workers and did not arise naturally out of their day-to-day work experiences. To put it bluntly, we had miscalculated their informal work groups.

Changing organizing strategies

Pete returned to Chicago in late March and we began to implement our strategy. Through a lot of diligent work in Pete’s absence, we had managed to create an almost complete map of the industry and collect the contact information for close to 650 messengers, roughly 45 per cent of the people working in the industry. The near-heroic efforts of messengers made this possible.

Pete’s arrival in Chicago kicked the campaign into high gear. With Pete in town, we organized several shop committees. Our plan was to build the union slowly by winning small grievances at individual work places. However, no committee was capable of functioning without an IWW organizer present. Two organizer trainings were held, but they failed to empower couriers to be independent organizers. Despite these weaknesses, the shop committees achieved limited success.

Our first victory came when Scott Gibson, one of the members of the IOC, was fined illegally “when he was caught not wearing a company-required uniform” by Standard Courier. Scott only learned about the fine when he saw a $50 deduction from his paycheck. Such deductions are illegal under Illinois law.

Scott and the Standard Courier shop committee confronted management, demanded Scott be reimbursed and an end to the uniform policy. Management insisted that the messengers at Standard were independent contractors. The shop committee reasoned that independent contractors could not be required to wear uniforms. Over the course of a week and a half, Scott and six of his coworkers marched on their boss to issue their demands. After the third march, management rescinded the uniform policy, refunded Scott $50 and fired him.

Scott’s firing turned out to have a silver lining. The same day he was fired, he filed an Unfair Labor Practice with the NLRB charging Standard Courier with punishing him for union activity. Several months later Standard settled the charge and offered Scott $3,000. In the meantime, Scott had also filed a claim with the Illinois Department of Employment Securities. The claim resulted in a decision “that Standard’s workers are employees and not independent contractors as the company has claimed.”

During that time the couriers won a small victory at the Comet messenger company. Comet employed primarily black workers. A couple of bike messengers from Comet joined the union and told the IOC that “workers paychecks did not amount to minimum wage.” The messengers began to organize. The threat of organizing pushed management to enforce minimum wage laws.

Pete left in June and his absence was immediately felt. MK and I lacked his experience at group facilitation. The organizing faltered and changed direction.

We decided to aggressively reach out to driver messengers. Up until this point, participation in the union had consisted almost entirely of bike messengers. We knew we had to bring driver messengers into the campaign if it was to succeed.

This effort failed due to different work cultures. Driver messengers are an atomized workforce isolated in their vehicles at work and during breaks. Bike messengers congregate together during their downtime. The bike messenger subculture also can be elitist and alienating to non-members.

It was around this time that MK took a job with Arrow as a bike messenger and focussed on building a shop committee at Arrow. His work led to a major campaign to change working conditions and pay. This switch of focus by a key organizer prompted the end of the IOC.

The union then decided to concentrate efforts on fighting independent contractor status. In Chicago, and across the country, many messengers are considered independent contractors by their employers. The reasoning of the employers is that messengers are able to decide whether or not they will accept a particular package from a dispatcher and, therefore, are independent. As independent contractors, couriers are responsible for their own taxes, denied workman’s compensation, unemployment insurance and even a right to a minimum wage or overtime pay.

Government agencies have mostly rejected the employers’ claim. But most messengers do not know this and so the companies get away with it. The North American Independent Contractor Association (NICA) helps them do it. When a messenger gets a job with a company that uses NICA she or he is told they are contracted through NICA and merely assigned to work for the courier company’s dispatchers. NICA messengers are charged a weekly fee and must pay for using the radio equipment. These fees can be quite high, up to $100 per month.

We formed the Stop NICA! committee with the goal to drive NICA out of the industry. The committee would fight NICA on both a legal level, by filing claims for unemployment and workmen’s compensation with the various government agencies as if the workers in question were employees, and through direct action. The Stop NICA! committee hoped to convince companies that they should switch their workers back to employee status and prevent NICA’s spread elsewhere.

The committee lasted the summer and had moderate successes, winning five workman’s compensation cases and holding a series of pickets that delayed, but did not stop, NICA from spreading to two companies.

Andrea Murphy came onto the campaign as a full-time paid organizer to speed up and focus the work. She decided that it was time “to end the secrecy” that had surrounded the campaign since the beginning. Murphy threw CCU meetings open to all couriers who came.

“Every working messenger would have a voice and a vote at meetings, with the exception that only members of the CCU in good standing could vote on money matters,” said Murphy.

The CCU elected a secretary, Marshall Arnold, a former Arrow dispatcher who worked at Dynamex. The group held workshops, advocated for messengers to city hall, and organized around grievances and industry issues. Arnold believes that in some ways the union’s biggest accomplishment is that it continues to exist.

In Fall 2006, the CCU began a campaign to the get one of the buildings in downtown Chicago, 135 S. Lasalle, to install a messenger center that would allow couriers to easily drop off their packages as reported in the June 2007 Industrial Worker. What is exciting is that this campaign is that is the first major effort spearheaded by the couriers themselves. Nearly four years later, the dream of a solidarity union for the courier industry may be happening.

Learning five lessons on the job

Looking back, we learned five lessons. First is that a campaign initiated by outsiders cannot follow the pure model of solidarity unionism advocated by Lynd. IWW organizers often found their ideas in conflict with the couriers working in the industry. This conflict stifled these workers and slowed the campaign.

Second, building a union takes a long time and organizing requires dedication and patience. The CCU is only a success because organizers stuck with it for several years. The industry’s high turnover raises the question of how to create stability for a successful union.

Third, informal work groups matters a lot. The union failed to bring in drivers because they belonged to a different set of informal work groups.

Fourth, structures must evolve organically. Efforts to create the IOC, the Stop NICA! committee, and the shop committees failed because organizers imposed them artificially onto the industry. The structure of the CCU ultimately succeeded because it reflected the social dynamics of bike messenger culture, which is part of a community. Organizers should pay careful attention to the indigenous forms of organizing that exist and seek to capitalize on them.

Fifth, organizers need clear goals. Organizing at Arrow and now around 135 S. Lasalle, has been successful because the organizers had and have both clear goals and a plan of action. This clarity makes it much easier to get people to join in the organizing and understand why it might benefit them.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (August 2007)

I wanted Local 8 to exist before I knew it did.

When I was an undergraduate, I knew I wanted to be a historian before I knew what aspect of United States history interested me. I was inspired by the example of the modern civil rights movement, as well as from the myths and pop culture creations of that time. It was the first social movement that I seriously thought about. I came to appreciate that race matters and racism were perhaps the central paradox of US history. Fortunately, while still in college, I also was introduced to labor history—so few are, a real bias in education—and started to read about the American labor movement.

Predictably, when I entered graduate school, I learned how little I knew. The only certainty was that I wanted to write about social movements. Though from a privileged background (upper-middle class, white, suburban—well, that last one is a questionable privilege), I already appreciated that the world was seriously messed up and that the only way it was going to get better was if people organized and fought to make it better. Unless you’re rich, individuals don’t stand much of a chance to change things. Ordinary folks need numbers to make things happen. History told me as much.

I also was starting to understand that economic inequality, increasing exponentially under capitalism, was the main culprit, though studying the black freedom struggle made me realize that reducing any important problem to a single cause is problematic. I also saw that race (ethnicity and nationality) was a real blind spot for many on the Left; somehow, a class-based revolution was going to solve the reality that white folks had risen up on the backs of non-white ones. I didn’t buy that; it was too simplistic. Hence, I was thinking about how issues of class and race fit together, how solving one of these matters would not necessarily solve the other, how social movements had to figure into the solution. But only some very special group of humans, who would be willing to fight the good fight on multiple fronts simultaneously, could do the job.

Then I read Mel Dubofsky’s We Shall Be All, still considered by academics if not Wobblies, as the standard history of the Industrial Workers of the World. Though there are plenty of problems with Dubofsky’s book, I still credit it for opening my eyes up to the IWW. Like many folks, even those who claim to seriously study US history, I knew absolutely nothing about the Wobs. This book was an eye-opener.

One line in We Shall Be All, just one line, aroused my curiosity and eventually turned into the numerous articles and the two books I have written on Local 8 in Philadelphia. In a section on governmental repression of the IWW during World War I, Dubofsky made a brief reference to Ben Fletcher, the only African American arrested during the 1917 federal raids. Who was Ben Fletcher?!? How in the world did a black man get involved with the Wobblies? Sure, the IWW had a lot to offer African Americans and other oppressed groups but—let’s face it—precious few blacks were in the IWW, right?

Over the next few years, I wrote a dissertation on Local 8, which organized thousands of Philadelphia longshoremen into the most radically inclusive labor union of the early twentieth century. The union dominated waterfront labor relations through its militant, direct action tactics, willingness to organize all workers in marine transport, and openness to blacks and immigrants—something that the American Federation of Labor and most white organizations (working class or other) were unwilling to do. Local 8 lined up African Americans, Irish Americans, Poles, Lithuanians, West Indians, and other native-born and immigrant white workers, put them into a single unit, integrated work gangs, and fought to treat all workers as equal, regardless of their race, ethnicity, nationality or job skills. The Delaware riverfront never had seen such a militant, successful union but, the truth is, no American port of call ever had.

Of course, the combination of being so inclusive and radical (the two go together, don’t they?) meant that Local 8 was a threat to local business interests and even the US federal government. Hence, the wartime repression that Wobblies know so well along with, ironically, many of the records that I would use to write their story. For instance, federal spies infiltrated Local 8 and gave regular reports to employers after World War I. Without these records, my job as a historian of Local 8 would have been much harder.

To many people, Local 8 equals Ben Fletcher, for good reason. Fletcher, a black man born and raised in Philadelphia, was not only Local 8’s best known black member, but also the IWW’s best known black member. He joined the IWW and became a local leader prior to the formation of Local 8, though to this day how and why he first joined the IWW remains a mystery.

Fletcher traveled up and down the Atlantic coast to organize waterfront workers, especially black ones, in Norfolk, Baltimore, Providence, and Boston. He attended national conventions. He gave brilliant lecture tours and soapbox oratories. He was loved by his fellow workers in Philadelphia, especially the black ones. He scared the hell out of “the Man.”

As I slowly and quietly toiled to produce a publishable history of Local 8, I also managed to connect with Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, the publishers of the legendary Charles H. Kerr Press. Together, we came up with a thin volume that was my honor to work on: a short biography of Fletcher (though, really, since we know so little about his personal life, it is mostly about Fletcher in Local 8) with a collection of most every item ever written by or about Ben. As it turned out, that book came out a bit before the general history of Local 8.

Finally, this summer, the University of Illinois Press published my book Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia. Although a few other historians have written some good pieces about Local 8 and Ben Fletcher, I do think that my books and articles set the standard. I am not suggesting that all the work on Local 8 or Fletcher is complete, not by a long shot, because many questions still remain unanswered. To me, the most important unanswered question is what the rank-and-file members of Local 8 were thinking; I cannot say with confidence that I know. Sure, thousands of black and white Americans and thousands of immigrants proudly belonged to Local 8. But what did they think of their interracial, multiethnic union that belonged to the most radical outfit in the nation?

In a way, I wish I could not write that last sentence but there it is. And, who knows what other materials might be uncovered in future years. If there are people out there who are as fascinated by this Philadelphia story as I am, I encourage you to keep digging! We all would benefit from the effort.

I am so happy that I “found” Local 8, as it opened my eyes and gave me hope. When I think about how the world could be made better—and we all should be doing that—I think about Fletcher and the thousands of other proud, militant, egalitarian members of Local 8.

Today, nearly a hundred years after the founding of Local 8, America and the world still are divided economically, racially, and ethnically. Today, American workers and workers the world over are divided, placing their national identities above their class ones.

I recently spent five months in Tanzania and they are as hung up on their differences with Kenyans and Ugandans as Americans are about Mexicans and Chinese people. Who benefits? Well, most of all, global corporations that play workers in different countries off of each other every single day; just consider the recent UAW strike against General Motors.

Truly, the IWW is needed as much today as it was when a group of bold men and women got together to form the union. I sincerely believe that one of the keys to our future success at making the world a better, fairer, healthier, happier place is not just forming powerful unions. No, Local 8 shows us what must be done: we must organize people of all ethnic, national, and racial backgrounds, no questions asked. They are workers, enough said. The genius of Ben Fletcher and Local 8 was to wed these issues together so that they were inseparable. They rose, and fell, upon solidarity. We are their heirs.

Let us get to it.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (November 2007)

Peter Cole, Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive- Era Philadelphia, University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago:July 2007, 227 pages, , hardbound, cost $40.

Peter Cole’s Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive- Era Philadelphia challenges the idea that the IWW’s vision of interracial unionism was little more than revolutionary slogan and tokenism. Instead, Cole describes how the IWW overcame the barriers of racism on the waterfront in Philadelphia, United States.

As Peter Cole —tells, Philadelphia area longshoremen and sailors known as Local 8 were the only major example of successful interracial unionism until the Thirties and arguably until later. Cole describes Philadelphia’s long history of ethnic barriers and racism, particularly the bitter street fights between Irish immigrant longshoreman and African- American longshoremen. He describes in detail as well the constant corruption of Philadelphia’s government. Cole also presents how previous Philadelphia longshoremen’s organizations failed because of racism.

The context Cole provides makes the story of the success of Local 8 that much more improbable and satisfying.

In 1913, 3500 longshoremen of various backgrounds including African- Americans, Irish-Americans, and recent Lithuanian and Polish immigrants went out on strike together and formed Local 8. As Cole points out, the strikers sought out the IWW, not vice versa. The predominantly African-American longshoremen (more than 50 per cent) chose the IWW over the more prominent and established International Longshoremen’s Association because of the IWW’s egalitarianism and the fact that one of the Philadelphia IWW’s leaders was himself an African-American, that leader being Benjamin Fletcher. (Fletcher, incidentally, was the recent subject of another Peter Cole book put out by C.H. Kerr this year.) That the ILA was segregated and undemocratic did not help it gain favor amongst Philadelphia longshoremen.

The IWW and Local 8 grew in Philadelphia because of its success with on the job actions and its bold antiracist stance. It was normal practice for instance to get a job with scabs or non-union longshoremen, then refuse to work until the scabs had joined or been fired. That in a nutshell shows how much power Local 8 had.

Local 8 maintained racial harmony in numerous ways. One was through a rotating leadership system, which specified that the top two leadership positions of the union were filled by one African- American and one white and that those positions were rotated year to year. Another way to make sure that every group was empowered was to make sure that each group was represented in every committee and amongst the delegates. The ethnic groups that made up Local 8 understood that their livelihoods depended on interracial solidarity.

While economics bound them together, shortly after the founding of Local 8 members became bound to each other socially and interacted with and formed strong relationships with each other outside of their work.

What all of this added up to was that very simply, at the apex of their power, Local 8 controlled the Delaware River. That Local 8 did this without ever signing a contract still would shock any modern union person.

Wobbly waterfront during WWI

Local 8 was even stable and powerful enough to ride out the famous government repression of the IWW that began in 1917 with the United States’ entry into the First World War.

Cole argues that the US government’s repression of the IWW in Philadelphia was not because the government actually believed that the IWW was aiding the Germans but because the government wanted an excuse to destroy the IWW. It is almost funny how disingenuous the government was being at this time while many Philadelphia-based Wobbly seamen were being killed by German U-Boats and many Philadelphia Wobblies were either not against the war or even for it, such as jailed leader Walter Nef. Even as most of Local 8’s leaders, including Ben Fletcher went to jail for several years, Local 8 still held its own, showing that the IWW in Philadelphia was deeper than just their wellknown leaders sitting in jail.

Under Communist attack

Cole explains in detail the effect that the rise of the Communists had on Local 8 and on the IWW as a whole. Cole explains that at the worst possible moment in Local 8’s history, the Communists probably did the most to destroy Local 8 when they accused Local 8 of loading supplies that would be used against the Red Army fighting the Russian Civil War. It was a bogus charge and one that Cole shows to be improbable at best, but one that got Local 8 de-chartered the moment it could least afford it, as it was being attacked by the AFL’s powerful International Longshoremen’s Association, the government and local capitalists.

By the early Twenties, several members of the GEB were Communists and were following the dictates of the Moscow and American Communists. The Communists believed that the proper way to bring about a revolutionary labor movement was to bore from within, not by creating a separate radical labor organization, thus the Communists believed in crushing the IWW. That the Communist influenced- GEB pulled the charter of the Local 8 and thus prevented Benjamin Fletcher (an anti-Communist) from being elected to the GEB, does not speak well of Communist foresight. At this moment the government and Communist-supported ILA managed to finally regain a foothold in Philadelphia thus destroying the longshoremen’s democratic unionism and later their interracial unionism.

One of Cole’s regrets is that he never got to speak with a member of Local 8. However, Cole uncovered an impressive range of sources from interviews with Philadelphia longshoremen who were members of the IWW and later the ILA, military intelligence files and the like. By using the writings of A. Phillip Randolph and W.E.B. DuBois on the subject of Local 8, Cole puts into context how extraordinary Local 8 was and how nationally prominent they were. If and when Benjamin Fletcher becomes a figure seen in school text books (as he has become in several African-American history textbooks), it will probably be in large part thanks to Cole’s scholarship.

Using Philadelphia as an example, Cole argues very convincingly that the government repression argument for the decline of the IWW is not exactly true, but instead it was a combination, at least in Philadelphia, of government repression, the government, and Communist- backed International Longshoremen’s Association, and increased racial tension, all coming together during the birth of the Communist movement in the United States. If that sounds complex, that is because it is complex, at least a lot more complex and credible than some other major historians’ arguments on the IWW.

Because of the book’s focus on race, Wobblies on the Waterfront will be relevant in the US for many years to come, as race and racism remain prominent problems. Because it is well written, because it argues an alternative view of the IWW and because it revolves around many still pertinent issues, Cole’s books is one of the few “must-read” books on the IWW and labor history in general to come out recently.

Originally appeared in the Industrial Worker (December 2007/January 2008)