Industrial Workers of the World
| Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) |
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|---|---|
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| legal form | labor union |
| founding | 1905 |
| founder | William Dudley Haywood |
| Seat | Chicago (USA) |
| motto | An attack on one is an attack on everyone! |
| Action space | international |
| Website | www.iww.org |
The Industrial Workers of the World ( IWW , whose members are often referred to as wobblies ) are a worldwide unionwhose influence is concentrated in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. The IWW has around 5000 members worldwide, 3045 in the USA in 2019; Great Britain had the largest regional structure in Europe with around 2000 members in 2018. In the German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg) there is an independent section of the IWW, which was founded in December 2006 in Cologne (IWW-GLAMROC - German Language Area Members Regional Committee). It has (as of December 2015) general membership branches in Berlin, Bochum / Ruhr area, Bremen, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Kassel, Cologne, Leipzig, Rostock, Vienna and Jura-Alpen-Mittelland. IWW has also existed in Austria since 2009.
etymology
The exact origin of the name Wobbly is unknown, there are several theories.
history
The union has "a long and aggressive history" ( Wall Street Journal ). Founded at a congress on June 27, 1905 in Chicago by delegates from various individual trade unions, socialists , anarchists and militant labor leaders , in the presence of well-known activists such as Mary Harris "Mother" Jones and William Dudley "Big Bill" Haywood , this union differed on two points essentially from the organizations widespread up to then:
On the one hand, it organized in particular those social groups neglected by the traditional labor movement : women , unskilled workers, migrant workers , Americans of Asian descent and African-Americans . In addition, the IWW was founded as an industrial union and was therefore fundamentally different from the AFL , which at that time was still mainly organized in trade unions . One of the strengths of the IWW was and is the organization of workers as a class rather than in rival professional groups. Furthermore, the IWW always saw direct actions as an important, if not undisputed, means in labor disputes .
The union played an influential to decisive role in numerous spectacular strikes in the USA at the beginning of the 20th century . The first to make them known was a miners' strike in Goldfield, Nevada . There she worked with the Western Federation of Miners . In addition to the miners, she succeeded in organizing large sections of the workforce in the then booming gold rush town. The city administration also sympathized with the union. Their influence could only be broken by the use of federal troops, which John Sparks , the then governor of Nevada, called for help. Increasing repression during and after the First World War as well as the growing influence of the Communist Party of the USA made it a marginal phenomenon after several divisions from the mid-1920s. At its organizational peak in 1923, the IWW had 100,000 members, and fewer than a hundred in the late 1950s.
The IWW experienced a renewed, initially modest, upswing in the USA through the civil rights movement and the youth and student revolts of the 1960s. Another wave followed from 1986, when the left rediscovered the social issue after policies of the Reagan administration worsened the legal situation of the working population. Since the mid-2000s, the number of members has been increasing slowly according to its own information.
The council-communist General Workers 'Union of Germany of the 1920s and its split off, the General Workers' Union - unified organization, can be regarded as a related organization in German-speaking countries .
Texts and actions such as legendary strikes from the heyday of the Wobblies at the beginning of the 20th century were also disseminated within the undogmatic left from the 1970s through publications of some operaism- inspired magazines such as the Karlsruher Stadtzeitung and Wildcat , but without the organizational ideas of the IWW in particular to be observed.
Historic IWW groups in Germany - The International Seaman's Association
Although isolated and limited to a few port cities, there were IWW groups in (then) German coastal cities during the Weimar period. The "Internationale Seemanns-Bund" (a member organization of the IWW Industrial Union 510) in Gdansk and Stettin stood out.
Even before the First World War, there were lively contacts between the Hamburg left-wing communists Fritz Wolffheim and Heinrich Laufenberg at the IWW. The writer and editor Wolffheim had already published the IWW organ “Forward of the Pacific Coast” in 1912/13 in San Francisco .
After the First World War, the IWW carried out brisk propaganda activities in port cities in the North and Baltic Seas. There is a German-language IWW leaflet from 1919, which calls for participation in the newly emerging “General Workers' Unions”. The weekly newspaper "Der Klassenkampf" (editor: John Alexander, Chicago) is distributed in port cities in northern Germany around 1919/1920. Police files of the time mention distributions of IWW printing works in Bremerhaven, Hamburg, Cuxhaven and Bremen as well as contacts to Hanover and Braunschweig. IWW members tried through their propaganda in the German port cities to win over emigrants to the USA - they distributed German, English, Polish and Russian agitation material as well as to force an expansion of the IWW to Germany in the opposite direction.
From 1922 onwards there were efforts to set up local IWW groups in German port cities, which were particularly successful in Gdansk and Stettin. For the first time there were relatively stable groups that had their own club halls. In Hamburg there was an IWW group around the boatswain August Lemke for a short time . The organizer of the Pomeranian sea and port workers was the machinist and explained anarchist Otto Rieger , who had previously been chairman and international secretary of the syndicalist-oriented trade union Deutscher Seemansbund (DSB, later renamed Deutscher Schiffahrtsbund ).
The historian Hartmut Rübner reports that in the autumn of 1923, Rieger, on behalf of 1000 seafarers, announced that the newly founded “International Seamen's Union” would join the IWW. As early as July 1922, the “Seemanns-Union” carried out a strike of 400 machinists and showmen in the port of Szczecin, which - with the reinforcement of the AAU and AAU-E unions - managed to detain around 100 ships in the port for several days. At the turn of the year 1923/24 another strike took place, in which - according to Rieger - by February 8, 1924 exactly 124 ships with a total crew of 2,000 seamen could be arrested.
The German section of the IWW in Stettin existed until its dissolution in 1933 by National Socialism. In the years 1930–1932 the newspaper Der Marine-Arbeiter - organ of the German section of the IWW appeared there .
The Starbucks campaign
In the USA, the IWW has had an organizing success since 2004 in an area that was previously considered unrelated and difficult to organize. By autumn 2006, the employees of six branches of the world's largest coffee house chain Starbucks in New York City had joined the IWW Starbucks Workers Union . The IWW Starbucks Workers Union claims to have achieved several successes, including wage increases of almost 25% as well as improvements in occupational safety and an increase in guaranteed weekly hours.
In September 2006, the Starbucks Workers Union expanded to Chicago, where the majority of employees in another branch (on Logan Square ) identified themselves as active union members. Additional branches in Rockville, Maryland, and Grand Rapids, Michigan followed in 2007. The Wobblies called in response to the dismissal of four IWW members by Starbucks in New York City, which, according to IWW, was based on anti-union intentions in August 2006 launched a global boycott of Starbucks aimed at enforcing the reinstatement of terminated colleagues and preventing the company from taking any further action against unionization.
New York-based IWW also filed a lawsuit against Starbucks with the National Labor Relations Authority (NLRB), which was approved in April 2007. The lengthy process began in August 2007 and was not over at the beginning of 2008. He helped the IWW's activities against Starbucks to get regular coverage in respected newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times .
In addition to the German-speaking section of the IWW, FAU took part in a global day of action against Starbucks on July 5, 2008, and carried out various campaigns in more than 15 German cities.
Principles
The preamble to the IWW statutes has been changed and supplemented variously since 1905. Its current version in 2007 is in German translation:
The working class and the exploiting class have nothing in common. There can be no peace as long as hunger and hardship are found among millions of workers and the few who make up the exploiting class have all the good things in life.
The struggle between these classes must continue until the workers of the world organize themselves as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system and live in harmony with the earth.
We believe that the centralization of the management of industry into fewer and fewer hands makes the branch unions unable to keep up with the increasing power of the exploiting class. The branch unions promote a situation in which one group of workers against another group of workers who are employed in the same branch are pitted against each other in wage battles. In addition, the branch unions trick workers into believing that the working class has interests in common with their employers.
These relationships can be changed, and the interests of the working class can only be defended by an organization that is structured so that all workers in any industry, or if necessary, all industries stop working whenever there is a strike or lockout somewhere takes place in some department. An attack on one is an attack on all.
Instead of the conservative motto: "A fair wage for good work" we have to write the revolutionary slogan: "Abolish the wage system" on our flag.
The historical mandate of the working class is the abolition of capitalism. The army of wage laborers must organize not only for daily struggles with capitalists, but also to maintain production after capitalism is overthrown. By organizing as an industrial union, we shape the structures of the new society in the shell of the old.
The ROC (Regional Organization Committee) of the IWW for the German-speaking area adopted rules of procedure in December 2006, the preamble of which is in line with the preamble of the IWW, but sets its own priorities and leaves out the idea of the historical mandate of the working class . In practice, this is of little relevance, since all IWW members are in a single organization worldwide. However, critics criticize the unclean translation.
philosophy
The IWW represents an independent strand in the history of ideas and organization of the labor movement, which is known as unionism . It sees itself as the “One Big Union”, a union of the entire working class on an operational / economic basis. Although unionism has incorporated elements of both anarchism , revolutionary syndicalism and undogmatic readings of Marxism , members of the IWW have always included workers with the most varied of worldviews.
The IWW rejects both the leadership role of a party over the working class and its trade unions, as it was propagated and practiced by Lenin and his successors, as well as an operational / parliamentary division of labor between trade unions and workers 'parties, such as the social democratic German-speaking workers' movement before Made World War I the rule. In the opinion of the IWW, parties and their ideologies tend to divide working people rather than bring them any benefit. Nevertheless, IWW members are free to belong to a party, as long as they do not occupy a functionary position in it.
The IWW differs from anarcho-syndicalist organizations both in its greater ideological openness and in its organizational structure through a much less federalist, i.e. more centralized organizational structure.
sabotage
The form of sabotage adopted by the French labor movement proved to be a particularly effective means of the Wobblies in the class struggle . By this the Wobblies understood the impairment of a company's production measured by the quality and number of goods and services produced. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who published a widely read pamphlet on sabotage in 1916, defines the form of struggle as “the conscious withdrawal of industrial efficiency by the workers”, a broad spectrum that begins with “ following the rules ”, collective strolling around or partying sick together and up can be increased to the deliberate production of rejects or the destruction of machines.
The sabotage pushed against the strike from about 1,912 seen in the foreground of the IWW propaganda, partly because the union by brutal attacks by state organs, vigilantes , private security agencies (such as the Pinkerton -Agentur) and lynch mobs massively in a legal and public development in the sense the United States Constitution was prevented.
The question of sabotage represents a break between the IWW and the Socialist Party of America , especially since the press stylized the IWW in the run-up to and in the course of the USA's entry into the First World War as a “red danger”, as “un-American” traitors to the fatherland, even as an outpost of the German Empire. (The IWW had consistently rejected the war as - in their opinion - a senseless mutual slaughter of workers in the interests of competing capitalist states.) The Socialist Party distanced itself from IWW members who publicly advocated the idea of "sabotage".
In the course of the First World War , the meaning of the term "sabotage" changed through intensive press coverage to an act of terrorism or intelligence that was intended to hit the enemy's military installations or supply facilities in the country and consciously accepted fatalities. However, as a consistently anti-national and universal labor movement, the IWW had no connection whatsoever. In addition, she always rejected the threat to health and life as a means or byproduct of the class struggle.
Known wobblies
The best-known member of the IWW is the linguist and intellectual Noam Chomsky , along with guitarist and singer Tom Morello and martial artist Jeff Monson in the union. By far the most prominent member of the IWW in the 20th century was folk singer and agitator Joe Hill , who was executed in Salt Lake City in 1915 . Numerous folk songs come from him , which are summarized in the IWW's Little Red Songbook . Example: bread and roses
In addition to Joe Hill , Emma Goldman and Mary Harris “Mother” Jones , well-known personalities who were or are members of the IWW include: Charles Ashleigh , Louis Adamic , Judi Bari , Ralph Chaplin , Vere Gordon Childe , James Connolly , Carlos Cortez , Eugene V. Debs , Dorothy Day , Sam Dolgoff , Joseph Ettor , Marie Equi , Ben Fletcher , Elizabeth Gurley Flynn , William Z. Foster , Arturo Giovannitti , David Graeber , Big Bill Haywood , Frank Little , Heinrich Laufenberg , Daniel De Leon , Ricardo Flores Magón , Paul Mattick , Lucy Parsons , Utah Phillips , Franklin Rosemont , Gary Snyder , T-Bone Slim , Fred W. Thompson , William E. Trautmann , Kurt Gustav Wilckens , Fritz Wolffheim and David Rovics .
literature
- Elizabeth Gurley Flynn : SABOTAGE. The deliberate reduction in industrial efficiency. Trikont-Duisburg Publishing House, Dialog Edition, Duisburg 2016. ISBN 978-3-945634-14-1
- Louis Adamic : Dynamite. History of Class Struggle in the United States (1880–1930). Trikont Verlag, Munich 1974. ISBN 3-920385-66-7
- Anonymous: The Founding Convention of the IWW - Proceedings , Merit Publishers, New York 1969. Library of Congress Catalog Number 70-85538
- Jörg Auberg: Wobbly Rebel. The story of the rediscovered "black cat" . In: Schwarzer Faden , anyway publishing house , Grafenau 4.1987,26 u. 3,1988.28. ISSN 0722-8988 .
- Gisela Bock : The other labor movement in the USA from 1909-1922. The IWW - The Industrial Workers of the World. Trikont Verlag , Munich 1976. ISBN 3-88167-005-X
- Hans Manfred Bock : Syndicalism and Left Communism from 1918–1923 - On the history and sociology of the Free Workers' Union of Germany (Syndicalists), the General Workers' Union of Germany and the Communist Workers' Party of Germany , Meisenheim 1969.
- Paul Buhle, Nicole Schulman: WOBBLIES! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World. Verso, London 2005. ISBN 1-84467-525-4 .
- Daniel Guérin : The American Labor Movement 1867-1967. Suhrkamp Verlag , Frankfurt 1970. ISSN 0422-5821
- Joyce L. Kornbluh: Rebel Voices. To IWW Anthology. Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, Chicago 1988. ISBN 0-88286-120-4 .
- Gabriel Kuhn (ed.): Wobblies. Politics and History of the IWW. Classic of the social revolt , Unrast Verlag, Münster 2019. ISBN 978-3-89771-926-2 .
- Austin Lewis: The Militant Proletariat . Chicago 1911. (PDF; 735 kB)
- Franklin Rosemont : Joe Hill. The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Working Class Counterculture. Charles H. Kerr, Chicago 2003. ISBN 0-88286-264-2 .
- Daniel Rosenberg: The IWW and the Organizing of Asian Workers in the Early 20th Century . In: Labor History. Routledge, Basingstoke 36, 1995, 1. ISSN 0023-656X
- Hartmut Rübner: Freedom and Bread , pages 90-123, Libertad Verlag, Berlin / Cologne 1994. ISBN 3-922226-21-3
- Augustin Souchy : Reign of Terror in America. Impuls Verlag, Bremen 1977. ISBN 3-921833-03-5
- Fred W. Thompson + John Bekken, The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First 100 Years , IWW, Cincinnati 2006. ISBN 978-0-917124-02-0
John Dos Passos the Wobblies has a literary monument in his novel Nineteen Nineteen . Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York 1932, with portraits of Joe Hill , Ben Compton, and Paul Bunyan on pp. 421–461.
In the novel For the Win by Cory Doctorow , gold farmers in computer games, together with other workers in the real economy, found the worldwide union Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web - IWWWW , whose representatives call themselves Webblys and Webblies .
Movie
- The Wobblies (Eng. The Wobblies). Film by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, USA 1979. Length approx. 89 minutes. The film shows the development of the IWW from 1905 to around 1930 using documentary material and interviews with old members of the union. ( on YouTube )
Web links
- Industrial Workers of the World
- IWW in German-speaking countries
- IWW Starbucks Workers Union
- More spirit, fewer customers - the financial crisis in the US is apparently damaging Starbucks' businesses. Union activities also cause problems for the group. Heiner Stuhlfauth in Jungle World , January 24, 2008
- Historical IWW texts in German in the Marxists Internet Archive.
- The folk song "The Popular Wobbly" by T-Bone Slim, played by the Grand Industrial Band of the Cologne IWW, April 30, 2009 in Connection in Cologne-Ehrenfeld
- On the history of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Philadelphia . Mark Richter in conversation with the historian Peter Cole. Sozial.Geschichte Online 19, 2016, pp. 199–214
Individual evidence
- ↑ United States Department of Labor, Office of Labor-Management Standards, File number 070-232. Report ( Memento from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ IWW in German-speaking countries. IWW, accessed November 5, 2017 .
- ^ Homepage of the IWW Regional Group Austria / IWW GMB Austria ( Memento from February 6, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ What is the Origin of the Term Wobbly? IWW website, accessed February 22, 2014 .
- ↑ Kris Maher, Janet Adamy: Do Hot Coffee and 'Wobblies' Go Together? In: The Wall Street Journal. March 21, 2006, accessed January 9, 2019 .
- ^ Howard Zinn : A People's History of the United States . Harper Perennial, New York 2005, ISBN 0-06-083865-5 , pp. 329-330.
- ^ University of Washington, IWW History Project, IWW Yearbook: 1905-1906 ( Memento November 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ University of Washington, IWW History Project, IWW Yearbook: 1907 ( Memento of November 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Goldfield remains a Nevada relic ( Memento from June 1, 2016 in the web archive archive.today )
- ↑ Text of the leaflet, from: KAZ (Hamburg) 1st year (1919), No. 104 . Reprinted in: Marburger Abhandlungen zur Politische Wissenschaft, edited by Wolfgang Abendroth Volume 13, Hans Manfred Bock : Syndicalism and Left Communism from 1918-1923, On the History and Sociology of the Free Workers 'Union of Germany (Syndicalists), the General Workers' Union of Germany and the Communist Workers' Party of Germany, Meisenheim 1969, p. 355 f.
- ^ Colin Moynihan: Icy Day Finds Old Union Outside Modern City Shops. New York Times, accessed April 1, 2013 .
- ^ Reports from the Global Day of Action against Starbucks. Direct action , July 11, 2008, accessed April 1, 2013 .
- ↑ Preamble to the IWW Constitution , accessed September 30, 2008 (free translation)
- ↑ IWW in German-speaking countries (GLAMROC) , accessed January 2, 2016
- ^ "Sabotage - the conscious withdrawal of the workers' industrial efficiency" , Elisabeth Gurley Flynn, IWW Publishing Bureau, Cleveland / Ohio 1916. (Original brochure online or as a pdf download from the Internet Archive Open Source Books)
- ↑ Known members