William E. Trautmann
William E. Trautmann (also William Trautmann , or William Ernst Trautmann , born July 1, 1869 in Grahamstow , New Zealand ; † November 18, 1940 in Los Angeles , California ), lived in New Zealand, Germany, Poland, but most of his life in the USA. He was a brewery worker, trade unionist, newspaper editor, author, public speaker, and senior member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
The unified industrial union
Trautmann can be seen as an important source of ideas for the US trade union movement. Through numerous brochures, speeches and through his organizational activities, he spread the idea of the industrial union in the USA (as opposed to the predominant form of organization based on occupational groups and professional guilds, the trade unions) and linked them to the Industrial Workers of the World with a revolutionary program. After the IWW largely disappeared in the 1930s, the idea of the industrial union was pursued by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
The background of the militant unity of the entire working class (one big union) propagated by Trautmann was the devastating experience that important strikes were lost because various professional unions existed within a company, so that in the event of a conflict, workers from regional union bosses as well as from the business side against each other could be played out. The industrial union follows the logic of "one company, one union"; it does not classify workers according to occupation, but according to the industries for which they work. So a locksmith who works in a mine would be in the miners' union. And the drivers of a brewery would be in the brewery union, not the drivers union.
Family, childhood and youth
Trautmann's father Edmund was a German gold digger who had taken part in the great gold rush of 1849 in California and married an American there. Together they moved on to New Zealand, where William Ernest was born in 1869 in the gold rush town of Grahamstow on New Zealand's North Island. After his father died in a mine accident in May 1874, the mother and her now four children traveled to see relatives of the man in Germany. There, William was left as the elder in an orphanage, and his mother and siblings moved to New York.
At the age of 14, Trautmann began an apprenticeship in the brewery of a distant relative. It was here that his trade union and social revolutionary awareness was stirred. As a journeyman in Dresden, he became conspicuous because he railed against child labor in bottling. As a beer brewer journeyman, he roamed through Eastern Europe and made it to Odessa .
From the brewery union to the IWW
In 1891 he was expelled from Germany as a dangerous radical on the basis of Bismarck's socialist laws and ended up in Springfield / Massachusetts (USA), where he joined the US brewery union, the "United Brewery Workers' Union". This was founded in 1886 during a spectacular strike in the Jackson brewery in Cincinnati / Ohio and until 1903 communicated almost exclusively in German.
Trautmann worked from 1900 to 1905 as an editor for the Milwaukee-based German-language "Brauer-Zeitung" of his union.
On June 27, 1905, he was elected secretary to the founding assembly of the Industrial Workers of the World ; as early as 1904 he was one of the six people who secretly planned and prepared the establishment of the IWW.
As the organizer of the IWW, Trautmann traveled mainly to the industrial centers of the US east coast in the following years. He appeared as IWW organizer and speaker at two labor disputes that have a prominent position in the history of class struggle in the USA: the strike of the Pressed Steel Car Company ( US Steel ) in Mc Kees Rocks (near Pittsburgh / Pennsylvania ) in 1909 and the strike of textile workers in Lawrence / Massachusetts in 1912, which achieved international fame as the "Bread and Roses Strike".
The first version of the manifesto One Big Union came from Trautmann's pen in 1912, the declaration of principles of the IWW that is still valid and published today (in an expanded and supplemented form), as well as a model for the industrial classification and organization of the working population, which has become known as Trautmann's Wheel .
In 1913 he joined a split from the IWW, led by the socialist Daniel De Leon and headquartered in Detroit, hence the name "Detroit IWW". This organization was renamed Workers' International Industrial Union in 1915 and disbanded in 1925. Between 1914 and 1916, Trautmann traveled through the USA as an organizer for this group. Then his track was lost.
In 1922 his novel "Riot" (also known under the title "Hammers of Hell") was published, which deals with the events of the McKees Rocks Strike in 1909. In 1938 he wrote his autobiography Fifty Years War , which, however, remained unknown because it could not find a publisher.
literature
- Anonymous: The Founding Convention of the IWW - Proceedings , Merit Publishers, New York 1969. Library of Congress Catalog Number 70-85538
- Jay Miller, Mark Derby: William E. Trautmann, New Zealand Wobbly , Industrial Worker No. 1689, page 5, IWW, Philadelphia PA., Nov. 2006.
- Jay Miller: Soldier of the Class War: The Life and Writing of William E. Trautmann , Wayne State University, 2000.
- Heiner Stuhlfauth: The wandering beer brewer: William E. Trautmann - a German immigrant who gave impetus to the American labor movement in Holger Marcks + Matthias Seiffert (ed.): The great strikes - episodes from the class struggle , Unrast-Verlag, Münster 2008, p. 25-26. ISBN 978-3-89771-473-1
- William E. Trautmann: One big union; an outline of possible industrial organization of the working class, with chart , Charles H. Kerr, Chicago 1912.
- William E. Trautmann, Peter Hagboldt: Riot , Chicago Labor Printing, Chicago 1922.
- William E. Trautmann, EG Flynn, Walker C. Smith: Direct Action + Sabotage , Charles H. Kerr, Chicago 1997.
- Fred W. Thompson + John Bekken: The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First 100 Years , IWW, Cincinnati 2006. ISBN 978-0-917124-02-0
- Paul Boyer (Ed.): The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Business, Labor, and Economic History: 2-Volume Set (Oxford Encyclopedias of American History) , Oxford University Press, New York, 2013, pp. 323, 324.
Web links
- Scope & Contents . Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor & Urban Affairs, archived from the original onOctober 10, 2008; accessed on September 21, 2014(English, original website no longer available).
Individual evidence
- ^ The Structure of the Industrial System . Industrial Workers of the World , November 25, 2003, archived from the original on August 7, 2007 ; accessed on September 21, 2014 (English, original website no longer available).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Trautmann, William E. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Trautmann, William; Trautmann, Wilhelm Ernst |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Brewery worker, trade unionist, newspaper editor, author, speaker |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 1, 1869 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Grahamstow , New Zealand |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 18, 1940 |
| Place of death | Los Angeles , California |