Towards a Global History of the Early IWW

December 15th, 2008

Founded in Chicago in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World is one of the most radical labor unions in U.S. history and occupies an important place in the history of organized labor in the early twentieth century U.S.  As implied by its name, the I.W.W. was and still is a transnational organization.  Many members claimed to have no nationality and denounced the concepts of nations in general.  Its primary organizing principle were industrial unions, not national sub-organizations.  The vast majority of historical writings on IWW focus on its history in the U.S. and the few that look at the IWW outside the U.S. are still situated in the context of a national history.  Because of the transnational nature of the organization itself this approach is inadequate.  To fully understand the IWW's history a global or transnational approach much be undertaken.

Virtually all works purporting to be a general history of the I.W.W. are histories of it in the U.S and, in some cases, incorrectly assume that the IWW outside the U.S. simply imitated what happened within the U.S.  Patrick Renshaw's The Wobblies (1967) devotes a twenty-one page postscript to the IWW outside the U.S., which is more than most works give.  Melvyn Dubofsky's classic We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (1969) is almost exclusively concerned with the IWW in the U.S., discussing international influences only when they had an impact on the American IWW.  Even the IWW's current official history, The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First 100 Years by Fred W. Thompson and Jon Bekken (2006), focuses primarily on the U.S., although it does sprinkle references to IWW activities outside the U.S. through its narrative.

As the IWW was not limited to the United States any general history of it must take into account its activities outside the U.S.  A global or transnational approach must be taken because the IWW itself was a transnational organization spanning borders.  Doing so reveals aspects of the organization that are otherwise missed by restricting the focus to a single nation.  To illustrate this I will use a combination of comparisons and a focus on international connections to examine three specific aspects of the IWW: its worldwide spread, repression of the union, and its relationship with other labor unions.

Spread of the IWW

The IWW crossed borders from the moment it was founded.  The Western Federation of Miners, the largest of its founding unions, had already established several locals in western Canada by 1905.  The IWW's founding convention included four Canadian delegates, two from Montreal and two from mining districts in British Columbia.[1]  It spread beyond North American through three overlapping methods: written communication, migration, and the Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union.

Written communication was the least common way the IWW spread, but was important in some cases.  Australian workers first heard of the IWW through hostile accounts of it written by members of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and published in Australian labor newspapers.  Socialists were more receptive to the IWW and their newspapers published more positive accounts of it.  Beginning in 1907 they formed IWW clubs, propaganda groups espousing IWW ideals and linked to the Socialist Labor Party.[2]  Similar propaganda clubs were formed in England shortly after the IWW's founding.[3]  Wobblies in the U.S. mailed newspapers printed in various languages to other countries in the hope of spreading their ideas and organization.[4]  Spanish language newspapers helped spread the organization to northern Mexico.[5]

The movement of its members around the world was a more common way the IWW spread across the globe.  A large portion of IWW members, both in North America and elsewhere, were migratory workers.  They worked in industries where the need for labor fluctuated greatly and so moved from job to job (and location to location) frequently.  Sometimes their movements crossed borders, at which point they were labeled “immigrants” or “aliens.”  The movement of migratory Wobblies further spread the organization across North America and to northern Mexico.  By 1912 the IWW had established five metal workers branches in northern Mexico.[6]

The IWW spread along the circuits of migration connecting much of the world in the early twentieth century.  Migration between New Zealand and Australia resulted in the spread of the IWW to New Zealand by 1910.[7]  Immigration between Canada, Australia, South Africa and England spread the organization through much of the British Empire.  For example, IWW organizer Tom Glynn was born in Ireland but, at different points in the early twentieth century, engaged in IWW organizing in South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States.[8]

Although most national histories of the IWW acknowledge the important role of immigrants and the migratory nature of much of its membership, a national approach only shows a subset of the IWW and risks overlooking important global interconnections.  For example, many Wobblies in New Zealand left the country, often migrating to Australia, after the defeat of the 1913 waterfront strike.[9]  New Zealand courts sentenced Tom Barker, an IWW organizer heavily involved in the strike, to three months in jail for sedition during the strike.[10]  He later migrated to Australia where, during the Great War, he wrote and published one of the best known anti-war posters in Australian history.  It read:

TO ARMS!!

Capitalists, Parsons, Politicians,

Landlords, Newspaper Editors, and

Other Stay-at-home Patriots.

YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU IN

THE TRENCHES!

WORKERS

FOLLOW YOUR MASTERS!!

The prosecution of Barker for discouraging enrollment in the armed forces, stemming from this poster, made the IWW famous in Australia for its anti-war stance and is a key part of the Australian IWW's history.  Barker argued that he didn't violate the law because his poster was an attempt to raise recruitment levels by persuading the wealthy to join the military.  The judge did not agree with Barker's argument and fined him £50, but Barker's conviction was overturned on appeal due to a technicality.  These types of transnational interconnections can be missed or, at best, truncated by strictly keeping our analysis within national borders.

The IWW's Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union no. 510 was at least as important as migration in spreading the IWW around the world, and further shows the transnational nature of the union.  The MTW was an oceanic union that organized workers on ships and in ports who were involved in seaborne shipping or other water-based transportation.  Borders were almost meaningless to it.  The MTW established IWW branches in ports across the Atlantic and Pacific, including locals in Ecuador, Uruguay, and Buena Aires.[11]  Many of the regional administrations organized around the world were established by the Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union.[12]  Beginning with MTW locals in port cities, the IWW established branches in nineteen Chilean cities.  Most were part of the Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union or the Construction Workers Industrial Union.[13]  The MTW also spread the IWW to eastern Mexico, where it gained a large following in Tampico, a stronghold of anarcho-syndicalism.[14]

Repression

In addition to giving us a better understanding of the spread of the IWW, a global view can also shed light on the repression of the IWW.  A comparative approach is particularly useful here.  Nation-states are more important when studying the repression of the IWW than its spread not because our analysis should be limited to national borders but because nation-states were the primary entities engaging in violent repression of the IWW.  The Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union survived longer than most other industrial unions in the IWW because it was spread out across numerous different nations and so attacks by a single or a handful of nation-states were unlikely to undermine it.[15]

There is a clear difference between the repression of the IWW in Latin America and in English speaking countries.  In the United States and much of the British empire the most intense period of repression was during World War One.  This was not the case in Latin America because large portions of Latin America stayed neutral, and those that did join the war did not play as large a role in it as the U.S. and British empires.  Mexico and Chile had the largest contingents of Latin American Wobblies and both nations did not participate in the war.

A comparison between the repression of the IWW in Australia and the United States sheds light on the reasons for the high degree of repression directed against it during World War One.  In Australia the IWW consistently applied its internationalist principles and vigorously opposed the war from the start.  They argued that all wars between nations were wars in which workers were asked to kill each other in order to profit the capitalist class.  The IWW became one of the best known anti-war groups in Australia and it shared responsibility for defeating a 1916 referendum authorizing conscription.  In contrast to the Australian Wobblies, the IWW in the United States took a more muted position on the war.  They feared that a major campaign against the war would result in greater repression directed against the IWW and distract the union from organizing workers.[16]

In Australia the government subjected the IWW to a substantial degree of repression.  The state harassed, fined, and imprisoned members for their anti-war activity.  In 1916 a conspiracy of police officers framed twelve prominent Wobblies for arson, resulting in long sentences.  In 1917 the government outlawed the IWW, imposing six months forced labor as the penalty for membership.[17]

In the United States repression of the IWW was more severe.  Many members of the IWW were lynched, tortured, and/or imprisoned for years.  During a copper strike in Butte, Montana masked vigilantes kidnapped IWW organizer Frank Little, beat him, tied him to the back of their car, dragged him through the street to a railroad trestle, and then hung him from the trestle.  In Bisbee, Arizona police and company militias rounded up IWW members, forced them into a train, and dumped them in the middle of the desert.  Many states passed criminal syndicalism laws, which effectively outlawed the IWW with a punishment of up to ten years in prison and a $5000 fine.  Violent mobs of vigilante patriots, often working in coordination with local business and/or political leaders, assaulted Wobblies and their union halls.  On a national level, the espionage and sedition acts outlawed all opposition to the war and were used to suppress the IWW, the Socialist Party USA, and other radical groups.  The federal government used the army to break many IWW strikes.  At 2 pm central standard time on September 5th, 1917 the Justice Department simultaneously raided IWW facilities across the country.  Between 1917 and the close of 1920 thousands of Wobblies and other radicals were arrested and sentenced to years in jail or deported.[18]

The fact that Wobblies in Australia faced less repression than Wobblies in the United States, even though Wobblies in Australia did far more to interfere with the war effort than Wobblies in the United States, reinforces arguments that the motive for attacking the IWW during World War One was not its opposition to the war.  The war was a useful excuse to smash the union.  If their opposition to the war effort was the primary motive for attacking the union then repression of the union should have been stronger in locations where the IWW more vigorously opposed the war, but this was not the case.

This conclusion is not entirely missed by national histories of the IWW, but a global comparison provides further supporting evidence.  Verity Burgmann argues in Revolutionary Industrial Unionism that the Australian government attacked the IWW because its activities undermined the loyalty of many labor unions to the labor party.  The labor party was the ruling party during the war and it used the war as an excuse to destroy the IWW in an effort to prevent it from further undermining union loyalty.  While there probably is an element of truth to Burgmann's argument, the repression of the IWW in many different countries all during World War One implies that there was a broader transnational reason for elites to want to destroy the union.  Although the Wobblies have never been nearly large enough to seriously endanger the capitalist system, by World War One they were large enough to antagonize political and business elites.  This could take the form of undermining unionist loyalty to the government, but it could also take the form of unionizing copper miners or waging lumber strikes.

The U.S. stands out as subjecting the IWW to a very high degree of repression.  Only in Chile did the IWW face a similar degree of violence.  In 1920 the Chilean state unleashed an intense wave of repression against all unions and radical organizations, similar to the 1919-1920 Red Scare in the U.S.  In 1927 a coup brought a military dictatorship to power which waged war on all opposition and ultimately vanquished the IWW in Chile.[19]

Relations with Other Labor Unions

A comparative approach can also be useful for understanding the IWW's relationship with other labor unions.  In North America the IWW had an intensely hostile relationship with its primary competitors, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada (TLC).  The IWW focused on building its own independent unions which competed with AFL/TLC unions.  They organized regions and workers, including the western part of the continent and unskilled workers, that the AFL/TLC neglected or considered unorganizable.[20]

This was not the case in Australia and New Zealand.  A much higher proportion of the paid workforce belonged to labor unions in Australia than in North America.  As a result many Wobblies were members of both the IWW and another union.  They formed a radical wing of many labor unions, rather than founding their own independent unions (although the later was their eventual goal).

Australian Wobblies focused much more on criticizing electoral strategies than their North American and Chilean counterparts.  In North America and Chile electoral politics were largely irrelevant to the IWW because most of its members weren't allowed to vote due to their failure to meet gender, racial, residency, citizenship, literacy, or property requirements.  The IWW in North America and Chile took a largely non-political position as a result.  In Australia many more workers were allowed to vote and, further, there was a large labor party which was sometimes the ruling party.  Consequently, Australian Wobblies tended to be anti-political rather than non-political and put considerable energy trying to persuade labor unions not to back a political party.  They were intensely hostile towards the labor party, pointing out that it actually did very little for workers and when it was in power it continued to send the police to attack strikers just as other parties did.  In the United States it was not unusual for a Wobbly to also be a member of the Socialist Party, but this was not at all the case in Australia.[21]

In Mexico, the IWW did build independent unions and was friendly towards some rivals, hostile towards others.  The IWW had a friendly, cooperative relationship with the anarcho-syndicalist House of the World Worker and subsequent General Confederation of Labor.  It was hostile towards CROM, the state-backed moderate union intended to replace radical unions with a domesticated one.  CROM was allied with the AFL, but was forced to take a position to the left of the AFL due to competition from the IWW and anarcho-syndicalist unions.  In order to prevent members from defecting to its rivals, CROM pressured the AFL to support the release of IWW political prisoners in the United States, which complicated diplomacy between Mexico and the U.S.[22]

In Chile the IWW had a generally friendly relationship with other unions because the labor movement in Chile was founded by anarchists.  Anarcho-syndicalists generally considered the IWW too centralized, but regarded it as an ally.  After the founding of the Communist International the Wobblies competed with the Communist-controlled Workers Federation of Chile.[23]

Historians have noted that the IWW foreshadowed some aspects of the Congress of Industrial Organizations but the IWW had an even greater impact on unions outside the U.S.  Both the CIO and the IWW were organized along industrial lines and both used militant tactics like the sit-down strike.  However, the CIO was a much more top down organization and was no where near as radical as the IWW.  In South Africa the IWW was established and died relatively quickly, but in 1917 a similar organization, the Industrial Workers of Africa, was founded.  The IWA was organized along similar lines as the IWW and adopted the same famous preamble as the IWW.[24]  Even the more moderate Industrial and Commercial Workers of Africa, founded in 1921, used a modified version of the IWW's preamble.[25]  After World War One in Australia many unionists, inspired by the IWW's one big union ideal, advocated merging all unions into one big union.  In 1919 many unions held conferences to merge together and found the Industrial Union of Australia, which adopted an old version of the IWW preamble as its own preamble.[26]  In Canada the IWW was greatly weakened by the 1913-1914 depression and was destroyed by state repression during World War One.  Later in the war, radical workers founded a new union on similar IWW principles, the One Big Union.  At one point the OBU had locals in the U.S. as well as Canada.[27]  The IWW thus played an important role in the global history of organized labor by influencing so many unions.

Bibliography

Burgmann, Verity Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia. Cambridge University Press. 1995.

Cain, Frank. The Wobblies at War: a history of the IWW and the Great War in Australia. Richmond, Victoria: Spectrum Publishing, 1993.

Caulfield, Norman. Mexican Workers and the. State: From the Porfiriato to NAFTA. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1998.

DeShazo, Peter. Urban Workers and Labor Unions in Chile, 1902-1927. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1983.

Dubofsky, Melvyn. We Shall Be All: A history of the Industrial Workers of the World. Abridged Edition. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Industrial Workers of the World. IWW Chronology. Accessed 15 December, 2008. http://www.iww.org/culture/chronology/chronology3.shtml

Leier, Mark. Where the Fraser River Flows The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1990.

Renshaw, Patrick. The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1967.

Scott, Jack. Plunderbund & Proletariat. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1975.

Steiner. Peter. The Industrial Workers of the World in Aotearoa. Wellington, NZ: Rebel Press, 2007.

Thompson, Fred W and Bekken, Jon. The Industrial Workers oj the World: Its First 100 Years. Cincinnati, OH: Industrial Workers of the World, 2006.

Thorpe, Wayne. "The IWW and the Search for an International Policy, 1905-1935.” Anarcho-Syndicalist Review #42/43 (Winter 2005-6): 13-18.

Turner, Ian. Sydney's Burning. Melbourne: Griffin Press, 1967.

Van der Walt, Lucien. The IWW, Revolutionary Syndicalism, and Working Class Struggle in South Africa. Braamfontein, South Africa: Zablaza Books, undated.

Endnotes

[1]    Mark Leier, Where the Fraser River Flows: The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1990), 3.

[2]    Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11-15

[3]    Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1967), 275-276.

[4]    Fred W. Thompson and Jon Bekken, The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First 100 Years (Cincinnati, OH: Industrial Workers of the World, 2006), 42.

[5]    Norman Caulfield, Mexican Workers and the State: From the Porfiriato to NAFTA (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1998), 23.

[6]    Ibid., 23.

[7]    Peter Steiner, The Industrial Workers of the World in Aotearoa (Wellington: Rebel Press, 2007), 2-3.

[8]    Burgman, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 36.

[9]    Steiner, The Industrial Workers of the World in Aotearoa, 7.

[10]  Steiner, The Industrial Workers of the World in Aotearoa, 5-6.

[11]  Caulfield, Mexican Workers and the State, 23 and Industrial Workers of the World, IWW Chronology, Accessed 15 December, 2008 http://www.iww.org/culture/chronology/chronology3.shtml.

[12]  Wayne Thorpe, “The IWW and the Search for an International Policy,” Anarcho-Syndicalist Review #42-43 (Winter 2005): 18.

[13]  Peter DeShazo, Urban Workers and Labor Unions in Chile, 1902-1927 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 155.

[14]  Caulfield, Mexican Workers and the State, 22-30.

[15]  Ibid., 23.

[16]  Frank Cain, The Wobblies at War: a History of the IWW and the Great War in Australia (Richmond, Victoria: Spectrum Publishing, 1993), 169-200; Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 181-202.

[17]  Cain, The Wobblies at War, 201-273; Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 203-228.

[18]  Thompson and Bekken, The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First 100 Years, 105-120; Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A history of the Industrial Workers of the World (Abridged Edition, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 215-254.

[19]  DeShazo, Urban Workers and Labor Unions in Chile, 1902-1927, 179-242.

[20]  All general histories of the IWW in North America cover this.  See, for example, Dubofsky, Thompson and Bekken, Scott, or Renshaw.

[21]  Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 143-158.

[22]  Caulfield, Mexican Workers and the State, 4-53.

[23]  DeShazo, Urban Workers and Labor Unions in Chile, 1902-1927, 206-208, 213-214, 228.

[24]  Lucien Van der Walt, The IWW, Revolutionary Syndicalism and Working Class Struggle in South Africa, 1910-1921 (Braamfontein, South Africa: Zabalaza Books, undated):  3, 6.

[25]  Van der Walt, The IWW, Revolutionary Syndicalism and Working Class Struggle in South Africa, 7.

[26]  Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 252-261.

[27]  Thompson and Bekken, The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First 100 Years, 127, 143.