Our old labor leaders, who worked with the International Workers of the World (IWW) Wobblies, had names that represented the world. Names like Vincent St. John, Big Bill Haywood, Joe Hill aka Joseph Hillstrom, Ralph Chaplin, the Magon brothers, Frank Little, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Joe Ettor, and Arturo Giovannitti. These people were the shock troops of labor. The IWW’s weakness was that they really liked to fight better than they, the Wobblies, liked planning, negotiating or politicking. The IWW ideas were the anarcho-syndicalist ideas that had stirred France a little earlier with its methods and shibboleths (sabotage)—even the wooden shoe is a symbol of sabotage. The IWW membership was an American mixture with a large percentage of foreign-born, who were the most politically awakened. It was a conflict of the bloodiest kind that kept the IWW together. It existed for the sole purpose of making the first breaches in the resistance of entrenched industry. The IWW’s greatest single con...
This blog is a quick read about concerns, whether local or international, facing union and non-union workers.