One Hundred Years of Radical Solidarity
Submitted on Mon, 04/03/2006 - 4:59pm
Note: This is an official Pittsburgh GMB posting. The Branch only authorizes officially recognized news and articles to be posted under the Pittsburgh GMB banner.
One Hundred Years of Radical Solidarity
By FW Kevin Farkas, originally published Thursday, Sep. 15, 2005
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This year the Industrial Workers of the World celebrates its 100th anniversary. With historic and contemporary ties to Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, the IWW is one of the earliest labor organizations to advocate industrial unionism. In 1909, 1912, and 1913 the Wobblies organized strikes with local workers in the steel and tobacco industries. The Pittsburgh General Membership Branch of the IWW will be holding a Centenary celebration in October to commemorate one hundred years of radical solidarity unionism.
It sounds like today...the bulk of the American working class is unorganized. Workers are divided into such narrow organizations that employers just ignore them. The American Federation of Labor is seen as ineffective. The rich are getting richer. The employing and ruling classes are one in the same. All over the world capitalism rules unchecked. Organized labor needs to do something.
One hundred years ago some workers did! In June of 1905, a gathering of about two hundred socialists, anarchists, and radical unionists from all over America held a convention in Chicago, at which the Industrial Workers of the World was organized. Its founders included Big Bill Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners, Daniel De Leon, Eugene V. Debs, Thomas J. Hagerty, Lucy Parsons, Mary Harris Jones ("Mother Jones"), and Ralph Chaplin. Its goal then, as now, was to promotes industrial unionism, where all workers would be organized in solidarity into one union irrespective of race, color, ethnicity or gender.
This year the Industrial Workers of the World celebrates its 100th anniversary. With historic and contemporary ties to Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, the IWW is one of the earliest labor organizations to advocate industrial unionism—organizing workers in their industries such as education, health care, or transportation. Today’s USWA, UMWA, and UAW are all modern unions with historic roots as industrial organizations. However, decades before the great industrial steel, coal, and auto organizing in and around Pittsburgh during the 1930s, the IWW was on the scene educating workers about industrial solidarity and organizing with workers in industries such as tobacco, meat packing, and steel.
The IWW has a significant history in Pittsburgh. In 1909 the IWW helped Slavic workers in McKees Rocks organize a massive strike against the Pressman Steel Car Company and the oppressive State Constabulary brought in to bust the strike. With their emphasis on inclusiveness and solidarity, only the Wobblies seem to have been able to effectively organize the Slavic workers who were mostly divided along ethnic, linguistic, and religious lines. In that same year the IWW helped organize a significant strike with the Sheet and tinplate workers in New Castle, PA. In that same city the IWW began publishing their well-known and highly influential publication called Solidarity. In 1912 the IWW tobacco workers struck in McKees Rocks and in 1913 the Wobblies organized a massive retaliatory strike of 800 cigar workers against Dry Slitz Stogie’s lockout of 1200 workers.
Today, the IWW fiercely honors and studies its history. However, today’s IWW officially refutes violence but continue to advocate industrial organizing and workers’ direct action in the form of local strikes, sit-ins, slow-downs, pickets, massive sickouts and other tactics of disruption—just as the early Wobblies did. Ask any IWW member and you will quickly get a lesson about the union’s historic struggles and founding principles. Call it the IWW “long memory,” the most radical idea in America, said labor activist Clara Barton. As an example, witness a standing agenda item to any Pittsburgh Branch meeting, where members rise up and sing what is, perhaps, the anthem to all of organized labor, “Solidarity Forever.” However, it’s probable that only Wobblies remember that fellow worker Ralph Chaplin wrote that song for the IWW, not the trade unions.
The Pittsburgh General Membership Branch will be holding its Centenary celebration on October 22nd from 10am to 6pm at the Pump House in Homestead, PA (where in 1892 striking steel workers courageously fought back against company guards and the state militia). The event is free and open to the public. On hand will be historic displays and artwork, radical literature, official IWW merchandise, and table displays presenting current IWW projects in the greater Pittsburgh area. There will also be free speech sessions on an actual soapbox where labor activists can step up in good old Wobbly fashion and shout out, “Fellow Workers . . .”