The I.W.W. and Alternative Unionism
Adam Kader has a nice article on the I.W.W. organizing of Starbucks.
That might sound weird. The I.W.W? Didn’t it disappear 80 years ago? Well, more or less. It’s always been there with a very small membership but the people I’ve known involved in the organization seemed to romanticize the past more than understand how to organize in the present. As a scholar of the I.W.W., I have always found little from its past that is particularly helpful in present labor struggles. The historical Wobblies proved utterly ineffective in running an effective organization or maintaining a union after a rare victory (such as in Lawrence, Massachusetts).
But forget about the past. What can the new I.W.W. tell us about organizing? The Starbucks campaign builds upon 2 key tenets of the old I.W.W. with great relevance to the present. First, it organizes industry wide. Understanding that one shop within the larger Starbucks empire has little meaning, the I.W.W. seeks to build solidarity between workplaces in order to build solidarity and gain additional power.
Second, the Wobblies focus heavily on worker education. One of the real weaknesses of the modern labor movement is a lack of emphasis on educating workers about their own workplace, how unions fit into a larger economic and social justice world, and building workplace democracy. The I.W.W. model is better than the AFL-CIO on all these fronts. Here there is real potential for unions outside the AFL-CIO structure to build quality organizations. The I.W.W. is rebuilding worker education centers and emphasizing larger ideas of workplace justice in its Starbucks campaign.
This alternative strategy makes a lot of sense given the continued failure of the AFL-CIO strategies of workplace organizing since 1980. Harold Meyerson had a recent piece exploring SEIU door-to-door campaigns that have nothing to do with organizing a specific workplace, but rather seek to build a larger coalition of the poor and unemployed. Given corporations’ goal of returning us to the Gilded Age, it makes a lot of sense to start revisiting older forms of labor tactics as a response.
It’s true that pre-New Deal unions always had a tremendously difficult time succeeding. It took government intervention on the side of workers to make unionization happen for most. But that intervention would not have happened were it not for 50 years of agitation by workers determined to improve their lives. It’s time to start rebuilding multiple forms of worker and poor person organization to best prepare for the brutal struggles ahead, struggles that some day may convince the government again to care about working-class people.
There are good reasons for the AFL-CIO to exist and be workers’ most powerful voice. But the big organization has always fought vociferously against alternative models of unionization. This is a mistake. There are multiple models of unionization, each with strengths and weaknesses. This most certainly includes the AFL-CIO, whose weaknesses has made it quite unprepared to deal with the modern globalized economy. I don’t know whether the renewed I.W.W. really represents a workable alternative, but I am certainly happy to see it and the Starbucks workers try.
And they have the best songs.
As I recall, the IWW refused to sign contracts with management even after winning a strike (because it didn’t believe in the concept of management). Is my memory correct and, if so, has that practice changed?
You are correct about their unwillingness to sign a contract, which I would call a major problem. I suspect that would probably change were the IWW in a position to sign contracts at Starbucks, but at this point, I don’t believe they have any current contracts.
… wait, what? how does that even work?
If you won’t sign a contract, how do you legally enforce the concessions you just forced out of management? That’s the whole POINT of winning a strike, to put management in a position in which it has to agree to concessions in a way that allows you to deploy the power of the state against them if they renege!
Well, this was the biggest problem in 1912. If the IWW still continued on that thread today, it would probably be equally disastrous. From its perspective, the contract limited what labor could do more than what the companies could do. Of course, it also contributed to the post-Lawrence collapse.
That was a major reason why they couldn’t build on success. The real problem was that the IWW didn’t recognize the right of private property and the other assumptions of capitalism. They thought that winning a strike would lead to the working populace joining the one big union and overthrowing capitalism (slightly simplified version of their philosophy but not off by much).
I agree on the idea of trying new ways to organize, but I don’t see this new SEIU model as one of them. it seems to be more of a substitute to work place organizing, rather than an addition. One of the biggest obstacles to work place organizing has been unions themselves, which means strategic shifts within the movement could lead to greater success (and certainly some internationals get that). I agree with Joe Burns that labor is not just another protest movement, so I’m disturbed by the increasing interest by SEIU and others to turn it into that.
There’s definitely a lot of room for debate about these things and I absolutely see the point you and Burns make. Labor isn’t just another protest movement; as for the SEIU program, much of it depends on how SEIU is actually going to mobilize these people. And I do have some skepticism on that. On the other hand, labor is in such bad shape that turning it from the movement it currently is to something that focuses heavily on the poor and unemployed may pay off in the long term. But again, I can certainly see your point here.
I think that if the labor movement is going to make a come back they need to expand out of simply focusing on the work place. They need to convince more people that the movement means something to them, that it cares about all of the poor and working classes and not just their members. Broadening their outreach and organizing like this could really be helpful in that regard.
This I agree with wholeheartedly, although whether it is fair to call what we have now a ‘movement’ I think is an open question.
On a related note, conservative groups are going after one model, LAANE, using open records laws, similar to what was done in WI not too long ago.
Interest in the Wobblies is strictly romantic. The most successful model, outside the public sector, seems to be the craft-union model. If you have a specialized skill — especially in a post-Fordist world where your employer can change quickly — it makes sense to band together with others with that skill. Those unions can provide real benefits in terms of pension and welfare plans.
I agree that the Wagner Act model is dead, and that the union movement, if it is to survive, needs to experiment more. I suspect though that people want more concrete benefits, and do not want to spend their weekends listening to left-lab propaganda.
“Interest in the Wobblies is strictly romantic.”
While this is often true, I don’t think it necessarily has to be true. After all, the IWW is having some success with these Starbucks workers. If they can create a union model that successfully organizes workers, I’d say it is something worth paying attention to.
From reading the articles, it appears that IWW “success” at Starbucks is very limited. About 250 members from about 150,000 employees worlwide. A couple legal victories where workers who were fired were reinstated. No union election at any store where the workers chose the IWW as their bargaining representative.
I’m a “tall dark roast to go” coffee drinker, but when I see what most people are ordering at coffee shops I wonder how much more they will pay for their pricey lattes. More power to the organizing effort, however.
Why would unionization necessarily lead to higher prices?
Isn’t this the same argument that’s been used against unions forever. It’s not as if the American consumer suffered during the 1950s and 1960s, when unionization was at its peak and wage rates were also peaking in real terms.
Aren’t Starbucks employees hoping to gain more in wages, at least part of which will be passed on to customers?
Isn’t it the pool of cheaper, non-union workers why auto companies locate in southern states?
The linked article goes into all the reasons Starbucks employees are organizing. I’d suggest actually reading it. I’d also caution not to assume that wages are always the top or even a primary reason for unionization campaigns.
Yes, cheaper non-union workers are why companies are locating in the South or overseas, but that is largely about corporate profits, not prices of goods.
If employers could simply translate higher wages into higher prices, they wouldn’t fight so hard to keep wages down. The difficulty is that, by and large, prices are set by the competitive market, so that wage increases have to come out of profits. Higher wages, generally speaking, means lower profits, not higher prices. That’s why there’s a class struggle.
A quick question:
Why, when you see what people are ordering at coffee shops, do you not wonder how much more they could afford to pay their employees?
Good point. How profitable is Starbucks? Maybe they justify the low wages by providing some health care.
Talking out of my ass as usual but national chains like this don’t engage with their employees so much as they engage with communities. A nationwide network of baristas or whatever they are called are never gonna have the organizational capabilities of a Starbucks, but efforts to raise communal awareness and solidarity could certainly have positive effects on wages, prices, and work against the all the perks local governments tend to throw at chains to get them to bring in tax revenue.
I feel sentimental about the Wobblies
As a dues paying IWW member now for 16 years (and a dual card member in various AFL-CIO unions for 14 of those last 16), I can assure everyone here that the IWW is alive and well, and you can visit our website at iww.org to find out more.
I have several disagreements with the author’s statements in the first paragraph above that I feel I need to address:
(1) “The historical Wobblies proved utterly ineffective in running an effective organization or maintaining a union after a rare victory”. If you believe this, then you haven’t done your research very carefully at all. The IWW won the eight hour day in the woods of the Pacific Northwest in 1917 through its organization at the point of production and “striking on the job”. This is well documented, though the documentation is hard to come by (though not for a serious scholar). Robert Tyler’s Rebels of the Woods demonstrates the truth of this claim quite well, although Tyler, like the author of this article, equates bureaucratic organization with actual unionism, which is a mistake. The IWW also almost literally controlled the Philadelphia docks for over two decades, thanks to the militancy and interracial organizing of Marine Transport Workers Local 8, led by Ben Fletcher, an African American IWW leader and organizer. This is documented in several sources.
(2) “the people I’ve known involved in the organization seemed to romanticize the past more than understand how to organize in the present.” If that’s true, then Erik Loomis has been talking to the wrong people. The IWW has played key roles in several major labor struggles, the most recent of which is the near General Strike in Wisconsin. Many of the delegates on the South Central federation of Labor who voted to endorse a General Strike were card carrying members of the IWW.
(3) “I have always found little from its past that is particularly helpful in present labor struggles.” If the author feels this way, then he just hasn’t been looking in the right places. It sounds to me like he has been following the same course of studying IWW history as the self-described Leninists in the International Socialist Organization whose emphasis on IWW history almost exclusively focuses on Big Bill Haywood (because of their insistence on making him the American version of Lenin) and Lawrence. This overlooks so much of the rest of the IWW’s contribution to both US Labor History and American Cultural History. A good place to broaden one’s perspective is Franklin Rosemont’s Joe Hill, The IWW and the making of a Revolutionary American Workingclass Counterculture, Thomspon and Bekken’s The IWW, it’s First 100 Years, and of course, Joyce Kornbluh’s Rebel Voices. In terms of labor organizing, many of the tactics and strategies that actually worked in the CIO and (in rare moments) in the AFL and AFL-CIO, such as industrial organizing (think ILWU and the 1934 General Strike), the UAW’s sit down strikes, and union-wide, union controlled hiring halls (again, think ILWU) were pioneered by the IWW. Howard Kimmeldorf has documented this in Reds or Rackets and Battling for American Labor, for example. The IWW was organizing itinerant farm workers almost fifty years before the UFW (see Hall, Harvest Wobblies). The IWW is even the first union to pioneer the concept of Green Unionism–though most people don’t know this, but my own soon-to-be published book, One Big Union, Judi Bari’s vision of Green-Worker Alliances in Redwood Country will document this quite thoroughly. Information on this last book is available at judibari.info.
It’s all well and good if people celebrate the IWW’s cultural history and romanticize it’s story, but the IWW is alive and well, and still blazing the trail that the rest of the labor movement follows (though of course few know this–maybe because author’s like the above don’t give us credit or refuse to?).
I’ll leave you with this: The IWW is only the second labor union in the world to have a website (the first was an Israeli teacher’s union local), and the very first international union to have a website. Thanks to the foresight of a group of members in the Bay Area and Santa Cruz, California, we know own the domain http://www.iww.org. Ownership of a three letter TLD is almost unheard of for an organization with a budget as small as ours. The founder of Labnourstart.org, Eric Lee, has been a dues paying IWW member, and it was he who first suggested, in the pages of the IWW’s official newspaper, The Industrial Worker, that unions should embrace social networking, such as Facebook and Twitter, something the IWW does eagerly. The revolutions begun earlier this year in Tunisia, Egypt, and Wisconsin, and the actions currently unfolding in Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Greece, and England take a cue from these online campaigns (in part). While they may be independent developments of those pioneered by the IWW (and again scarcely documented), the fact is that the IWW was one of the first to engage in and embrace online organizing.
The fact is, that if you look hard and carefully enough, you will see that the IWW is extremely relevant to the modern labor movement. You just need to look a little harder.
I will respond to this by saying 3 things.
First, that I think this is an accurate account of the IWW perspective on these things.
Second, to say my own work explores the IWW in the Northwest in great depth and that I stand by everything I said.
Third, in a very real sense the IWW helped bring about the 8 hour day in the Pacific Northwest forests, as well as a lot of other extremely important changes in sanitation, which is what really motivated those workers, but that in the end, it was the federal government who implemented these changes in exchange for crushing the IWW through the Spruce Production Division and Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumberman during World War I. It’s important to recognize how multiple actors bring about change as opposed to crediting a particular union. In this case, I’d argue that it was first, the individual workers, most (though not all) of whom were willing to sacrifice the IWW for the changes they wanted, 2) the federal government, and 3) the IWW itself, who often found itself having to change its tactics and message in order to follow the loggers rather than other way around.
Historian 1 : IWW Partisan 0
AKA: It’s nice that you have your mythology, but it’s not history.
Would you care to debate me, point-by-point, on any of the historical FACTS that I presented aren’t historical or accurate? Please, enlighten me!
Erik, this is exactly the same line that Tyler took in _Rebels_, but the fact remains that none of this would have happened if the IWW didn’t agitated for it in the first place. What motivated the workers is something only the workers themselves know, and it is an extremely arrogant assumption that you know what they thought or felt. Certainly some did think exactly as you suggest, and one of these is even documented in The Vanishing Logger, by Emil Engstrom (I own a copy). Others were probably more dedicated to the IWW, such as Tom Scribbner (whose self-published writings cobbled together in a piece called Lumberjack I intend to include in a volume of works that will include most IWW writings on forestry worker organizing in the Pacific Northwest).
Nobody, especially not me, denies that multiple causes lead to particular results, but only a fool would deny that the IWW was the crest of the wave that brought about the changes in working conditions among lumber workers. Even Bryce Disque and Carleton Parker say as much in their writings (both of which I have read). In fact, Parker was so fascinated by the IWW, he dispatched two of his students (F C Mills and Paul Brissenden) to infiltrate the IWW to study its organization and methods. Both of these students’ works were eventually published. Have you read these?
As for your statement, “that I think this is an accurate account of the IWW perspective on these things.” You can say that, but I stand by my assertion that it is an opinion, and not a factual statement. That it may be the majority opinion among scholars doesn’t change the fact that it may be inaccurate.
And, what have you to say about the Philadelphia Longshoreman? IWW.ORG? Judi Bari or any of the other issues I raised?
I, too, have an academic background. I have two B.A.s from UC Berkeley (one in Architecture, one in Art History). I am currently a ferryboat deckhand on the San Francisco Bay (I have a captain’s license), I help maintain iww.org (I have for over ten years), I serve on the Executive Board of my AFl-CIO union local (unpaid), and I am about to be published. I, like the IWW, refuse to let historians dismiss us or shoehorn us into a preconceived agenda, which it seems to me you are doing Mr. Loomis. That is your prerogative, but I suspect, in the long run, history will prove you somewhat wrong. And if that makes me a partisan, well, so be it.
I can’t figure out where you’re disagreeing with Erik’s post.
Well, if there’s one thing Wobblies of the past and present have in common, it’s their love of long, long debates on arcane points. Somehow because I didn’t address every single point that you mentioned, even though I went into great detail about the point I personally research, I don’t know what I’m talking about. Whatever.
I’ll say two more things and be done with it. First, yes, the IWW played a vital role in the labor struggles of the Northwest. And yes, IWW organization was extremely important. But the IWW gave shape to existing discontent. It was workers’ personal dissatisfaction that was the spark. Wobbles themselves admitted this.
Second, you say, “What motivated the workers is something only the workers themselves know, and it is an extremely arrogant assumption that you know what they thought or felt.” Right–because rreading hundreds of accounts what the workers actually said themselves at the time and when they remembered upon the past and reading what IWW organizers said at the time and when they thought about their past clearly means that this is obviously off base.
“Leninists in the International Socialist Organization whose emphasis on IWW history almost exclusively focuses on Big Bill Haywood”
I can’t resist jumping to rebut this, as someone who learned pretty much everything he knows about the IWW within the ISO. To take one example, Mike Davis spends a couple chapters talking about the IWW and California farmworker organizing in No One Is Illegal, which is published by Haymarket and the go-to book in the ISO for an intro to immigrant struggles.
Don’t know why Steve felt the need to include a random sectarian aside, anyway. I’m pretty sure Loomis isn’t a Trotskyist. And just because I don’t give the present IWW special points for continuity, doesn’t mean I have anything against it.
Entirely positive Socialist Worker article about IWW’s Starbucks campaign.
My criticism of the ISO comes from direct experience, having debated them twice when they have attempted to present their “history” of the IWW which is full of inaccuracies and omissions.
They ascribe policies and positions to the IWW that the IWW doesn’t have (for example, despite the ISO’s repeated claims that the IWW is “anarcho-syndicalist” NOWHERE does the IWW Constitution or any of its official literature state this or make this claim).
They argue that the IWW declined immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (also untrue: the IWW’s actual decline occurred in the 1950s after the Cleveland Metal Workers Industrial Union quit the IWW en masse when the organization’s General Executive Board refused to agree to the anti-communist provisions of the Taft Hartley Act–a principled, if somewhat risky stance to take).
They–like Eric Loomis–are extremely dismissive of the IWW fight for the eight-hour day among the woods workers in the Pacific Northwest, scarcely mention the Agricultural Workers Organization (AWO) that almost completely controlled working conditions in the wheat belt in the 1910s (documented in Hall’s _Harvest Wobblies_), do not mention the Philadelphia Longshoremen or the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in the south, both of which were very successful examples of racially integrated industrial unionism under extremely racist conditions.
I suspect that is because to mention these examples would undermine the ISO’s central thesis about the IWW which is essentially that the IWW had the right spirit, but failed to see the need for a revolutionary workers party and because they failed to see this need, that is why they declined when the Bolshevik Revolution proved the superiority of that model (except we all know this is not true, and the IWW didn’t decline until the 1950s).
What bothers me about Loomis’ perspective is that it seems to follow this same line of reasoning. It also suggests that the IWW represented some sort of “vanguard” and thought of itself as such, i.e. a force /independent of the workers/ when anyone who knows anything about the IWW knows full well that the IWW and the workers were meant to be one and the same. That some workers saw the IWW as an outside force and not part of their own being represents an incomplete development of the process of radical unionization. It’s not necessarily an inherent failure of the IWW model of organizing as the ISO suggests and (perhaps) Loomis might also believe (though I am not certain if this is the case).
First on a matter of historical fact: Eric writes “It took government intervention on the side of workers to make unionization happen for most.” In actual fact, it took the mass picket lines, defiance of the law and plant occupations (the 3 big strikes of 1934 and the sit-downs of 1937) to win this. Where the leadership relied on the law – as in the Little Steel campaign, they filed miserably.
Which brings me to my main point: Today’s IWW, with all its deficiencies, weaknesses and confusions, represents a possible alternative to the mainstream unions, whether they are in the AFL-CIO or not. These unions are controlled by a leadership that is absolutely committed to the idea that their fate is tied to the fate of management’s profits and that any open defiance of the law is as impossible as the Sun rising in the West and setting in the East. This commitment leads to betrayals of their membership on a daily basis – not only in what they negotiate for in a contract, but also in how they allow the management to run roughshod over the members.
As a result, a huge vacuum has opened up in the union movement, and some force will move in to fill it, or at least partially fill it. When the membership – as well as the close to 90% of all workers who are non-union – finally decisively move, and when they cannot find a way to move through the official channels of the unions (because these channels are clogged up by the leadership), then they will seek and will find alternatives. Who is to say that the IWW cannot become at least part of that alternative?
I disagree with none of this. Again, multiple causes are in effect for successful unionization efforts. Government willingness to tolerate and encourage unions were absolutely necessary for those 30s strikes to succeed, but of course so were militant workers.
And discussions of the IWW always revert to the distant past. But the renewed IWW could have something to say about modern unionization, which is precisely my point in the post.
Loomis states, “Government willingness to tolerate and encourage unions were absolutely necessary for those 30s strikes to succeed, but of course so were militant workers.”
But what caused the government to be willing to tolerate this? The answer is the threat of militant workers’ action. Just as Bryce Disque was only able to convince the lumber barons to give workers the eight-hour day because of the threat of the IWW and militant unionism.
But what caused the government to be willing to tolerate this? The answer is the threat of militant workers’ action.
that’s an enormously tricky question, very hard to answer, and whatever provisional answer we might hope to come up with is sure to be complex and multi-causal. That you airily and vainly declare the correct answer to it to the be the one most in line with and flattering to the organization you are part of tells me all I need to know about you.
The Starbucks campaign isn’t an industrial campaign: with a few local exceptions, it’s a corporate campaign aimed exclusively at the retail end of the production chain in one branch of the foodstuffs industry.
It isn’t really a solidarity campaign, either. It depends heavily on appeals to the state and to customers, and comparatively little on organized solidarity in the workplace. It has managed to enlist majorities at a few shops, and to win occasional concessions locally through workers’ solidarity; but its big achievements have been delivered by the NLRB and the federal courts, not by direct action. These are hailed as great victories of the workers, but they only show the workers’ dependence on the state and lawyers.
It’s very far from the old IWW model, which aimed to achieve workers’ control of entire industries, not just influence in one phase of production, and certainly not just in one corporation. The SWU campaign closely follows the NLRA’s prescription for unionization, despite the rhetoric of “solidarity unionism”. Its organizing generally sticks to “bargaining units”, and seldom tries to reach into other companies’ shops, let alone other parts of the foodstuffs industry. If it could attract more workers, there’s little reason to think that the SWU wouldn’t follow the SEIU and the AFL-CIO into workplace contractualism. Some very good work is being done by the SWU, and the dedication and sincerity of its members are unquestionable; but the SWU scarcely epitomizes an IWW campaign, at least as IWW campaigns were known in the organization’s heyday.
Maybe that’s not the SWU’s fault. The IWW today has failed to put across any coherent message that the mass of modern workers can identify themselves in. It has placed itself squarely within the irrelevant fringe of the Left-wing social protest movement. Like American political democracy, the IWW’s democracy has become largely a side-show for the diversion of the rank and file. Most of its members are simply dues-payers who don’t even belong to a local Branch, let alone a workplace organization. Most of its few organized shops exist in spite of the IWW, as virtually independent bodies without involvement or meaningful representation in the broader organization, while its General Administration and Branches dissipate revenue and energy in symbolic demonstrations and internecine quarrels. The SWU charts its own course because the IWW is too disorganized to exercise any effective oversight.
So maybe the SWU is doing the best anybody could do in its situation. Maybe modern workers are too individualistic, too indoctrinated by bourgeois society, too domesticated, to be able to create truly democratic organizations, win control of their working lives through collective exercise of economic power, and build a new society within the shell of the old. Maybe the best they can hope for is, with their customers’ help, to persuade the bosses to be better bosses, and to call in lawyers to petition Uncle Sam when the bosses won’t be persuaded. Maybe the SWU’s strategy is exactly right for modern workers in modern corporate America.
But whether that’s the case or not, the modern IWW and the SWU need to come out from behind their rhetoric and their idealistic fantasies, and take stock, with clear eyes, of what they are and are not doing.
One big union. One big strike. The Wobbly love of “direct action” often got in the way of building an effective institutional framework. But really, they are anarcho-syndicalists. Are you expecting something different?
Thanks for the post, Adam.
Signed,
Ex-Wobbly, but still a member at heart
oops…thanks, Erik. I think you are on to something.
In Solidarity.
First, in reply to Erik: It’s not possible to agree with what I wrote and what he wrote, as he claims to do. His claim is that unionization came about as a result of its having been, in effect, legalized through the NLRA. In fact, it was just the opposite process: Unionization was given legal standing after the working class made it clear that this was going to be an unstoppable force. And where the organizers tried to rely upon that legal standing – the “Little Steel” campaign – they were resoundingly defeated. Read “Labor’s Giant Step”. It seems to me that Erik is trying to be all things to all people here.
In reply to Crutchfield: We have to start with the objective situation, including the general consciousness or what could be called the general psychology. Fifty years or more of repression of class consciousness and militancy and forty years of repression of the left have left their mark on this consciousness. There has been a systematic campaign – orchestrated by the officialdom of the mainstream unions – to isolate and ostracize (at the least) – those members who retain some class consciousness and want to use their unions to fight. The effect of this campaign goes well beyond just the union membership; it affects all layers of the working class.
That’s the background to the Starbucks campaign as well as any other organizing campaign of the IWW. I’m not saying that there aren’t mistakes made; there are and some of them are pretty major, but even if there weren’t we couldn’t overcome this objective situation.
Wisconsin gave us a little glimpse of the future (as well as of the past). When a “Wisconsin” starts to be generalized, then all these organizing campaigns will take on a lot more meat, I think. Meanwhile, I think we have to keep on organizing as best we can and keep on learning the lessons, including those from our mistakes.
Reiman is right that the IWW needs to start with the objective situation, but his response to that situation is typical of today’s Wobs: “We can’t overcome the objective situation, so we can’t be blamed for failing as long as we keep struggling and our hearts are pure.” In other words, the IWW’s failure is the fault of the deluded working class, not the IWW. The IWW doesn’t have to change–the workers do!
[...] off what I was talking about yesterday, this sounds like a sensible way to rejigger traditional labor tactics for the modern economy: But forget about the past. What can the new I.W.W. tell us about [...]