Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine rocked a red and black #IWW hat as Rage Against the Machine was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He said:
"Rage is not here, but you are. The job we set out to do is not over. Now you are the ones that must testify. If you've got a boss, join a union. If you're a student, start an underground paper. If you're an anarchist throw a brick, if you're a soldier...follow your conscience, not your orders."
Posted by (AT)IndustrialWrkr on twitter:
If you run a business or make a living from commissions making fursuits, you have a place in Textile and Leather Workers Industrial Union 410.
Those that make a living doing freelance artwork or fursona commissions you have a place in Printing and Publishing Workers Industrial Union 450 https://archive.iww.org/unions/dept400/
We must devastate the avenues where the wealthy live.
-Lucy Parsons
Today, In honor of Black History Month, we celebrate the life of Lucy Parsons (c. 1851 – 1942) an American anarchist born to an enslaved African American who then married a black freedman in Texas. She may also have had indigenous and Mexican heritage. She married Albert Parsons, a former Confederate officer, in Waco, Texas. After the war, he was shot in the leg for helping African Americans register to vote.
They moved to Chicago together around 1873 and their politics were radicalized by the violent repression of the Great Upheaval of 1877. Both members of the International Workingmen's Association, and the Knights of Labor, they participated in the strikes that would result in up to 30 deaths by cops and national guards, in Chicago, alone. Nationwide, the wave of wildcat strikes associated with the Great Upheaval would result in over 100 worker deaths. Because of his revolutionary street speeches, Albert was fired from his job at the Chicago Times and blacklisted. Albert Parsons was executed in 1887 as one of the Haymarket Martyrs who had been fighting for the eight-hour workday.
Lucy Parsons later set up the Chicago Working Women's Union with her friend Lizzie Swank and other women. Lucy would go on to cofound the IWW, in 1905, with Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, James Connolly, and others. The IWW was and is a revolutionary union seeking not only better working conditions in the here and now, but the complete abolition of capitalism. The preamble to their constitution states, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” They advocate the General Strike and sabotage as two of many means to these ends. Lucy also edited radical newspapers and became a sought-after public speaker.
Today in Labor History February 11, 1919: The Seattle General Strike ended after five days as a result of a sell-out compromise by AFL bureaucrats. The strike began in response to government sanctioned wage cuts. Both the AFL and the IWW participated. During the strike, the workers formed councils, which took over virtually all major city services, including food distribution and security. They also continued garbage collection. Laundry workers continued to handle hospital laundry. And firefighters remained on duty. They established a system of food distribution, which provided 30,000 meals each day. Any exemption to the work stoppage had to be ok’d by the General Strike Committee.
Today in Labor History September 5, 1917: Federal agents attacked Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) halls and offices in 48 cities across the nation as part of the Palmer raids against the left.
Today In Labor History September 29, 1921: Lithuanian anarchist revolutionary Fanya Baron was executed by the Cheka on the personal order of Lenin. Baron spent her early life participating in the Chicago workers' movement and IWW. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, she moved to Ukraine and joined the Makhnovist movement. She was arrested and imprisoned by the Cheka. On July 1, 1921, she broke out of prison with the help of the Underground Anarchists and went to Moscow, where she was discovered and aided by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. However, on August 17, 1921, she was discovered and arrested again by the Cheka, and ultimately executed.
Today in Labor History October 2, 2007: The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Starbucks Workers Union won their grievances against the Starbucks in East Grand Rapids, Michigan. Starbucks chose to settle after the NLRB busted them for anti-labor violations.
Today in Labor History November 21, 1921: The original Columbine Massacre occurred in Serine, Colorado. State police and company thugs used machine guns against the unarmed miners, slaughtering six striking IWW members, all of whom were unarmed. Dozens more were injured.
chicago is currently undergoing a bitterly cold spell. as i write this, its -14F, with a wind chill of -33F.
one of my workplace campaigns, composed primarily of chicago residents who walk to work, organized a 100% sick out against working. they followed it up with a letter to the boss, demanding no work until wednesday, when the weather is supposed to break.
the boss quickly caved, even agreeing to pay wages while closed.
Today in Labor History October 7, 1879: Radical labor organizer and song writer Joe Hill was born in Gavle, Sweden. Hill was an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies). He was arrested and convicted on trumped up murder charges in Utah. He claimed innocence and the evidence against him was flimsy. However, because of his radical associations, they still convicted and executed him. President Wilson, Hellen Keller (also an IWW member) and the Swedish ambassador all asked for clemency. His famous last words to IWW co-founder Big Bill Haywood were “Don’t mourn. Organize.” Some of Hill’s most famous songs were Rebel Girl, There is Power in the Union, Mr. Block, and Casey Jones-Union Scab. Joe Hill's song "The Preacher & the Slave" first appeared in the IWW’s Little Red Song Book. The song is a parody of the hymn, “Sweet By and By,” often song by the Salvation Army (who the IWW called the Starvation Army), which would try to drown out the union’s street-corner labor organizing with their hymns. The Wobbly bard, Haywire Mac, is believed to be the first person to sing this song in public. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Utah Phillips also covered the song. Joe Hill’s ashes were supposedly sprinkled in every state of the union, except Utah, because he had said, "I don't want to be found dead in Utah." However, it is said that the IWW still keeps a small vial of some of his remaining ashes.
Watch Paul Robeson singing “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” to striking Scottish miners, 1949.
Today in Labor History November 5, 1916: The Everett Massacre occurred in Everett, Washington. 300 IWW members arrived by boat in Everett to help support the shingle workers’ strike that had been going on for the past 5 months. Prior attempts to support the strikers were met with vigilante beatings with axe handles. As the boat pulled in, Sheriff McRae called out, “Who’s your leader?” The Wobblies answered, “We’re all leaders!” The sheriff pulled his gun and said, “You can’t land.” A Wobbly yelled back, “Like hell we can’t.” Gunfire erupted, most of it from the 200 vigilantes on the dock. When the smoke cleared, two of the sheriff’s deputies were dead, shot in the back by their own men, along with 5-12 Wobblies on the boat. Dozens more were wounded. The authorities arrested 74 Wobblies. After a trial, all charges were dropped against the IWW members. The event was mentioned in John Dos Passos’s “USA Trilogy.”
Today in Labor History November 26, 1911: Paul Lafargue, Cuban-French revolutionary and son-in-law of Karl Marx, died. Lafargue wrote “The Right to Be Lazy” in 1893 while in prison. Lafargue had Jewish, French, Indian, Creole and African ancestry. When IWW cofounder Daniel De Leon asked him about his origins, he replied that he was proudest of his “negro” ancestry. In his youth, Lefargue participated in the International Students Congress in 1865. Consequently, the government banned him from all French universities. So, he moved to London, where he became a frequent visitor to Marx’s house, ultimately marrying his daughter, Laura. Lafargue was a member of the General Council of the First International. He also participated in the Paris Commune.
"Sixteen employees recently signed union-authorization cards and joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), aka The Wobblies, the legendary union that battled capitalism, corporations and the robber barons in the early 20th century"
I know there are many remarkable branches out there so I can't speak for fellow workers elsewhere, but from where I am, the Industrial Workers of the World - yes, the "anarchist" IWW itself - has largely replicated the old trade union cultures of toxic masculinity, transphobia, and also Covid denialism. Please, comrades in the labour movement, don't ever let your guard down, because if we are not steadfast in our opposition to bigotry, if we are not assertive and even aggressive in our defence of the disadvantaged and marginalised, and if we are not resistant to reductive class politics, trust me: this shit seeps in and creeps in everywhere, including the last places you'd expect. #IWW#union#TradeUnion#intersectional#AntiFascist#anarchism
Today in Labor History March 12, 1912: The IWW won their Bread and Roses textile strike in Lawrence, MA. This was the first strike to use the moving picket line, implemented to avoid arrest for loitering. The workers came from 51 different nationalities and spoke 22 different languages. The mainstream unions, including the American Federation of Labor, all believed it was impossible to organize such a diverse workforce. However, the IWW organized workers by linguistic group and trained organizers who could speak each of the languages. Each language group got a delegate on the strike committee and had complete autonomy. Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn masterminded the strategy of sending hundreds of the strikers' hungry children to sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, drawing widespread sympathy, especially after police violently stopped a further exodus. 3 workers were killed by police during the strike. Nearly 300 were arrested.
The 1911 verse, by Poet James Oppenheim, has been associated with the strike, particularly after Upton Sinclair made the connection in his 1915 labor anthology, “The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest”
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
Today in Labor History January 29, 1936: Rubber workers engaged in a sit-down strike in Akron, Ohio. Their action helped establish the United Rubber Workers as a national union. Working conditions and pay were terrible and workers and virtually no benefits. They engaged in numerous sit-down strikes in the 1930s. Theirs preceded the more famous Flint sit-down strike of 1936-1937. The first American sit-down strike was probably in 1909, when 3,000 members of the IWW engaged in a sit-down strike against General Electric, in Schenectady, NY.
Today in Labor History March 9, 1911: Frank Little and other free-speech fighters were released from jail in Fresno, California, where they had been fighting for the right to speak to and organize workers on public streets. Little was a Cherokee miner and IWW union organizer. He helped organize oil workers, timber workers and migrant farm workers in California. He participated in free speech fights in Missoula, Spokane and Fresno, and helped pioneer many of the passive resistance techniques later used by the Civil Rights movement. He was also an anti-war activist, calling U.S. soldiers “Uncle Sam’s scabs in uniforms.” 1917, he helped organize the Speculator Mine strike in Butte, Montana. Vigilantes broke into his boarding house, dragged him through the streets while tied to the back of a car, and then lynched him from a railroad trestle. Prior to Little’s assassination, Author Dashiell Hammett had been asked by the Pinkerton Detective Agency to murder him. Hammett declined.
Boss emailed the team asking them to chip in and buy a fake tree to decorate the lobby.
I replied-all with a link to the company 990s (nonprofit corp tax docs are public record fyi) and, citing the $11mil net revenue, suggested the corp can afford decorations w/o asking us for donations. #IWW