Today in Labor History February 25, 1913: The IWW-led silk strike began in Paterson, New Jersey. 25,000 immigrant textile workers walked out when mill owners doubled the size of the looms without increasing staffing or wages. Workers also wanted an 8-hour workday and safer working conditions. Within the first two weeks of the strike, they had brought out workers from all the local mills in a General Strike of weavers and millworkers. Over the course of the strike, 1,850 workers were arrested, including Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Five workers were killed during the 208-day strike. The strike ended in failure on July 28.
Today in Labor History February 24, 1912: The cops beat up women and children during the IWW-led Bread and Roses textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Three people died during the strike. Unknown numbers were injured. The police arrested nearly 300 workers during the two-and-a-half-month strike. The authorities framed and arrested IWW organizers Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti for murder.
Today in Labor History February 21, 1934: Augusto Cesar Sandino, Nicaraguan independence fighter, was assassinated by Somoza’s Nation Guard. While in exile in Mexico during the early 1920s, Sandino participated in strikes led by the IWW. Inspired by the anarcho-syndicalist union, he adopted their red and black logo as the colors for the revolutionary Nicaraguan flag. The Sandinistas, or FSLN, who overthrew the dictator, Anastasio Somoza, in 1979, were named for Sandino.
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 February 19, 1912: During the IWW Bread & Roses Strike in Lawrence, MA, 200 police attacked 100 women picketers, knocking them to the ground and beating them. As a result, several pregnant women lost their babies.
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 February 8, 1919: A General Strike occurred in Butte, Montana against a wage cut. Inspired by the Seattle General Strike, members of the IWW and the Metal and Mine Workers Union, Local 800, organized Soldiers’, Sailors’ and Workers Councils to lead the strike. Streetcar workers joined in, shutting down transportation for 5 days. Soldiers, returning from World War I, joined the pickets. Montana’s governor called in the National Guard. They bayoneted 9 workers. The workers ultimately called off the strike out of fear that there would be fatalities.
Today in Labor History February 6, 1919: The Seattle General Strike began. 65,000 workers participated. Longshoremen, trolley operators and bartenders also participated. The strike began in response to government sanctioned wage cuts. Both the AF of L 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. Army veterans created an independent police force to maintain order. The Labor War Veteran's Guard prohibited the use of force and didn’t carry weapons. The regular police made no arrests in any actions related to the strike. Overall, arrests dropped to less than half their normal number.
A pamphlet that was distributed during the strike said, “You are doomed to wage slavery till you die unless you wake up, realize that you and the boss have nothing in common, that the employing class must be overthrown, and that you, the workers, must take over the control of your jobs, and through them, the control over your lives instead of offering yourself up to the masters as a sacrifice six days a week, so that they may coin profits out of your sweat and toil."
The strike ended when they brought in federal troops and the workers were pressured to quit by bureaucrats from the national unions, particularly the AFL.
I go do shit in WNC. I wear my #IWW swag. People come up to me and say they're members, flash a red card, etc. If I see sabotabby on your shirt or an IWW logo I come say hi. We talk about work and organizing. We trade #'s. Every Wob I meet I tell "if you're doing some wobbly shit and need another body, call." There are more of us in WNC than the main office knows about.
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we celebrate the life of Hubert Henry Harrison (April 27, 1883 – December 17, 1927), a West Indian-American writer, speaker, educator, political activist based in Harlem, New York. He was described by union leader A. Philip Randolph as the father of Harlem radicalism and by John G. Jackson as "The Black Socrates." Harrison’s activism encouraged the development of class consciousness among workers, black pride, secular humanism, social progressivism, and free thought. He denounced the Bible as a slave master's book, and said that black Christians needed their heads examined. He refused to exalt a "lily white God " and "Jim Crow Jesus," and criticized Churches for pushing racism, superstition, ignorance and poverty. Religious extremists were known to riot at his lectures. At one of his events, he attacked and chased off an extremist who had attacked him with a crowbar.
In the early 1910s, Harrison became a full-time organizer with the Socialist Party of America. He lectured widely against capitalism, founded the Colored Socialist Club, and campaigned for Eugene V. Debs’s 1912 bid for president of the U.S. However, his politics moved further to the left than the mainstream of the Socialist Party, and he withdrew in 1914. He was also a big supporter of the IWW, speaking at the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike, and supporting the IWW’s advocacy of direct action and sabotage. In 1914, he began working with the anarchist-influenced Modern School movement (started by the martyred educator Francisco Ferrer). During World War I, he founded the Liberty League and the “Voice: A Newspaper for the New Negro,” as radical alternatives to the NAACP. The Liberty League advocated internationalism, class and race consciousness, full racial equality, federal anti-lynching legislation, enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, labor organizing, support for socialist and anti-imperialist causes, and armed self-defense.
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we celebrate the life of Ben Fletcher (April 13, 1890 – 1949), Wobbly and revolutionary. Fletcher joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1912 and became secretary of the IWW District Council in 1913. He also co-founded the interracial Local 8 in 1913. Also in 1913, he led a successful strike of over 10,000 dockers. At that time, roughly one-third of the dockers on the Philadelphia waterfront were black. Another 33% were Irish. And about 33% were Polish and Lithuanian. Prior to the IWW organizing drive, the employers routinely pitted black workers against white, and Polish against Irish. The IWW was one of the only unions of the era that organized workers into the same locals, regardless of race or ethnicity. And its main leader in Philadelphia was an African American, Ben Fletcher.
By 1916, thanks in large part to Fletcher’s organizing skill, all but two of Philadelphia’s docks were controlled by the IWW. And the IWW maintained control of the Philly waterfront for about a decade. After the 1913 strike, Fletcher travelled up and down the east coast organizing dockers. However, he was nearly lynched in Norfolk, Virginia in 1917. At that time, roughly 10% of the IWW’s 1 million members were African American. Most had been rejected from other unions because of their skin color. In 1918, the state arrested him for treason, sentencing him to ten years, for the crime of organizing workers during wartime. He served three years. Fletcher supposedly said to Big Bill Haywood after the trial that the judge had been using “very ungrammatical language. . . His sentences are much too long.”
"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"
Today in Labor History February 4, 1921: A massacre at San Gregorio, Chile, left 565 nitrate miners dead. 1920 was a year of brutal repression of the workers movement. Many locals were burnt down, many agitators murdered, workers sent to prison. Prior to the San Gregorio massacre, the Chilean IWW led a three-month strike protesting the export of grain during a food shortage. Four years later, the Chilean government murdered another 500 saltpeter miners and family members in the Marusia massacre.
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 1, 1913: The IWW Patterson silk workers’ strike began. They were fighting for an 8-hr work day and better working conditions. Over the course of the strike, 1,850 workers were arrested, including Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Within the first two weeks of the strike, they had brought out workers from all the local mills in a General Strike of weavers and millworkers. Two workers died in the struggle, one shot by a vigilante and the other by a private guard. The strike ended in failure on July 28.