Comments Elsewhere

Constant,

The I.W.W. was founded in 1905. Its membership peaked in the early 1920s at about 100,000 workers. During the first couple decades of its existence its most numerous constituents were timber workers and miners in the American West. You may think that the logging towns and mining camps of the 1900s-1920s were hotbeds of “left-wing intellectuals” playing at working-class solidarity, but you can hardly expect most people to agree with you.

You may note that it also predated the Communist Party U.S.A. by about a decade and a half. The economic ideas they promoted were generally not communist, but rather syndicalist. The immigrant members who were deported to Russia after the Palmer Raids usually found themselves jailed, exiled, or shot.

The membership of the I.W.W. today is about 1% of what it was in the early 1920s, and due to the impact of the Wagner Act and similar measures most workers find it more advantageous to join conservative, NLRB-recognized unions. However, I’d suggest that a balanced view of the IWW’s role in labor history would require looking back a bit further than 2007 and it would also require a bit more detailed of a discussion than you’ll find from a WikiPedia article.

Brandon,

What I’m suggesting is that different unions have different organizing models just as different firms have different business models. Excluding politically, economically, or culturally vulnerable segments of the labor market from your organizing is a model that some of them have adopted, but others adopted a model of trying to organize all workers everywhere to the extent that they could. The exclusionist organizing model is usually unstable in a free market, because unions depend on membership to get anything done, and excluding large segments of the working population creates an entrepreneurial opportunity for inclusive unions to pick up membership.

I think the fragility of their position is part of the reason why conservative union bosses actively aided the government in its efforts to violently suppress the radicals. The government in turn liked and supported the conservative unions because they drew workers away from radical unions, which during the 1900s-1920s tended to be more or less explicitly anarchist.

Aaron,

I doubt she’d be surprised. What she expresses in her article about the role of male-dominated unions in excluding women and marginalizing their concerns is not surprise, but rather anger. In any case, there is a very similar history within the AFL (the “American Separation of Labor,” as A. Philip Randolph liked to say) and its role in propping up Jim Crow in the American South. As well as the long history of nativism and anti-immigrant politics throughout the history of the AFL.

Half Sigma,

Neither all workers, nor all unionized workers, are men. Do everyone a favor and get Sam Gompers out of your head before you start thinking about the characteristics of the labor movement broadly.

Dave,

SDS isn’t a union. It’s a student organization. (That’s what the first “S” is for.)

Making more money is not the primary goal of joining a union—any kind of union. The primary goal is for workers to gain more autonomous power in the workplace. One way such power can be exercised is by bargaining for higher wages. (Most conservative unions today use it to bargain for job security and generous benefits for senior employees, more than for higher wages.) But there are lots of other ways that workers might exercise it.

And I don’t care what kind of unions conservatives can live with. I am a free marketeer, not a conservative. Thus I prefer anti-statist radical unions to establishmentarian conservative unions that have spent the past 70 years selling out workers in the name of maintaining their positions of influence within the liberal corporate state.