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from Libertarian Labor Review #16
Winter 1994, pages 15-18
IWW Organizing in the 1970s
by Mike Hargis
When the IWW began its resurgence in the 1960s, it became
mostly a student and counter-cultural phenomenon. But at the
dawning of the 1970s the times seemed ripe for bringing the IWW
back to the job. The radicalization of the sixties was beginning to
be felt in industry and was expressing itself in wildcat strikes
and tales of sabotage.
The Chicago Branch of the IWW decided to jump into the fray
with a few organizing bids early in the decade. In the period from
1970-73 the Branch took on a manufacturer of counter-cultural
artifacts called Hip Products; a move house (Three Penny Cinema)
owned by an ex-commie; a small furniture factory; and even received
a grant from some philanthropist to venture into organizing
McDonalds restaurants. None of these efforts succeeded, except for
the Three Penny campaign which did result in a short-lived contract
which was lost when the workers quit en-masse in response to a new
ownership's decision to turn the once-popular cinema into an
exhibitor of pornographic films.
In analyzing these early campaigns, members of the Branch came
to the conclusion that the IWW got involved in these struggles only
when someone who worked in the place, usually someone involved in
the local counterculture, contacted someone they knew in the IWW;
therefore there was no real strategic or tactical planning done to
carry on the fight. They concluded that what needed to be done was
to target a particular industrial sector and prepare a long-term
effort to "infiltrate" the sector and organize from within.
They conducted a survey of industry in the Chicago area and
discovered that there were literally hundreds of small non-union
job shops (of from 50 to 100 workers) engaged in the manufacture
and/or finishing of metal products. As a result, several Chicago
Branch members formed the IU440 Metal Workers Organizing Committee
and, in the autumn of 1974, put out a call for all "footloose wobs"
who would like to try their hand at organizing to move to Chicago
and help out. The committee offered fellow workers who heeded the
call free room-and-board and $15 spending money a week for up to a
month or until they found a job.
At the time yours truly was cooking pizzas in Bangor, Maine
for a minimum wage, so I decided to pull up stakes and move to the
Windy City in the autumn of 1975 to join the campaign. Several
other wobs from around the U.S. also responded to the call. The
plan was to get IWWs hired on in the designated sector, hopefully
a few in the same workplace; get established on the job and begin
the task of gaining the confidence of work-mates; find out what the
gripes were; talk about and take direct action around these
grievances; and, eventually, recruit fellow workers into the union.
Now, word on the grapevine was that if you couldn't find a job
in Chicago, you couldn't find a job anywhere. Unfortunately, 1975
was not a good year employment-wise. Getting jobs in the sector was
difficult, and getting established even harder. My own experience
could illustrate the problem.
It took me a full month of pounding the pavement before I
landed a job at an electroplating plant. While the plant was in the
industrial sector we were targeting, it was not an ideal situation
for our purposes in as much as the place was already a union shop.
Secondarily, I was the only gringo on the shop floor, the rest
being black and hispanic. This could have made it more difficult,
from a cultural point of view, for me to gain acceptance by my
fellow workers. I say "could have" because I wasn't on the job long
enough to find out--just four months. What happened was I brought
to the attention of the union's business agent a particularly
dangerous safety problem. (In electroplating, metal parts or tools
are dipped in a plating solution of zinc or cadmium or copper or
whatever and then placed in a drier. The problem was that the
person who carried the bucket of wet-plated metal to the drier had
to wade through a rather large puddle of water that had accumulated
on the floor. The danger of slipping and falling was bad enough to
warrant action, but the live electrical wires hanging above the
puddle made the danger of electrocution if one of these wires
should loosen and fall into the drink very real.) Surprisingly he
called in OSHA which fined the company and forced them to correct
the situation. In retaliation, I believe to this day, the company
began a campaign of harassment against me, making life on the job
unbearable. The AFL-CIO union, not surprisingly, did nothing to
protect me and the IWW was in no position to intervene. After a
month of hell I decided to chuck that job and seek another.
The next job I landed was at Dietzgen Corp., a manufacturer of
surveying and drafting equipment. This place, too, already had a
union--an old company union formed in the twenties which had been
transformed in recent years into the semblance of a real collective
bargaining agent for the workers with, it might be noted, the help
of a few wobblies. On the plus side, there were already two wobs
working there and the annual contract was coming up for
renegotiation, so it appeared that there might be some
opportunities for agitation. But, as these things do happen from
time to time, one fellow wob got canned for alleged excessive
absenteeism and, after I had been there ten months, the company
decided to move to the 'burbs and I was out on the street.
This was the winter of 1976-77, jobs were becoming scarcer,
and the drive was beginning to flounder for lack of direction.
(What I ended up getting was a part-time job at IWW headquarters as
a clerk. In the fall of 1977 I was elected General Secretary-
Treasurer of the IWW and began serving my first of three terms in
that position in January 1978.) Because of the inability to get
jobs in the metal sector, the committee decided to expand its focus
to the entire manufacturing and general production sector; renaming
the committee the General Production Workers Organizing Committee.
The expanded committee, which numbered 8 to 10 fellow workers
employed in various jobs, continued to meet and discuss job
conditions, organizing prospects, etc., but without much activity.
We were all active in General Membership Branch activity,
however, which consisted for the most part in doing strike support
work for a number of struggles being carried out by other unions.
The one concrete product of the GPWOC in this period was the
publication of a pamphlet, A Metal Workers Guide to Health and
Safety on the Job. The pamphlet outlined a number of common hazards
from electrocution to solvents to stress. Production of the
pamphlet was no problem, but distribution was. It never really
worked as an organizing tool, though we did get bulk orders from
time to time from other local unions. (Several years after the
committee had been dissolved, the GMB donated a box full of the
guides to the South African Metal Workers Union.)
As indicated above, the drive was floundering in the winter of
1976-77. Then, in July 1977, the General Secretary-Treasurer of the
IWW received a call from the president of a UAW local down near
Springfield, Illinois, asking if the IWW would be interested in
helping a small group of workers employed in a heavy road-building
equipment shop to get organized. They had approached his local, but
his superiors would not touch the place because it was too small a
shop and, therefore, not cost effective. The GST asked the GPWOC if
we wanted to take on the job. We agreed, and on July 23. 1977 sent
an organizing team of three fellow workers to the small town of
Virden, Illinois, located some 300 miles south of Chicago, to meet
with the workers of Mid-America Machinery Company.
At this meeting the organizing team listened to the workers'
grievances and explained what the IWW was and what it could and
could not do for them. A majority, six out of seven shop workers,
signed cards authorizing the IWW as their collective bargaining
agent and joined the union. The one worker who did not join up
turned out to be a stool-pigeon and ratted to the boss. When the
workers turned up for work on July 26 they found themselves locked
out.
The next day the committee presented the owner, Larry Jabusch,
with proof that the majority of his hired hands were members of the
IWW and demanded that he recognize this fact, end the lockout, and
set a date to start negotiations for a contract. This he refused to
do. The committee and the workers met to consider the options:
strike for recognition or petition the National Labor Relations
Board for an expedited representation election and file unfair
labor practice charges (ULPs) with the Board. The workers chose the
latter course.
This turned out to be a big mistake. While the filing of ULPs
did convince the boss to end the lockout on July 30, it did not
convince him to recognize and negotiate with the union. The union
offered to drop the ULPs in exchange for recognition, payment of
wages for the time of the lockout, and the reinstatement of a
worker who had been fired in retaliation for bringing OSHA into the
plant to assess health and safety conditions. (It was this firing
that prompted the workers to organize in the first place.) Again
the boss refused. It became obvious that Jabusch felt that he could
outlast the union in a battle of attrition.
This strategy paid off for Jabusch in the long run. While the
union did bring the pressure of direct action to bear, in the form
of disruptive picketing at auctions where Mid-America sold its
products, costing Jabusch thousands of dollars in lost sales, the
long march through the courts allowed union membership in the shop
to dwindle down to one by June 1978. By that time the courts had
ordered Mid-America to recognize the union and to reinstate the
fired worker, but Jabusch would not budge and was in the process of
building a new site for his plant. The lone union supporter left in
the shop decided to go for broke and went on strike. The GPWOC
mobilized to uphold picket lines at both the old and new plant
sites, but without the cooperation of the Teamsters Union and the
AFL building trades unions which were erecting the new plant, the
strike was largely ineffective. In September, the committee advised
the striking fellow worker to offer to go back to work
unconditionally (without officially calling off the strike). This
would allow him to collect unemployment compensation if Mid-America
refused (as it did) to take him back, as well as open the employer
up for more ULPs.
Two years later, in the fall of 1980, with all appeals
exhausted, Mid-America finally agreed to recognize the union and
begin negotiations. By this time, of course, there were no union
supporters in the shop and the GPWOC had dissolved in acrimony. The
Industrial Organizing Committee, which was an outgrowth of the
apparent need for coordination of organizing campaigns union-wide
in light of the Virden disaster, was asked to, and did, send
letters to current Mid-America employees to brief them on the
organizing campaign and to find out if they wished the IWW to
bargain on their behalf. There was no response and the Virden
campaign became history.
In the aftermath, some members of the organizing committee and
the Chicago GMB got together to draw up a balance sheet of the
whole Virden experience. Unfortunately, not all involved took part
in this evaluation--most notably the workers directly involved in
the whole process.
One of the main conclusions drawn was that there were major
problems with the entire notion that small shops, which the
mainstream unions ignored for being "not cost effective," could
provide a proper niche for IWW organizing. The Virden experience
showed that smaller shops tend to be more economically marginal and
less able to "afford" a union. Owners of such places tend to be
virulently anti-union and more willing to go belly-up than deal
with a union.
The size of a workplace is also relevant with regards to the
organizing campaign's time-line. In a small shop where one or two
workers can make the difference between having a majority or a
minority, time is crucial. Dragging the campaign through the NLRB
and the courts can be demoralizing for the workers and cause enough
of them to give up in disgust. Then even if the union "wins" legal
recognition it loses its actual presence on the job. The big
mistake in Virden was in not responding to the lock-out with a
strike when we still had the majority in July, 1977. A year later
it was too late.
Another lesson to be learned was to never take on a campaign
unless the union has established some kind of base in the community
in which the organizing target exists. The IWW had no presence in
Virden, so mobilizing and maintaining informational and then strike
pickets was very difficult. It is also important to educate
pickets, especially support pickets, in what the struggle is all
about and in how to deal with potentially violent confrontations
with scabs and police.
On the plus side, however, we did discover that the IWW's
program of class-struggle unionist was not all that alienating to
your run-of-the-mill worker. We also learned first hand the power
we collectively posses to inflict economic damage on a recalcitrant
employer.
Perhaps the biggest lesson to be drawn from the Virden
disaster was how devastating such a defeat can be on the
organization that took up the cause. Relationships among members of
the Chicago GMB deteriorated rapidly as some sought to find
scapegoats for the defeat. Some Virden organizers refused to give
assistance to an organizing project of the GMB's Health Workers
Organizing Committee, while others looked askance at the formation
of a construction workers' job branch. These poisoned relations
spread outward from the Branch as they colored relationships within
the Industrial Organizing Committee. but that's a whole other story
in itself.
The Virden disaster marked the end of the MWOC/GPWOC and
nearly destroyed the Chicago GMB. Throughout the 1980s, the Branch
unsuccessfully struggled to define a direction for its activity.
There were a few haphazard, unsuccessful organizing nibbles and
some international solidarity campaigns, most notably around the
Coca-Cola bottling workers in Guatemala in 1982-83, the British
Miners strike in 1984-85, and the International Labor Conference
around May Day, 1986, but the Branch never regained its enthusiasm
for on-the-job organizing.
But defeat in one battle does not mean that the war is lost.
Perhaps we have become too tied up with the notion that collective
bargaining is the end-all-and-be-all of unionism, and that the only
possible role for the IWW is as a collective bargaining tool for
small groups of marginal workers or, worse, a sort of junior
chamber of commerce for worker-owned businesses. We need to find
ways to participate on the bigger field of the class struggle and
break out of the marginal ghetto into which we have fallen. As the
IWW Preamble says, "Between these two classes a struggle must go on
until the workers of the world... organize as a class... and
ABOLISH THE WAGE SYSTEM."