The United States (and global) economy has been moving into a period of economic stagnation for the past few decades (Magdoff & Foster, 2014). As a small number of large corporations dominate a greater share of sectors in the U.S. and global economies, business investment has slowed and wages are increasingly static (Foster, 2009). Although the economy has been on this trajectory for quite some time, a series of financial bubbles has obscured the trend. The most recent burst triggered the Great Recession of 2007–2008 and laid bare this overall trend in the macroeconomy to such a degree that even mainstream economists such as Larry Summers openly recognize “secular stagnation” as the economy’s dominant course (Bernanke, 2011; Hall, 2011).
The immediate attributes of a stagnating economy are a general decline in business investment, static or deteriorating wage levels, and deficit spending by the federal government in its attempt to reignite sustained growth. The result is that in the wake of each burst bubble, the economy “recovers” from each setback weakly, without returning to its earlier strengths (NPR, 2015). Thus, over time, although specific sectors may experience some growth, the overall economy continues to slow in terms of investment, jobs creation, and wage increases and display increasing fragility in each of these spheres.
The longer-term implications of an economy caught in stagnation are quite serious. As the situation continues to worsen, there is tremendous pressure, both from the business community and the general public, to somehow stimulate the economy again at a rapid pace. Politically this pressure has yielded two possible—and very separate—paths. The first is a sharp turn to the right, which we have witnessed in this country as well as elsewhere. This tendency eschews democracy as too weak and inefficient to come to grips with the problem, and embraces an elitist, chauvinist, conservative attitude as the priorities of growth overwhelm any other social goal. The other possibility is a shift to a more progressive politics based upon solidarity, community, and innovation. This position sees community building and social solidarity as core elements in remaking the economy in a new light.
As noted, one of the attributes of stagnation is increasingly static wages (in real terms) among the majority of the population. In addition to this plateau or decline in the growth of wages is increasing decline in overall job security as flexible employment, temporary work, informal labor, and short-term contracting replace steady, full-time, family-wage work.
The stagnation of real wages combined with job insecurity is transforming the workforce into the “precariate” (a portmanteau of “precarious” and “proletariat”): people who do not have the job security of the previous generation. The precariate is not simply the underclass but often people with job experience, education, and some assets who are often working several part-time positions to make ends meet.
With the economy faltering, the question then is how to organize politically and economically to restore—and perhaps even establish greater—equity, fairness, and democracy to this economy? And how is this to be done in the face of an increasingly globalized, monopolistic economy and a fragmented, precarious workforce? With the relative size of the U.S. unionized workforce in decline for decades, where should we look for ideas that could offer effective strategies for organizing the unemployed and underskilled in the face of the growing monopolistic economic power of corporations?
Perhaps one of the best places to look is in the earlier labor history of the United States. Before the establishment of the National Labor Relations Board, sanctioned collective bargaining, and other pro-union legislation, the situation at the turn of the twentieth century was oddly similar to that in play today. Corporations were growing exponentially in political and economic strength. Workers were largely unorganized, especially workers without specific high-end skills. While some skilled workers were organized, they represented a small fraction of the workforce. Unorganized workers often had to work on short contracts or with no job security at all, a tableau not unlike the conditions facing many workers today.
Into this highly precarious economic condition stepped the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), whose history and experience offer insight into how to grapple with these problems today. Founded in Chicago in 1905 by a veritable “who’s who” of the leading, militant labor organizers of the 20th century, including Mother Jones, Eugene Debs, and “Big Bill” Haywood, the IWW sought to organize and build “One Big Union” as a counterforce to emerging monopoly capitalism. The key to this strategy was to organize industrially as opposed to the then-contemporary practice of organizing workers on the basis of specific crafts as promoted by the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The IWW (or Wobblies, as they became known) saw the self-defeating nature of this craft-based strategy. When workers were organized in separate crafts under separate contracts, employers frequently pitted one group of workers against another. To make matters more difficult, the AFL activists sought only to organize skilled workers, leaving unskilled workers, the vast majority of the workforce, out of the equation.
True to their vision of building “One Big Union of all the workers,” the Wobblies set out to organize any and all members of the working class, skilled as well as unskilled, manufacturing as well as service workers, Black, Mexican, and Ethnic as well as White and Protestant, and women as well as men. To accomplish this task, IWW activists lit out across the country (and eventually around the world) to organize workers wherever the job was. From logging and mining operations in the Pacific Northwest and Great Basin, to the dock yards along the Coasts, and the auto industry, wheat fields, and orchards in the Midwest, the Wobblies began agitating for higher wages, safer and more dignified working conditions, and, ultimately, industrial democracy.
The documentary film The Wobblies, by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer, and the book The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First Hundred Years, by Fred Thompson and Jon Bekken, offer an excellent introduction and exploration of the IWW’s origins, great battles, strategies, and continued agitation and survival into the 21st century. Bird and Schaffer’s film, released in 1979, covers the union’s early, “heroic” period. The film’s perhaps greatest asset includes numerous interviews with IWW organizers from the 1910s and 1920s, veterans of the epic strikes in the textile mills of Lawrence (MA) and Paterson (NJ), and the original timber wars of the Pacific Northwest. Although many of the storytellers are old, in their 70s and 80s, their fire and whimsy is still evident when recounting their times on the picket line, in the lumber camps, or riding the rails. Known as the “singing union,” from the Wobblies’ proclivity for breaking into song, several of the oldtimers launch into choruses of “Hold the Fort” or “Halleluiah, I’m a Bum,” or other standards of the IWW’s Little Red Songbook.
Although the historic film clips and first-person narratives of Bird and Schaffer’s Wobblies are irreplaceable gems, the film suffers from a general lack of context. Without at least a passing knowledge of the IWW and the labor struggles of the early 20th century, some of the film’s more subtle points are lost. An example, especially relevant in today’s globalized workforce, is the very effective Wobbly strategy of bringing together workers across language and ethnic lines to join together in solidarity. While this gains passing reference in one interview with an old IWW hand, the film’s narrators leave this largely unexplained and unexplored. In addition, the severe and at times murderous repression the Wobblies faced is underplayed. The one exception in this latter case is the massacre of Wobbly members on the docks at Everett (WA) in 1916.
Another place where Bird and Schaffer’s treatment is too subtle is in the explanation of IWW tactics for “getting the goods” in workplace concessions from the bosses. While one Wobbly veteran makes a case for the union’s innovation of “striking on the job” and several others briefly comment on the power of sabotage, the film only hints at the tactical and strategic value of these shop-floor means of direct action. (For a fuller treatment of Wobbly theory and practice on nonviolent direct action, see Flynn, Smith, & Trautmann, 2014). Similarly, the IWW’s overall vision of establishing a “Commonwealth of Labor” organized around industrial democracy makes only the most minor appearance in the film. Still, despite these shortcomings, Bird and Schaffer’s film gives voice to the first generation of Wobblies, and it is a voice that still speaks with strength and determination for social equity.
Thompson and Bekkes’ The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First Hundred Years, 1905–2005 fills in many of the details hinted at in Wobblies. Fred Thompson, long-time editor of the IWW newspaper The Industrial Worker, writes the book’s first half covering the union’s growth and ultimate repression and near disappearance during its first 50 years between 1905 and 1955. Covering the actions of the union’s campaigns in detail, Thompson describes the events, strategy, tactics, and occasionally theory of the IWW’s powerful and tumultuous first half-century.
Particularly strong is Thompson’s relating of the large number of industries targeted by IWW organizers during this period. Thompson details campaigns across job sites and economic sectors around the country (and occasionally around the world). Although Thompson impressively recounts the tremendous breadth of the Wobblies’ energy and activism, the narrative often suffers from his decidedly nonacademic and nearly staccato news headline style that moves as restlessly and swiftly from one IWW organizing campaign to another as the rail-riding Wobbly organizers themselves.
The book makes up for this weakness in its second part, written mainly by Bekke, who joined the IWW in 1978 and later became its General Secretary-Treasurer. In a smoother, more recognizable style, Bekke covers the Wobblies’ recovery after the marked repression of the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare of the 1920s. Like a tough old lumber worker in the primeval forest, the Industrial Workers of the World, though battered, outlawed, ignored, and isolated both by the owning classes and the more mainstream elements of the American labor movement, refused to disappear.
Bekke details the union’s stubborn refusal to “go gently into that good night” of historical irrelevance. Instead, it is found organizing workers in small shop manufacturing firms in the Ohio Valley, grocery workers in the west, and bicycle messengers in the skyscraper canyons of New York City. The IWW makes inroads into the receptive world of consumer co-ops spawned in the 1970s and appears doing solidarity work in nonintervention struggles fighting the new imperialism. While still too weak to make efforts at organizing the types of “commanding heights” industries the Wobblies took on in the past such as auto, timber, and mining, Bekke outlines the union’s return to its roots of organizing the unskilled, in the form of today’s precariate, in the proliferation of low-wage, low-security service industries. The contemporary IWW also finds friends and new members in rank-and-file workers abandoned or fed up with the declining remnants of the bureaucratic, old-line unions.
In telling this story, Bekke shows the promise and the difficulties of forging new paths in organizing workers in the fragmented, global labor market. Though many of the contemporary Wobbly campaigns end in defeat (as do those of most other contemporary unions), their efforts are revealing. Of particular note in this regard is the union’s growing return to shop[1]floor organizing built around addressing workers’ immediate concerns rather than the elusive pursuit of gaining recognition from the largely compromised National Labor Relations Board.
It is here that the future promise and past relevance of the IWW is the strongest. Born as an uncompromising union dedicated to solidarity and establishing a new economy in which the workers “take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the earth,” the Wobblies struck fear in the established powers of both monopoly capitalism and elitist unionism (IWW, 2016). The root of this fear was—and still is—that unskilled, transient laborers (representing the majority of the U.S. and global workforce), upon which systems of exploitation were and still are dependent, might organize and find a voice.
During its initial heyday, the Wobblies were the vehicle through which this voice was found. Planners should take a particular interest in this history and its contemporary possibilities for two reasons. First, as the global and national economies continue to become more unstable and less able to “deliver the goods” for a growing percentage of working people and their families (a category that now includes large portions of the middle class as well as traditional working class), planners will increasingly be called upon to address these issues. Our response cannot be to offer more of the same half-measures of market solutions or “public–private partnerships” that have proven ineffective in staving off this condition. Only a sense of the history of previous struggles and their relevance for the present and future can provide the type of grist that generating new strategies for economic justice require.
Second, the IWW sought, as its ultimate goal, to establish a far more equitable society where all people regardless of race, gender, skill level, or ethnicity could share in the fruits of production that are the domain of no single person or class. Planners are fundamental to finding the way forward to such a society. The IWW’s idealism and committed struggle provide a “north star” by which we can begin to chart our course. Their history is groundwork for the future planners will have to help build as we face the challenges of the present day.
As the global economy becomes increasingly unstable, undermining job security and the dignity of work, the IWW’s pioneering tactics and perhaps even the union itself may again be the means through which working people of all walks secure “the good things in life” while building “a new society within the shell of the old.” For planners, organizers, and humane persons interested in making that change, Wobblies and The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First Hundred Years are a fine means of learning how to jump on that train.
About the Author
Dr. Robert F. Young works as an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the fields of urban planning, sustainable economic development, and urban ecology. His research centers on the planning, governance, and financing of metropolitan green infrastructure and on economic development initiatives for sustainable cities and regions. Dr. Young’s most recent academic publications include articles in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Landscape and Urban Planning, Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Urban Ecosystems, and a chapter in the book Garden Cities to Green Cities published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
References
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Magdoff, F., & Foster, J. (2014). Stagnation and financialization: The nature of the contradiction. Monthly Review, 66(1), 1–24.
