The Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, was founded in 1905 in Chicago, and by 1908 had become influential among migrant laborers in the Pacific Northwest. Members were dubbed "Wobblies" and soon earned a reputation for loud singing, radicalism, and militancy. IWW members and organizers played an active role in Northwest metal mining (in Idaho), logging, and agriculture. In 1909 the IWW Spokane free-speech fight was an early and legendary example of direct action in support of constitutional rights. The massive statewide lumber strike in the summer of 1917 brought the industry to a halt at the beginning of World War I. The union's bloody clashes with authorities in Everett (1916) and Centralia (1919) became the stuff of legend. IWW membership and influence declined sharply after the anti-radical purges of the World War I era, but the union never quite died off. Young IWW members made a dramatic reappearance in Seattle during protests around the World Trade Organization conference in late 1999.

A Democratic, Industrial Union

The IWW was an "industrial" union, one that embraced and organized both skilled and unskilled workers within particular industries. Formed in 1905 partly in opposition to the craft unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), it was a democratic union with a mix of radical anti-capitalist politics. The founding membership included socialists and labor unionists of various kinds, dominated by the militant, radical metal miners of the Western Federation of Miners.

Shortly after the IWW was formed, Bill Haywood and two other leaders of the Western Federation of Miners were arrested on the charge that they had murdered former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg. Idaho Senator William Borah was the prosecuting attorney and Clarence Darrow led the defense. The three union leaders were acquitted, and Haywood returned to an active role with the IWW.

Tenets and Tactics

From 1908 to 1917, the IWW in Washington state was particularly influential among migrant laborers who rode the boxcars to follow the harvest or to get a job in a lumber camp. The IWW was considered radical because it supported worker ownership of factories, a 40-hour work week, and sanitary conditions in logging camps.

Seattle General Strike and After

By 1919 many IWW leaders were in jail, and many Wobbly union halls had been raided, wrecked, and closed. The 1919 Seattle General Strike was not dominated by IWW members, yet it would be unfair to dismiss IWW influence in the city's labor community. Many unionists were dual union members. As one of the songs in the late 1980s rock opera Seattle 1919 goes, many workers had one card for their job and one for what they believed.

Most local and national press denounced the strike, while conservatives called for stern measures to suppress what looked to them like a revolutionary plot. Mayor Ole Hanson (1874-1940), elected the year before with labor support, armed his police force and threatened martial law and federal troops. After the General Strike fizzled out in February 1919, police raided the IWW hall and Socialist Party headquarters, and closed the labor daily newspaper Union Record.

The IWW survived, but continuing government harassment and the return of prosperity in the Roaring Twenties undercut its influence. It was involved in organizing laborers at late-1920s Seattle City Light projects in the North Cascades, in Boulder Dam near Las Vegas, Nevada, and in the Yakima orchards of the 1930s. It is no secret that many older Wobblies were involved in both the organizing in the woods of the Northwest and in the nation's auto industry in the 1930s.

As of the late 1990s, IWW chapters were operating in Seattle, Olympia, and Portland, Oregon. Seattle Wobblies tried to organize workers at a small food store in West Seattle, but the drive ended when the store management changed in 1998. In November 1999, IWW members and supporters were prominent among the thousands who protested the World Trade Organization's Seattle session.

The IWW's Little Red Songbook, first published in Spokane in 1909, has been updated constantly, proving that Wobbly ideas and hopes are still alive. It has been a cultural icon of the labor movement, helping to keep alive the notion that "When you stop singing, the revolution has ended and so has the progress of the union."

The IWW's founders included many historically important labor activists and socialist thinkers, including Big Bill Haywood, James Connolly, Daniel De Leon, Eugene V. Debs, Thomas Hagerty, Lucy Parsons, Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, Frank Bohn, William Trautmann, Vincent Saint John, Ralph Chaplin, and many others.

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