The Wobblies (1979)
Directed by Deborah Shaffer and Stewart Bird. Narration by Roger Baldwin.
“This is the Continental Congress of the working class. We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism… What we want to establish at this time is a labor organization that will open wide its doors to every man that earns his livelihood either by his brain or his muscle.” William ‘Big Bill’ Haywood, Opening Remarks at the Founding Convention of the IWW, 1905.
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in 1905 in Chicago with the aim of organizing all workers, no matter their skill, occupation, national origin, race, or sex, into “One Big Union.” Capitalism would be sunk when workers finally took into their own hands “the economic power, the means of life… the control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters,” as the union’s president, “Big Bill” Haywood, put it.
The IWW’s message of labor internationalism, class struggle, and uncompromising solidarity resonated in the most oppressed layers of the working class—those whom the American Federation of Labor (AFL) viewed to be the unorganizable “trash at labor’s door,” as one bureaucrat described industrial workers. With a few notable exceptions, the unions that
— source wsws.org | Tom Mackaman | 25 May 2022