Industrial Workers of the World - IWW Organizing Manual
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This second edition of the IWWs Organizing Manual builds upon the First Edition, published in 1978. This edition was published in May 1996, after a draft was circulated to the entire IWW membership for comments. It is a collective product, incorporating large sections of the 1978 edition, and suggestions from dozens of Wobblies.
This Manual is prepared primarily for workers in the United States While much of the discussion may be useful to workers in other countries, the legal restrictions imposed dramatically from country to country. For example, many countries do not have the winner-take-all system of union representation elections that provide in the US. Instead every union with a presence in the workplace is entitled to represent its members. Obviously union organizing strategies will differ with conditions.
PO Box 13476,
Philadelphia, PA 19101, USA
(215) 2221905
General Membership Branch
PO Box 91691
Pasadena CA 91109
(626) 6441973
Organizing is the process by which a group of people take power over some aspect of their liveson the job or in their communities. While community struggles are important in their own right, this Organizing Manual concentrates on organizing our fellow workers in the workplacewhere we, as workers, have the industrial power to enforce our demands. Too often, organizing is viewed as leaders selling an external agency to workers to represent them. A vast body of law and huge bureaucracies exist to reinforce such notions. But this is not what our organizing is all about.
IWW organizing aims at enabling a group of working people to build a union and use it to express their needs and desire and to accomplish the changes they want to make in their economic lives. The important consideration is their needs and their lives. The organizer simply makes the tools available to them. The union is the people in it. If it is not, it will not be worth the trouble of fighting for, and it will be abandoned at the first pressure.
The basic feelings most working people share, that make the union their natural tool, are already there: class consciousness, the conviction that their interests are not identical with their employers; alienation from jobs they see as unrewarding and/or useless; self-respect that is outraged by the conditions of their work or the attitudes of their superiors. Organizing involves first understanding these working people as they now are, and then giving them information they need in order to be able to figure out how a union can meet their needs. The understanding is the important part.
For many, working class has become a dirty word since the 1930s. Paternalistic liberals try to define the working class out of existence by assigning workers above the poverty line to the middle class and the rest to an underclass (to become objects of government benevolence). Part of the elitist left likewise tries to deny that wage workers are a class conscious, potentially revolutionary class, and many left political parties identify class consciousness with acceptance of their party line. Establishment academics and politicians try to hide the working class in an amorphous middle class. None of these opinions changes reality.
The potential for a class-conscious working class exists because capitalist production exploits wage workers. Class consciousness depends not on labels and revolutionary rhetoric, but on the fact of oppression and each workers awareness of his/her own individual exploitation. The intensity and breadth of working class struggle depend upon the pressure of exploitation and the viability of the practical tools available for struggle.
Each generation of workers learns for itself the bitter truth that, regardless of the myths and success stories they were taught in school, in reality they will not rise out of their class. The options are closed off, and they are stuck. For the next 40 years or so they will work (assuming they can find jobs) for wages. And for most those wages will be so modest that they will live their lives on the edge of financial disasteronly two or three paychecks from the street.
For most workers, class consciousness does not extend beyond their particular employer and their immediate fellow workers. They do not connect their situation to a capitalist class controlling a capitalist government for their enslavement. Nevertheless, every time a worker supports his/her fellow workers or unionany unionthat worker is saying: My employer is my enemy. I must combine with my fellow workers to fight this situation.
Our job as organizers is to build on that latent class consciousness, to show our fellow workers how their individual situations are fundamentally the same, and result from the structure of the workplace, the economy and the society. Only by working together, by recognizing that an injury to one is an injury to all, can we hope for substantive improvements for ourselves.
Only class-conscious working people can organize their peers. We learn class consciousness in our blood and bones. We, each individually, learn the feel of our own particular bosss foot on our own particular neck. Without this personal experience, the knowledge in our heads is useless.
Our shared work experience develops understanding impossible to acquire in any other way. If you have never felt that you simply could not stand the last hour of a shift, how can you hope to understand that feeling in others? Or endured the humiliation of a bosss bawling out because you couldnt afford to quit? Or, for that matter, faced a job you hated every day because people you cared about depended on you for support and you didnt see another job in sight? If you have not had to make the thousand and one compromises with yourself and the way you would like things to be, how can you possibly understand most working people, who are forced to make such compromises?
Any class-conscious worker can be, and should be, an organizer. The business unions and government have led many of us to think of organizing as a job for specialistsrather than as something we do everyday on the job. The labor movement was not built by professional organizers (many of whom have never worked the jobs theyre trying to organize). It was built by working people like us, who recognized that only by uniting on the jobin industrycould we hope to win better conditions and build a better world.
Most IWW organizing drives start with someone on the job (perhaps someone who already holds a red card and has decided conditions are ripe to organize his/her fellow workers) approaching the union for help organizing their fellow workers. Sometimes workers write or call our main office and are referred to the local General Membership Branch (GMB). Or else the local engages in activities designed to find workers interested in activism in the workplace. and/or organizing the place they work. Either way, you generally start off with a (generally small) pre-existing base of support on the job and information about working conditions, pay rates, and other useful information (such as when shifts change); which gives you an invaluable head start on getting the organizing drive off the ground.
But whether the IWW is asked in by workers on the job or youre coming in cold it helps to do a little research on the employer and the job. Even under the best possible conditions, the chances of success are not always certain. Here are some considerations.
Size is important. On a very small job the turnover of a few people may wipe out a majority. On a very large job, organizing may he beyond our resources and competition from other unions will likely be keen. Business unions often decline to organize small workplaces due to the relatively high cost per member of organizing and representing the workers. So workplaces with less than 50 employees should have the least competition from other unions. However, even where it isnt possible to win an IWW majority, the possibility of building a job branch to maintain a union presence on the shop floor should not be overlooked.
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