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IWW Wobblies
of song and legend stir new interest as union forges comeback after an 80-year
lull
The Oregonian, November 3, 2002
by Brent Hunsberger
Mike Chiappetta, 23, a former Cascadia Forest Alliance fund-raiser working
as a Portland bicycle messenger, got tired of paychecks that didn't account
for his commissions.
Marcus Tenaglia, 27, who earned $700 a week as a bike messenger in Philadelphia,
found himself struggling to make rent doing the same job for $200 a week.
Pete "Lil' Pete" Beaman, 23, conducted market research, installed fiber-optic
lines, cooked in restaurants and became a bike messenger before arriving
at a point "where this idea of upward mobility, this idea of the American
dream, was really a sham."
All three shopped among conventional unions to represent them. But they turned
instead to a locally led revival of a labor movement that promised them a
voice in union decisions, zealous resistance to capitalism and low dues.
They became Wobblies.
The Industrial Workers of the World, a union with a colorful regional history
organizing mistreated timber workers and hobo harvesters in the early 1900s,
is making a comeback in Oregon after 80 years of dormancy.
Its quirky legacy of Marxist ideals and anarchical tactics has struck a chord
with a small but growing group of young, low-wage service workers who are
suspicious of corporate globalization and traditional labor unions.
"I don't think people in professions understand what's occurred amongst the
American working class," said Morgan Miller, 44, co-owner of the worker-owned
Red andBlack Coffee Collective and one of the local union's co-founders and
oldest members.
"I'm hanging out with a bunch of kids, and they have no options like I did,"
he said. "The well-paying jobs aren't out there. There's no way in. And they're
mad."
The IWW is bucking the trend of declining private-sector union membership.
It reopened a Portland union hall on May Day after a 27-year absence. And
it has used sit-ins and wildcat strikes to organize such unorthodox targets
as nonprofit social-service agencies, a coffee shop and a Nature's Northwest
grocery store.
But the Wobblies' mixed record of organizing successes, now as in its heyday
in the early 1920s, has prompted critics to question whether its tactics
do more harm than good. Merely by organizing, the bike messengers said, they
won wage increases and detailed commission reports from their employer, Transerv
Systems.
They later failed, however, to win an election to represent all company workers.
By the end of an eight-day strike last month, Chiappetta, Tenaglia and Beaman
had all lost their jobs.
Gassen Gutierrez, vice president of Transerv, said the strike shrank the
company's business, and he refused to credit the union for any changes at
the company. "I think everybody lost out on this deal," he said.
The IWW has never aimed to please bosses.
Founded in 1905 by Eugene Debs and other radical labor leaders who felt betrayed
by conventional unions, the Wobblies sought to unite the working class, regardless
of trade, to seize control of the workplace.
"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common," the union's
constitutional preamble reads. "It is the historic mission of the working
class to do away with capitalism."
The union found fertile ground in the post-frontier Northwest, where it organized
timber workers toiling in decrepit logging camps, migrant harvesters, seasonal
construction workers and minorities rejected by larger trade unions.
The IWW's wildcat strikes, sabotage, soapbox speeches and passive resistance
eventually sparked a violent response from government leaders and a patriotic
public bracing to enter World War I.
Hundreds of Wobblies were jailed; some were shot, tortured and killed. Their
movement subsided in the mid-1920s, languishing for the rest of the century.
But even though the Wobblies ceased to be a big factor in labor relations,
other unions adopted their "direct-action" tactics.
This fall's 12-day West Coast dockworker lockout was triggered by an alleged
work slowdown by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union -- a tactic
the Wobblies refined.
"The longshoremen on the West Coast have shown that there are creative ways
to disrupt the workplace," said Howard Kimeldorf, chairman of the University
of Michigan's sociology department and author of "Battling for American Labor:
Wobblies, Craft Workers and the Making of the Labor Movement."
"You can stage slowdowns. You can work to rule. These are actually Wobbly
tactics."
The movement also survived in its folk songs, and a rekindling of interest
in them helped spark the Portland resurgence. In 1995, some musicians enchanted
by Wobbly songs hooked up with a group of militant electricians and persuaded
Miller to restart a chapter in Portland.
Since then, the Wobblies have attracted 240 dues-paying members in Portland
and hundreds of sympathizers and established the union hall in a former bar
on East Burnside Street.
The crowd celebrating the opening came from all walks: bike messengers in
baggy shorts, a musician with gray hair, a social worker in a dress suit,
a hair dresser bearing a full-body tattoo.
They sang Wobbly songs, drank beer and complained about bosses. The Wobbly
way Today's Wobblies might not come from logging camps or have lost fingers
in mills. But they've latched onto the union's rebellious ideals and egalitarian
spirit.
The union's leaders receive no pay. Delegates collect nominal dues in person
rather than via employer payrolls. They readily help nonpaying members resolve
their workplace concerns.
Several members jointly operate worker-owned businesses, including the Back
to Back Cafe adjoining the union hall, the nearby Pleiades Full Service Salon
and Stumptown Printers.
Many Wobblies hold democratic ideals so dear that they refused to sit alone
for interviews; some declined to be photographed.
Well-read members speak eloquently of the union's creed.
"Where you're most repressed, where you're least in control of your life,
is at work," said Ian Wallace, a 31-year-old carpenter and branch secretary.
"It's the natural place to rebel."
Kimeldorf and other scholars said they aren't surprised the union is making
a comeback. Its staunch values of solidarity, equality and worker empowerment
are common in the anti-globalization movement, which flexed its muscle at
the World Trade Organization protest in Seattle in 1999.
Wallace estimates 50 IWW members joined the protest.
"I think now it's beginning to be our time again," said Alexis Buss, general
secretary-treasurer of the union, who is based at its headquarters in Philadelphia.
"Business unions have basically failed to come up with any kind of strategy
that understands that labor law is not going to work for unions or working
people trying to get a better deal," Buss said. "We come up with strategies
that don't rely on the law and don't rely on legal recognition to win grievances."
On the strength of the Portland District Council's organizing drives, the
council has become a model for the union's national membership, about 2,000
strong.
In August, the Portland council hosted a weekend organizing retreat for Wobblies
in the West. And last weekend, the union's national office flew Miller to
Chicago to stage a workshop on tactics.
Employers and labor attorneys have taken note.
"It appears that the Northwest, and Oregon in particular, has become the
chosen breeding ground for a 'new' kind of union organizer," attorneys for
the Portland law firm Bullivant Houser Bailey warned clients in a newsletter.
"Employers should beware -- the Wobblies are back."
Targeting nonprofits Employers and attorneys who've dealt with the union
have been frustrated by what they consider the IWW's hostile maneuvers and
its time-consuming insistence on negotiating by committee rather than by
individual representatives.
They said the union creates needless animosity for little worker gain, and
they question why the IWW has aggressively targeted nonprofits such as the
Salvation Army and Janus Youth Systems, a Portland nonprofit that serves
troubled youths.
Two years ago, a Wobbly working at Janus told management he wanted to represent
workers at Harry's Mother, Janus' early-intervention program and emergency
shelter for homeless and runaway youths.
Janus Executive Director Dennis Morrow said he'd previously talked with a
public employees union about organizing his workplace, hoping that it could
leverage more money from the state, which has increasingly used outside contracts
to save money.
"Our workers are being taken advantage of in the way our system is funded,"
Morrow said. "There could be a union strategy that could actually enhance
the wages of the people in this sector."
"But," he added, "it's not going to happen through the IWW movement." Morrow
said union leaders demonized his agency, staged a sit-in at Janus that required
police intervention and demonstrated outside its law firm, which had members
on Janus' board and provided legal help at reduced fees.
The union eventually won the right to represent 24 of the agency's 255 workers,
and after a year of negotiating, both sides agreed to contracts that the
union said boosted wages by $1 an hour.
Morrow maintains the increase would have happened anyway as a result of a
new contract with Multnomah County.
He said the new labor contracts limit Janus' flexibility to deal with workers'
personal needs. The agency's annual worker satisfaction survey recently found
that Harry's Mother was the only Janus program where morale declined, he
said.
Andrew Altschul, an Janus attorney from Stoel Rives, called the union's negotiating
approach "amateurish." Union members refused for weeks to designate representatives
and rarely put their positions in writing, he said.
Altschul also questioned the union's intentions with nonprofits.
"Organizing nonprofits makes absolutely no sense," he said. "Janus doesn't
have any money. It's just scraping to provide as broad a service as it can.
It's not like General Motors, where it's trying to widen its profit margin
for shareholders."
Miller conceded the union made mistakes with Janus. It since has replaced
the main organizer at Janus, he said.
"I don't think we did our best," Miller said, "but we were on a rapid learning
curve." Union officials said the Wobblies' interest in nonprofits' employees
is as much about working conditions as wages.
"It's not like the union is trying to put those places out of business,"
said Buss, the union's general secretary-treasurer. "There would not be unions
at nonprofits if nonprofits were run in a more egalitarian way."
No blueprint The Wobblies' success at Portland-area businesses has produced
equally mixed results.
Its campaign at Nature's on Southeast Division Street last year led to the
resolution of multiple safety concerns but a failed representation election.
It won an election at The Daily Grind coffee shop on Hawthorne Boulevard,
but organizing there has since stalled, Miller said.
On Monday, several bicycle messengers gathered at the union hall to evaluate
their organizing drive at Transerv.
Beaman, sipping yerba mate tea, blamed the failed representation election
in August on the National Labor Relations Board. He said the board opened
the vote to include not just Portland-area bike messengers and drivers but
also Transerv's process servers, who deliver court summonses throughout Oregon.
Beaman, who normally bikes everywhere, borrowed his roommate's truck to lobby
process servers as far away as Ashland.
The union still lost 22-14.
Before eight bike messengers staged a wildcat strike Oct. 17, they demanded
that Transerv provide workers with a written disciplinary policy. They said
management had begun using previously unenforced safety rules prohibiting
riding on sidewalks or excessive radio chatter to threaten Wobbly workers'
jobs.
The Wobblies also demanded that three temporary workers, who they said were
hired to break the union, be made permanent.
Company officials didn't budge. Eight days into the strike, the union offered
an unconditional return to work.
"It was evident they were willing to drive themselves into the ground before
they'd deal with us," Beaman said.
Transerv hired back two Wobbly messengers last week and put three others,
including Beaman and Mike Chiappetta, on a wait list. The three temporary
workers were let go. They now wear Wobbly buttons.
Gutierrez, vice president of the 17-year-old delivery service, denied that
management targeted Wobblies for harassment. He countered that aside from
the strike, the Wobblies staged intentional slowdowns to hurt the company
and that they verbally harassed him. He also denied that the company gave
in to union demands by providing commission reports, saying it was responding
to discussion at aregularly scheduled employee meeting.
"This is not a union issue," he said. "They use anything they can useto kind
of rally the troops."
Beaman and other former Transerv workers promise to take their cause toother
courier companies.
The district council, meanwhile, continues to host Saturday afternoon organizing
meetings for trade workers. It is also organizing on newfronts, which it
declines to identify.
Despite some stumblings here, the Wobblies said they are undeterred.
"The IWW is great because it doesn't have a blueprint," Miller said. "The
IWW says, 'We're not sure what the end's going to look like. All we know
is, we know ways throughout history that will make it better for working
people.' "
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