IWW Organizing Manual

https://usa.anarchistlibraries.net/library/industrial-workers-of-the-world-iww-organizing-manual

A few snips from the detailed IWW manual about how to organize..

What Is Organizing?

Organizing is the process by which a group of people take power over some aspect of their lives—on 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 workplace—where 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.

A Class Conscious Working Class

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 worker’s 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 disaster—only 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 union—any union—that 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.

Who Can Organize?

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 boss’s 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 boss’s bawling out because you couldn’t 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 didn’t 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 specialists—rather 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 they’re trying to organize). It was built by working people like us, who recognized that only by uniting on the job—in industry—could we hope to win better conditions and build a better world.

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Part 5: Conclusion

Workers are increasingly becoming convinced, and for good cause, that the AFL-CIO business unions are incapable of stopping the current world-wide employer offensive against labor. Several strategies have been tried as alternatives—rank and file groups, union reform, corporate campaigns, political parties, electing new officers, and reform of labor laws. While all of these indicate a rebel spirit, none of these approaches has been effective.

The Industrial Workers of the World has demonstrated that a labor movement can be controlled by workers, win immediate improvements, and make major steps towards social change. Our experience shows that strong, fighting unions can be built in workplaces large and small, that workers can unite across ethnic and skis lines, and across national borders. As the old Wobbly saying notes, “Direct Action Gets the Goods.”

The IWW is practical, democratic, and up to date. While the AFL-CIO and kindred organizations limp along with structures, ideas and tactics forged in the 1800s (and obsolete even then), the IWW recognizes that class collaboration is a dead end, and that the employing class and those they hire (the working class) have interests as different as those of any group of buyers and sellers in the market place. IWW unionism looks toward the future, building on the lessons of the past.

The time has come to return to the tried-and-true methods of revolutionary industrial unionism. Growing numbers of workers are turning to the IWW, both to win better conditions from their bosses and to help build a brighter future for all workers. Whether or not the IWW takes root at your workplace and in your industry will depend upon you and your fellow workers, and the effort you’re willing to put into building the IWW.

This organizing manual is intended to help you get started.