A 100-Year-Old Idea That Could Transform the Labor Movement
One hundred years ago this month, a long-forgotten union powered by a remarkable engine of everyday solidarity and direct action was born. The union's distinguishing feature—that it was directly operated by workers on the job, bears little resemblance to today's traditional labor movement with formal negotiation by a bargaining agent as the end goal of even the most creative campaigns. With over 93 percent of private sector workers finding themselves outside of traditional union membership and with little prospect of getting in, this dramatically different and powerful unionism offers a compelling path forward for workers today.
The story of Local 8 of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) begins with a large industry-wide strike of longshoremen on the docks of Philadelphia. The local union borne of that May 1913 strike represented, in the view of some, the high-water mark of durable power and multiracial organizing in the widely-studied IWW. Despite that, its story was almost relegated to the proverbial dustbin of history.
The Local 8 example, and the road not taken for labor that it represents, was resurrected by historian Peter Cole in two recent books: Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia and Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly. His painstaking work unearthing this history is a major contribution to today's search for effective models of worker power.
While Local 8's solidarity unionism model, to use Staughton Lynd's term, was not that of the traditional labor union and its representational approach, it shouldn't be mistaken for the model used by today's worker centers either. Worker centers do stress leadership development, worker education, and community involvement, just as Local 8 did. But Local 8 was explicitly and proudly a labor union, and the control it exerted through worker organization on the job and across Philadelphia's maritime industry was the hallmark of union power.
http://www.indypendent.org/2013/05/28/100-year-old-idea-could-transform-labor-movement
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