It was founded in 1905, and at one time had 150,000 members. Its membership was gutted by extreme persecution during the red scare, and the Taft-Hartley act essentially outlawed their (very successful) tactics. Historically, the AFL-CIO raided members during those persecutions to swell their own ranks.
The IWW’s membership has been steadily growing in recent years as their tactics become needed once more, especially now that the NLRB has been captured and is effectively union hostile. Traditional unions are very much reliant on a friendly NLRB to function and thrive, and are not generally well equipped tactically to fight back against the current regime. We’ll need to call upon those old tactics to survive this period, and hopefully to give unions their teeth back, as they are currently quite a moderate group content with marginal gains that often barely keep up with inflation.
There’s a lot of merit in joining the IWW to help build it up back to its former glory, as it’s the only union in the US that is at its core is working toward abolishing capitalism, instead of becoming content making it slightly more bearable.
It was founded in 1905, and at one time had 150,000 members. Its membership was gutted by extreme persecution during the red scare, and the Taft-Hartley act essentially outlawed their (very successful) tactics. Historically, the AFL-CIO raided members during those persecutions to swell their own ranks.
The IWW’s membership has been steadily growing in recent years as their tactics become needed once more, especially now that the NLRB has been captured and is effectively union hostile. Traditional unions are very much reliant on a friendly NLRB to function and thrive, and are not generally well equipped tactically to fight back against the current regime. We’ll need to call upon those old tactics to survive this period, and hopefully to give unions their teeth back, as they are currently quite a moderate group content with marginal gains that often barely keep up with inflation.
There’s a lot of merit in joining the IWW to help build it up back to its former glory, as it’s the only union in the US that is at its core is working toward abolishing capitalism, instead of becoming content making it slightly more bearable.