Industrial unionism
"[10] The preamble of the IWW's constitution further emphasised that "There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on...."[11] In the United States, IWW executive board officer Frank Little was lynched from a railway trestle.
[12] Writing in 1919, Paul Brissenden quoted an IWW publication in Sydney, Australia: All the machinery of the capitalist state has been turned against us.
Our hall has been raided periodically as a matter of principle, our literature, our papers, pictures, and press have all been confiscated; our members and speakers have been arrested and charged with almost every crime on the calendar; the authorities are making unscrupulous, bitter and frantic attempts to stifle the propaganda of the I.W.W.
Within three months of the passage of the Australian Act, the American States of Minnesota and Idaho passed laws "defining criminal syndicalism and prohibiting the advocacy thereof."
[14]While Brissenden notes that IWW coal miners in Australia successfully used direct action to free imprisoned strike leaders and to win other demands, Wobbly opposition to conscription during World War I "became so obnoxious" to the Australian government that laws were passed which "practically made it a criminal offense to be a member of the I.W.W.
[16] In short the Industrial Union, is bent upon forming one grand united working class organization and doing away with all the divisions that weaken the solidarity of the workers to better their conditions.
The Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (GCTU) recruited skilled and unskilled workers from many industries, with membership growing to half a million within a few weeks.
He returned to Britain and helped to organize the Workers' International Industrial Union, which was similar to the IWW from North America.
[23] In 1904, the Western Federation of Miners was under significant pressure from military and employer violence in the Colorado Labor Wars.
The AFL was the largest organized labour federation, and the United Brotherhood of Railway Employees (UBRE) felt isolated.
The Scranton Declaration acknowledged that one affiliate, the United Mine Workers was formed as an industrial union but that other skilled trades—carpenters, machinists, etc.
Hoover, as the former United States Food Administrator, president of the Federated Engineering Societies, and then Secretary of Commerce in the Harding Cabinet in 1921, invited the heads of several "forward-looking" major corporations to meet with him.
[Hoover] asked these men why their companies didn't sit down with Gompers and try to work out an amicable relationship with organized labor.
Such a relationship, in Hoover's opinion, would be a bulwark against the spread of radicalism reflected in the rise of the "Wobblies," the Industrial Workers of the World.
[26] The craft-based AFL had been slow to organize industrial workers, and the federation remained steadfastly committed to craft unionism.
