To the All Freeters Union and all of our fellow workers in Japan:

May Day greetings and solidarity from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)! We thank you for your warm introduction and we would now like to respond with an introduction of our own.

The IWW is a union for all workers, organized across industrial lines (transportation, food service, education, etc.) rather than divided into individual crafts (trucker, packer, teacher, etc.). We are headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, with the majority of our members living in the United States and Canada. We also have a strong and rapidly growing membership in the United Kingdom, and other members in Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, and Australia. Despite the broad geographical scope of our membership, we are relatively small in numbers. Currently there are about 2,000 active members of the IWW, but we have seen a lot of growth in the past 10 years and we expect this trend to continue in the future.

The IWW was founded in 1905, as a radical alternative to the conservative labor unions run by the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The IWW organized the elements of the workforce that other unions considered “unorganizable”: immigrants, racial minorities, women, “unskilled” laborers, migrant farm workers and “hoboes” who hopped trains across the country in search of work. IWW songwriters like Joe Hill put the organization’s ideas to popular tunes and IWW newspapers spread throughout North America and beyond.

By 1913, the IWW was a major force to be reckoned with and had won some major strikes that made national headlines in the U.S. media. The boss class and the government decided that the IWW was a serious threat that needed to be crushed. Over the next ten years, slanderous attacks from the media, mob violence financed and organized by the bosses, brutal government raids, internal divisions, and trumped up “conspiracy” trials, combined to devastate the IWW. Since that time we have never approached the power in numbers that we once had, but the organization survived nonetheless, and learned from many of its early mistakes. At times, the IWW held on by a thread, with only a few hundred members and very little activity. Yet today we have rebounded and are again a vibrant and effective labor union committed to the same principles the IWW was founded on over 100 years ago.

The IWW has always believed that “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common”. The ultimate mission of the IWW was, and still is, to unite the working class, abolish the wage system, and give birth to an economic and social system run autonomously by workers. However, we do not intend to achieve these revolutionary goals through political parties or violence, but rather through worker organizing and the power of the general strike. In the words of “Big Bill” Haywood, one of the IWW’s most important historic leaders, “If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists. . .”

Despite these lofty goals, IWW organizers realize the importance of engaging in the day to day struggles of workers for better pay and benefits, health and safety, job security, and a voice in decision-making. While we are suspicious of contracts with the boss because we know that there can be no true peace between the two classes, we will fight for good contracts in cases where we believe they will be strategic. However, contract or no contract, our goal is to build up rank-and-file workers’ power on the job. We call this strategy “solidarity unionism” as opposed to the “business unionism” of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win unions, which pursue worthless contracts with little participation from their members, in an effort to increase their numbers (and revenue from dues).

We have job branches in many different industries, with some of the strongest concentrations in food service and education. Some of our best known campaigns include the Starbucks Workers Union, the immigrant food-service workers’ struggles in New York City, and the struggle to save jobs at universities in Scotland and England. These are a few examples of the diverse struggles the IWW is involved in.

However, we organize the worker, not the workplace. Any worker who agrees to our constitution may join the IWW and when members move from one job to another their membership continues uninterrupted. For this reason, the primary unit of organization for most members is the General Membership Branch (GMB). GMB’s are based in specific cities or regions and are composed of every IWW member living in that city, regardless of whether or not they are currently organizing at their job. This allows everyone to participate in the democratic process of running the union, and to take part in local organizing campaigns and other projects.

Outside of North America, members are also organized into Regional Organizing Committees (ROCs) such as the British Isles ROC (BIROC), the Australia ROC (AUSROC) and the German Language Area Members ROC (GLAMROC). These ROCs have a great deal of autonomy and are able to adapt the policies of the IWW to the unique situation of their regions. Internationally, the IWW is governed by an unpaid General Executive Board (GEB) of seven representatives directly elected by the members, and a General Secretary-Treasurer who administers the union from our General Headquarters in Cincinnati. Additionally we have an elected editor of our newspaper, the Industrial Worker, an Organizing Committee, a General Defense Committee, and an International Solidarity Commission (ISC). The ISC is the elected body that communicates with and supports our allies around the world. This statement is being written by the ISC.

We are very excited at the prospect of developing a relationship of mutual aid with the All Freeters Union and other likeminded workers’ organizations in Japan. We believe we have plenty of common ground on which to build such a relationship and we look forward to demonstrating our solidarity as both of our organizations continue to grow and develop. We hope to continue this dialog, and to begin discussing concrete proposals for how our organizations can support each other in the future.

On this May 1st International Workers Day, we think of our fellow workers in every corner of the globe and remember that anything is possible when the workers of the world unite!

In solidarity,

Mike Pesa
International Solidarity Commission
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
E-mail: solidarity@iww.org
Website: www.iww.org