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    [One Big Union]

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    [
    One Big Union]. — Cleveland : IWW_ (Industrial workers of the World : 1905-....), . — 1 affiche (impr. photoméc.) : n. et b. ; 43 × 36 cm.

    • Affiches par pays  : États-Unis
    • Lieux d’archivages  : CIRA (Lausanne)
    • Liste des thèmes  : syndicalisme : syndicalisme révolutionnaire
    • Géographie, géopolitique et Histoire  :
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    [ texte (programme) au verso ; dessin (roue de l’organisation de One Big Union) ]

    texte :

    One Big Union

    Industrial Workers of the World

    […]

    The structure of the industrial system

    A labor organization to correctly represent the working class must have two things in view :

    First—It must combine the wage workers in such a way that it can most successfully fight the battles and protect .he interests of the working people of today in their struggle for fewer hours, more wages and better conditions.

    Secondly—It must offer a final solution of the labor problem—an emancipation from strikes, injunctions, jails, and scabbing of one against the other.

    Study the Chart and observe how this organization will give recognition to control of shop affairs, provide perfect industrial unionism, and converge the strength of all organized workers to a common center, from which any weak point can be strengthened and protected.

    Observe, also, how the growth and development of this organization will build up within itself the structure of an Industrial Democracy—a Workers’ Co-operative Republic—which must finally burst the shell of capitalist society and be the agency by which the workers will operate the industries, and appropriate the products to themselves.

    One obligation for all.

    A union man once and in one industry, a union man always and in all industries.

    Universal transfers.

    Universal emblem. All workers of the industry in one union ; all unions of industries in one big international union the world over.

    To start the IWW in your shop come to 8622 Buckeye road — telephone, Garfield 7114


    The IWW plan for industrial unionism

    SOCIAL relations and groupings reflect only mechanical and industrial conditions. The great facts of pre-sent industry are the displacement of human skill by machines and the increase of capitalist power through concentration in the possession of the tools with which wealth is produced and distributed.

    Because of these facts, trade division among laborers and competition among capitalists are alike disappearing. Class divisions grow ever more fixed and class antagonism more sharp. Trade lines have been swallowed up in a common servitude of all workers to the machines which they tend. New machines, ever replacing less productive ones, wipe out whole trades and plunge new bodies of workers into the ever-growing army of tradeless, hopeless unemployed. As human beings and human skill are displaced by mechanical progress, the capitalists need use the workers only during that brief period when muscles and nerves respond most intensely. The moment the laborer no longer yields the maximum of profits he is thrown upon the scrap pile alongside the discarded machine to starve. A dead line has been drawn, and an age limit established, to cross which, in this world of monopolized opportunities, means condemnation to industrial death.

    The worker, wholly separated from the land and the tools, with his skill of craftmanship rendered useless, is sunk in the uniform mass of wage slaves. He sees his power of resistance broken by class divisions, perpetuated from outgrown industrial stages. His wages constantly grow less as his hours grow longer and prices grow higher. Shifted here and there by the demands of profit takers, the laborer’s home no longer exists. In this hopeless condition he is forced to accept whatever humiliating conditions his masters may impose. He is submitted to a physical examination more searching than was the chattel slave when sold from the auction block. Laborers are no longer classified by differences in trade skill, but the employer assigns them according to the machines to which they are attached. These divisions, far from representing differences in skill or interests among the workers, are imposed by the employers that workers may be pitted against one another and spurred to greater exertion in the shop, and that all resistance to capitalist tyranny may be weakened by artificial distinctions.

    While encouraging these outgrown divisions among the workers the capitalists carefully adjust themselves to the new conditions. They wipe out all differences among themselves and present a united front in their war upon labor. Through employers’ associations, they seek to crush, with brutal force, by the injunctions of the judiciary, and the use of military power, all efforts at resistance. Or when the other policy seems more profitable, they conceal their daggers beneath the cloak of patriotism and hoodwink and betray those whom they would rule and exploit. Both methods depend for success upon the blindness and internal dissensions of the working class. The employers’ line of battle and methods of warfare correspond to the solidarity of the mechanical and industrial concentration, while workers still form their fighting organizations on lines of long-gone trade divisions.

    The recent San Francisco General Strike emphasizes this lesson.

    The A.F. of L. and its rock-ribbed Tory leadership ran true to form in the Frisco Strike, as it has in every recent strike, large or small. From the very beginning no efforts were spared to betray the strikers and to compromise the strike issue. From beginning to end the entire activity
    of the well-fed fakirs of the official unions were directed to the end that the strike should be called off and the strikers and their cause turned over to the tender mercies of the employers and the little playmates of the employing class, the politicians.

    It must be said to the credit of the new rank and file spirit of Labor that such overtures were consistently and indignantly rejected. With the settlement of the auto, steel and other strikers in mind, the Frisco strikers quite rightly figured that they had little to look for from this quarter. From the very beginning, the Frisco Strike was a three cornered fight. First came the struggle of the strikers against the employers over the matter of union demands, then came the struggle between the rank and file of the strikers against the treachery of the paid officials of their own unions ; and finally came the struggle between the strikers and the politicians. This last was not the least important phase of the fight, for it will be remembered that Governor Merriam’s contribution was the militia, and General Johnson’s, a hysterical diatribe against the General Strike. The Communist politicians, seeking as always to fish in troubled waters, beclouded the issue with the strident overtones of characteristic Communist Boastfulness. Keeping in mind the fact that the Frisco rank and file strikers were also hampered in their commendable efforts by the obsolete craft structure of their unions, one can see how marvelous it is that they were able to go as far as they did.

    One of the big lessons of the Frisco strike is the fact that One Big Strike calls for a new union alignment. More and more will the modern wage worker learn that trying to get General Strike performance from a craft union is like trying to get an airplane speed from a horse and buggy. This is obviously as impossible as it would be to fire heavy artillery projectables from a pop-gun. There is no escaping the fact that One Big Strike calls for One Big Union. Fortunately there are indications that the younger and more militant element of the old-line unions are not unaware of this pressing and all-important need for the industrial type of unionism.

    This worn out and corrupt system offers no promise of improvement or adaptation. There is no silver lining to the clouds of darkness and despair settling down upon the world of labor.

    This system offers only a perpetual struggle for slight relief from wage slavery. It is blind to the possibility of establishing an industrial democracy, wherein there shall be no wage slavery, but where the workers will own the tools they operate, and the product of which they alone should enjoy.

    It shatters the ranks of the workers into fragments, rendering them helpless and impotent on the industrial battlefield.

    Separation of craft from craft renders industrial solidarity impossible.

    Union men scab upon union men ; hatred of worker for worker is engendered, and the workers are delivered helpless and disintegrated into the hands of the capitalists.

    Craft jealousy leads to the attempt to create trade monopolies. Prohibitive initiation fees are established that force men to become scabs against their will. Men whom manliness or circumstance have driven from one trade are thereby fined when they seek to transfer membership to the union of a new craft.

    Craft divisions hinder the growth of class consciousness of workers, foster the idea of harmony of interests between employing exploiter and employed slave. They permit the association of the misleaders of the workers with the capitalists in conferences, where plans are made for the perpetuation of capitalism, and the permanent enslavement of the workers through the wage system.

    Previous efforts for the betterment of the working class have proven abortive because limited in scope and disconnected in action.

    Universal economic evils afflicting the working class can be eradicated only by a universal working class movement. Such a movement of the working class is impossible while separate craft and wage agreements are made favoring the employer against other crafts in the same industry, and while energies are wasted in fruit-less jurisdictional struggles which serve only to further the personal aggrandizement of union officials.

    THE INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD is an organization to fulfill these conditions. It is the modern, scientific movement of the working class toward emancipation by INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM. All the workers in any division of an industry are organized into an INDUSTRIAL UNION, so branched as the needs of the industry may require ; these INDUSTRIAL UNIONS are in turn organized into INDUSTRIAL DEPARTMENTS of connecting, or kindred industries, while all are brought together in the GENERAL ORGANIZATION of the INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD —ONE BIG UNION OF ALL THE WORKING CLASS of ALL THE WORLD, making possible world-wide working-class SOLIDARITY.

    It is founded on the class struggle and its general ad-ministration is conducted in harmony with the recognition of the irrepressible conflict between the capitalist class and the working class. It is established as the industrial organization of the working class, without affiliation with, or support of, any political or non-political sect.

    Industrial branch, industrial union, departmental and general administration, union labels, buttons, badges and emblems, transfer cards, initiation fees and per capita tax are uniform throughout.

    All members must hold membership in the industrial union in which they are employed, but there is a universal (free) transfer of membership between all unions.

    The initiation fee is one dollar with fifty cents monthly dues. In addition to this the members are assessed twenty-five cents every three months for which they receive our official paper, mailed to their homes every week.

    The general administration issues publications representing the entire union and its principles which reach all members in every industry at regular intervals.

    Hundreds of thousands of workers, in every civilized country, are coming to understand the principles of industrial unionism. They are organizing for the battles of today, for better conditions, and for the final clash in the future when the general lock-out of the parasite class of non-producers will end the contest for industrial possession.

    If you are one of the millions needed to accomplish the task, join the industrial union composed of workers in the shop or plant where you work. If none exists be the first to get busy. Get others, organize them. Learn to tackle the industrial problems, show others how the workers will be able to run the industries through agencies of their own creation the world over.

    For further information come to

    The IWW Headquarters 8622 Buckeye Road Telephone, GArfield 7114 Cleveland, Ohio

    [page ?] 42

    Issued by the Cleveland Organization Committee Metal and Machinery Workers Industrial Union No. 440 of the IWW


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