The IWW asked workers to join the “one big union,” even if they were not citizens, “skilled,” English-speaking, white, or male. Any worker can join, even dues-paying members of other unions.

The IWW did not have the organizational staying power of the AFL, but it still exists and it is more than a paper organization. Over the past couple of decades, ...

Welcome to National Industrial Workers of the World Day, a celebration that highlights the struggles and triumphs of workers ...

Both bases of IWW success in 1916–1917 proved the organization’s undoing. Because IWW membership and workplace actions were concentrated in economic sectors vital to the war effort, their business ...

The IWW stood apart for other reasons—it was a general union (as opposed to a craft union) that welcomed men and women, regardless of race or ethnic background.

The IWW was founded in 1905 in Chicago at a gathering its first president, William “Big Bill” Haywood, of the Western Federation of Miners, ...

Franklin Rosemont, Joe Hill: The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (Charles H. Kerr: Chicago, 2003). It’s the right man by the right biographer at the right time ...

The history we tell ourselves about the Mexican IWW is quite brief. Two events are most often repeated that carry the IWW banner: the Insurrectos that invaded Baja, Calif., and proclaimed the Tijuana ...

The IWW has such an outsized role in our romantic imagination of labor’s past glory. Frequently, treatments of the Bread and Roses strike, the many arrests of ...

This documentary about an IWW-led strike of copper miners in the company town of Bisbee, Arizona was recently added to Amazon, iTunes, and other VOD services.

Though most successful in the West, the IWW organized the stogie workers of Cleveland in 1908 and the rubber workers of Akron in 1912. Considered radical and un-American during WORLD WAR I, the IWW ...

Precisely because of this, the IWW was probably subjected to more sustained and intensive repression than any organization, labor union or otherwise, in our country’s history. Its members, the ...