It's a few days since I returned from the annual General Assembly of the IWW, this time in St. Louis. Thanks to all the Fellow Workers there for their great efforts and hospitality. Most participants at Assembly crashed in a former convent, bringing back memories, some not so fond, of my cat'lic upbringing. Residue of that upbringing sometimes makes it difficult for me to enjoy a vacation. Shouldn't I be using the time to do something "significant"?, that sort of thing. Good ol' cat'lic guilt.
Now a working vacation I can enjoy. And that's what Assembly constituted for me. It was great to share a beer with and put faces to all the names of new folks I had emailed, written, or phoned over the past year: a dynamic bunch. And it's always good to renew acquaintances with the long standing Wobs I only see once or twice a year, some of those relationships now going back longer than some of our younger members have been alive.
It was one of the youngest gatherings of Wobs I can remember, despite the presence of us dinosaurs here and there. The largest gathering during a time for caucuses was Fellow Workers with two years or less in the Union, about 80% of our membership. Many of them were representatives of new Branches and groups in the southeastern right-to-be-exploited states: Asheville NC, Austin TX, Atlanta, Memphis. I found that heartening; an indication that perhaps the south will rise again and this time it will be Union.
In my report to Assembly I outlined what a generally successful year the previous one had been for the Union. Membership continues to rise. It's doubled over the last two years. But, starting from a pretty small base, it needs to rise faster if we're going to again have a significant impact on the labor movement in my lifetime. It doesn't seem impossible judging from reports like the one I received the other day from Butte Montana where Fellow Workers lined up 16 new Wobs in two days. An email I put in the Assembly packet from a Fellow Worker in Lawrence Kansas tells of a dozen or so hard-core activists there planning to join largely as a result of IWW activity on the UPS picket line. Reports of that activity came in from around the U.S. Once again the Wobblies did themselves proud and won new allies among rank- and-filers for the support.
Then too, there are the eight new branches chartered over the past year, up from five new ones in the previous year. The winning of an NLRB election last week in Olympia, WA seems to have sparked public interest in us once again in the northwest. There were calls this week from reporters in Olympia and Seattle who are working on articles regarding the victory.
Internationally we have new Regional Organizing Committees in Australia and Tasmania. German Fellow Workers are setting up a tour for Wobbly musicians later this fall. The U.K. Wobs a putting out a new publication: "Bread and Roses", and had their own assembly a week following the General Assembly in the U.S. Bad news, but in the "we must be doing something right" category is that a FW in Moscow had her computer confiscated by whatever they're calling the KGB these days. We tried to get Fellow Worker Bright Chikezie from Sierra Leone to General Assembly, but failed because of communication problems. Hopefully next year.
The financial report is mixed. While deficit spending in the past year was half what it was in the previous year, it's still deficit spending. We need to get to break-even soon because the reserves are running out. And while still in the red (a good place to be except when talking about finances) we are having problems paying for adequate staffing to service the growing membership. It's an old adage that the treasury of the IWW is in the pockets of its members. Dig deep Fellow Workers.
On Monday about 40 of us marched in an energetic Wobbly contingent at the St. Louis Labor Day Parade. We didn't have the requisite AFL-CIO permission to participate. Not likely that it would have been forthcoming if we had asked since those bozos wouldn't even let the Teamsters participate when they were out of the AFL. We marched near the Gas Workers who used to be headed by deceased Wobbly Bob Tibbs Sr. Bob Jr. got dissed by one of their bureaucrats when he notified them of our intentions. "You'll have to get permission from so-and-so." said the bureaucrat. "No, we aren't asking for permission. I'm just informing you of our plans as a curtesy", replied Bob. Imagine workers having to ask permission to march in a workers' parade.
One the way back to Ypsilanti we passed a sign announcing the gravesite of Mother Jones. It seemed a fitting place to spend time on Labor Day, so we pulled off. While there we were joined by other Wobs coming from Assembly. Know, Mother, that your memory lives on and your message is being carried forward by the Wobblies.
See you at the next Wobbly gathering, in the next labor parade, at the next memorial to labor's heroes, or on the next picket line.
¨ Fred Chase, General Secretary-Treasurer