GENERAL STRIKE BAND
Portland, Oregon

Labor history is often a bewildering account of brutal injustice on the part of the ruling class toward the working class.

The following information offers a brief history of some significant struggles of the past:

Wobbly - Nickname for a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical labor union still agitating today on behalf of aggrieved workers, the IWW reached the height of its membership and successful actions between 1905 and 1920, it was also instrumental in laying the groundwork for the formation of the CIO.

The Wobblies were known also as a singing union, singing the songs of Joe Hill, Ralph Chaplin, T-Bone Slim and others. The IWW led the Bread and Roses Strike in Lawrence Massachusetts in 1912 and were involved in several FREE SPEECH FIGHTS.

Free Speech Fights - There were free speech fights in Fresno, Denver, Kansas City, Duluth, New Castle, San Diego, Missoula and some other cities between the years 1908 and 1916.

The free speech fight in Spokane, Washington in 1909-1910 went like this: Workers would come into town looking for a job cutting timber, they would have to pay a fee to a contractor (labor shark) to tell them where they could get hired.

Well, the shark would send 500 men out for 50 jobs, so the timber company would take the 50 that would work for the lowest wages. They would also make money from being in cahoots with the shark. To stop this the Wobblies needed a union hiring hall. When they would soapbox this idea on street corners the cops, under the thumb of the timber barons, would arrest them.

Free speech didn't apply to them it was obvious. The word was spread up and down the coast and other places and Wobblies flocked into town. They would line up in huge lines and take turns speechifying, sometimes all they said was"fellow workers" before getting hauled off to jail, some of them read the Declaration of Independence. There were so many that they filled the jails, high school gymnasium , the courthouse, etc.

The town quickly got real tired of having to feed them all and the courts were tied up with free speech cases. They released the prisoners and the workers got their union hall and the right to speak on the streets.

Sometimes they lost free speech fights and were given a bloody beating to get out of town and stay out.

Bread and Roses Strike - Textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 went on strike. They were averaging $6 a week pay. A state law reduced the work week from 56 to 54 hours, the mill owners responded to the new law by speeding up the looms and then cut pay, that was the last straw. When the new pay scale was handed out, suddenly the cry "short pay, short pay" echoed from mill to mill until everyone found themselves marching in the streets.

Besides 23 militia companies, the employers imported thugs from a Boston detective agency who masqueraded as strikers and destroyed property and assaulted people on the street. Strike leaders were jailed. The thugs used dynamite to portray the strikers as saboteurs. A little girl, Annie LoPizzo, was shot.

Despite frame-ups and killings and hunger, the spirits of the strikers remained high, the Wobblies helped bring people from many different backgrounds together to dictate their own strike preparations and plans. This in itself was amazing as the lack of communications between people of different ethnicities caused people to be suspicious or at least leery of the ways of others. A woman held a sign that said 'Give us bread, but give us roses too.'

The workers sang The Internationale in 14 languages, day and night the dynamic 21 year old Wobbly, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and others made stirring speeches, organized prisoners' defenses and raised money for food. The strikers sent hundreds of children to other cities so they could eat. Then the city authorities of Lawrence said no more children could leave.

Here is a description of the Women's Committee of Philadelphia, who were there to care for the children, when the strikers tried to send another group of children away on the train:

The station itself was surrounded by police and militia....When the time approached to depart, the children, arranged in a long line, two by two in orderly procession, with their parents near at hand, were about to make their way to the train when the police, who had by that time arranged themselves along both sides of the door, closed in on us with their clubs, beating right and left, with no thought of the children, who were in the most desperate danger of being trampled to death. The mothers and children were thus hurled in a mass and bodily dragged to a military truck, and even them clubbed irrespective of the cries of the panic-stricken women and children...

This was the turning point of the strike, the public outcry was so large that a congressional investigation was called. The textile manufacturers surrendered and the workers returned with 5 to 20% wage increases and other pay benefits weighted toward the unskilled laborers. Thousands of other mill workers throughout New England subsequently got raises.

The strike ultimately showed what potential power unskilled and semi-skilled laborers have. It was a an IWW benchmark too as their membership and successes of the next five years increased greatly.