The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or the Wobblies) is an international union. At its peak in 1923, the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after severe government repression as part of the first Red Scare and a 1924 split brought on by internal conflict. IWW membership does not require that one work in a represented workplace, nor does it exclude membership in another labor union.
The IWW contends that all workers should be united as a class and that the wage system should be abolished. They are known for the Wobbly Shop model of workplace democracy, in which workers elect their managers and other forms of grassroots democracy (self-management) are implemented.
In 2012 the IWW moved its General Headquarters offices to 2036 West Montrose, Chicago.
The origin of the nickname "Wobblies" is uncertain.
Read more about Industrial Workers Of The World: Folk Music and Protest Songs, Lingo, Notable Members
Famous quotes containing the words the world, industrial, workers and/or world:
“Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit;Mnot to be reckoned one character;Mnot to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach the white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Have them all shot. I don’t want any of my workers dissatisfied.”
—Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977)
“Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)