Millions of Americans enjoy liberties off and on the job that were pioneered by a working class organization that few of them are familiar with—the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
The standard of living for most working Americans was grim when the IWW was founded in 1905. Wages were low, housing squalid, civil liberties limited, safety regulations nonexistent, and job security tenuous. Employers routinely denied their workers the right to unionize, much less to strike or picket. Few major labor disputes ended without death playing a hand.
In Solidarity Forever, a score of IWWs tell how they fought against these injustices while advocating a new economic system in which production would be geared for the public good rather than for private profit.
They speak at length of the life and culture of a modern working class during its formative years, often touching on historic labor struggles as well as more humble local conflicts. Told with vigor and humor, these first-hand accounts attest to the IWW passion for mass education, popular culture, and grass roots democracy, and they reveal an IWW far more ideologically sophisticated than is generally acknowledged.
Historical essays preface these personal stories and place them in the context of the IWW commitment to civil liberties, women's rights, organizing the unorganized, and racial equality.
An oral history based on interviews done for the award-winning documentary, The Wobblies, by filmmakers Stewart Bird and academy-award-winning director Deborah Shaffer, with historical introductions to each section of interviews by labor historian Dan Georgakas, co-editor of the monumental Encyclopedia of the American Left.
Dan Georgakas is an editor of Cineaste magazine and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of the American Left and The Cineaste Interviews: On the Art and Politics of the Cinema. He teaches labor history at Queens College. His previous books include a study of autoworkers and urban rebellion, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying; two histories of Native Americans, The Broken Hoop and Red Shadows; and The Methusaleh Factor: Strategies for a Long and Vigorous Life.
Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer produced and directed The Wobblies, a feature-length documentary which premiered at the 1979 New York Film Festival. Bird is also coauthor of The Wobblies: The U.S. vs. W. D. Haywood et al., a drama premiered by the Labor Theater in New York. His most recent work is the feature-length fiction film, Home Free All. Shaffer began making films with Newsreel in the 1960s. Recent credits include editing the Academy Award nominee El Salvador: Another Vietnam, coproducing and codirecting Nicaragua: Report from the Front, and directing Witness to War: Dr. Charlie Clements, which won an academy award.
