About This Site And Index Of Columns

About this site

This web site is an archive of some material published by the Industrial Workers of the World. Most of the material on this site appeared in the Industrial Worker newspaper in one of two columns, Workers Power and Minority Report.If you have thoughts about any of this, or if you would like to brainstorm about potential column ideas, please get in touch with the person who maintains this archive, at crashcourse666[at]gmail.com.

For an index of the columns on this site, go to http://forworkerspower.blogspot.com/p/columns.html

Workers Power Columns

The Workers Power column aims to offer a space to share organizing stories and thoughts on strategies and tactics for building power on the shop floor. These columns are posted here to encourage discussion. The columns are intended for members of the IWW, though non-members may find them interesting as well. The columns don’t provide all the answers, but hopefully they are thought provoking and useful. At the very least, the people who wrote them learned a lot and got clearer about our ideas by writing them.

Please consider writing for the column. Writing is a good way to think, to encourage discussion, and to share lessons and experiences. The column is mainly about ideas for building power on the job in the short term, the direction of the IWW with regard to workplace organizing in the short term, and first hand accounts of the realities of workplace organizing - in all its glory and all its failure. If you would like to submit a piece for this column in the newspaper, please e-mail it to forworkerspower[at]gmail.com. Submissions should be no more than 800 words.

Minority Report

Minority Report: A Different Sort of Unionism
Writings by Alexis Buss
             

Nowadays people in the Industrial Workers of the World tend to talk about a vision of organizing using the term “Solidarity Unionism.” The term comes partly from a book called Solidarity Unionism by Staughton Lynd. Some people used to call this “minority unionism” or “direct unionism.” One of the ways that these ideas got worked out and spread around in the IWW was by some columns written by Alexis Buss that appeared in the Industrial Worker newspaper. The columns were printed under the title Minority Report. They’re also online at http://www.iww.org/en/organize/strategy/solidarity.html. 

Some of this material has also been reprinted by the Chicago branch of the IWW under the title “A Union On Our Own Terms.” The columns are reprinted here partly as a piece of recent IWW history. (For more of that history, see the last chapters of the book on the first 100 years of IWW history by Fred Thomson and Jon Bekken.) More than that, though, these columns have ideas that are still relevant to organizing today.