Labor History Archives
Memories of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
Part 2
by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/elizabeth_flynn_memories.html
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn addressed students and faculty members of Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb, on November 8, 1962, less than two years prior to her death. Her talk was sponsored by the History Club of the University and its chapter of the Student Peace Union. The occasion was chaired by Kenneth Owens, an assistant professor of history at the University.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's remarks were offered without notes; they were tape recorded and it is a transcript of that tape which is herewith published for the first time.
We left off with Flynn’s comments on the Bread & Roses Strike of 1912. The hours of labor were reduced to 54 hours per week.
On the first pay after the law went into effect, the employers cut the wages proportionately to the cut in-hours and the wages were on the average of $7 and $8 a week at that time, and the highest pay to loom fixers and more highly skilled were getting possibly, $15 and $20. It was a margin between mere subsistence and starvation and so there was a spontaneous strike. Now, many people say such things don't happen, that they are really organized in advance but, sometimes, as one writer, Richard Rostran Childs, who afterwards became the Ambassador of our country to Italy, said, the melting pot boiled over and so they poured out of the mills.
The owners did not want to give the workers more of the profits. These corporate types just didn't care about people at all. Today Wal-Mart is the poster child for poor treatment of workers in America. So these historical events are not just relics of the past. They are road maps to the future.
And, the AFL didn't want anything to do with them so they sent for the IWW and the IWW came on feet of lightning, and there came first Ettor and Giovannitti and they were there about three weeks or four weeks and then there was violence on the picket line as there often was. Not only the police were there but the State Militia was there. These two strike leaders were arrested and charged with incitation to murder although the person killed was a woman striker so they went out of the battle and they were charged many months after the strike was over and were acquitted.
Once again our Government takes the side of the wealthy against the workers who created the wealth in the first place. And look at the AFL. They called the IWW. The AFL let others fight the battles that made it possible for the AFL to make peace and sign contracts. We have enjoyed the legacy of that tactic for a long time but it seems to be coming to an end.
. . . We had to explain to them, workers, why we wanted them to be in the IWW, one big union and not in the AFL. Well, he would say, [showing his hand fingers spread] the American Federation of Labor, the AFL is like that, each one separated, but the IWW is like that, [he would make a fist] and they would all say, three cheers for the IWW and he had made his point.
The CIO organized all the workers in a company into one union rather than the AFL approach of having all the different crafts in different unions. This was Industrial Unionism versus Trade Unionism. Today we have the Change to Win coalition made up of some very large unions which broke away from the AFL to use a different approach in organizing workers. Change to Win is organizing by sector which is much like the company approach used by the CIO. They would, for example, have all the Building Trades represented by one union for all the Trades.
We took some of the children away from Lawrence to other cities once or twice. And then they tried to stop us and they beat up the children and the mothers and the committee in the railroad station in Lawrence (and took them to jail and a protest and roar went up from one end of the country to the other.
They tore down that railroad station later. I am sure one reason is that they didn't want people to be pointing it out as the place where the police and the soldiers had beaten the women and the children. The result was a Congressional investigation which was brought into being by Victor Berger, the Socialist Congressman from Wisconsin, and the condition of those workers were so exposed to the whole country that the employers were only too happy to call it a day and bring the strike to a close. There were sixteen witnesses down there before the Committee. Children, and every one of those children were actually workers in the mills. It was before the days when we had any regulation on child labor. You see it is a long time ago, I am speaking of, but these are the flesh and blood struggles that made the labor movement as it is today. At the same time that this Lawrence strike was going on, there was a great strike of timber workers in Louisiana, also under the auspices of the IWW, and I single that out, although we had strikes all over the place, we were just hopping all over from one place to another, because there for the first time the discrimination, the segregation rules were-broken down.
None of us have gone through any hard times like these early pioneers of the Labor Movement. We have had everything handed to us on a silver platter and think we can just let the laws change and somehow nothing will really be different. And what is really interesting is that most people just don't want to know how bad it has gotten today convinced that we will keep our standard of living no matter who we vote for or do or don't do on the job.
. . . William D. Haywood went down there to speak and he said every striker sits wherever he wants to sit. Segregation in this hall of the IWW and the Negro and white workers, I think for the first time in American labor history, broke that taboo and met together.
Isn't it interesting where advancement of the human condition comes from. Certainly not from big Corporations. And not from the super wealthy either. It came from all those bad socialists, communists and trouble makers we have been taught to despise.
It wasn't long after those big strikes in the east, the Lawrence strike, and the Paterson silk strike, that there was a great strike of workers in the State of Utah. And it was there that Joe Hill, I am sure that all of you have heard of Joe Hill, the song writer, troubadour of the IWW, was arrested. The little red song book, which never dies, apparently any more than the memory of Joe Hill, has many of his songs And if there is really one thing that I am proud of in my long labor history, it is that while he was in prison, before he was executed, he wrote a song for me dedicated to me, that was called, the "Rebel Girl" and that song, I hope you will do it here some time, it may not be the best of words or the best of music, but it came from the heart and it was certainly so treasured.
This was America in the early 1900’s. What happened to justice, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights? Where are those things now? As long as you don't see anything, hear or say anything or write anything that is the least bit provocative and anti Corporation you will do just fine. That is until things are so bad another generation of trouble making rebels pay the price to liberate the rest of us.
Now, after this period of which I am speaking, I became more and more specialized in what is called labor defense work, although I had been engaged in the defense of Bill Haywood and Pettibone back as far as 1919, and Ettor and Giovannitti and Joe Hill, and there came the arrest of Tom Mooney, Warren K. Billings and others, in San Francisco, and this labor defense work is something that is traditional in our country and with the American labor movement. Conferences were organized, that met regularly with delegates from every kind of organization, Socialist, Anarchist, IWW, AFL, no matter what, for the defense of Mooney and Billings. And, of course, it was many years before they were finally pardoned by Governor Olsen, but the agitation on their behalf and the conviction of their innocence was possessed literally by millions and millions of working people in this country.
As you may recall from previous history, labor agitators, troublemakers and organizers were cast as unpatriotic outsiders trying to over through the Country. The Sedition Laws were enacted to punish labor activists and discourage their activities. We are not supposed to think but just do what we are told and be thankful we are not living under a bridge. What kind of world are you willing to fight for?
Well, in the period of World War I a tremendous onslaught was made against the IWW, the Socialists, all Progressives in our country. There was a very strong peace movement at that time. It was not like World War II, which was an anti-Fascist war.
Isn't that interesting? Corporations are always ready to take advantage of workers and why not in a time of war? Most wars are fought for power, wealth and control. And of course us workers fight those wars. Historically, the Labor Movement has been intertwined with the Peace Movement.
They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people:
Eugene Debs
We are repeating the early 1900’s today. If we can't learn from history, we shall surely live it in real time.
HOMEWORK
Think about how this article sounds. Why does it sound that way to you? What kind of life do you want for yourself, your family and the next generation? What will you do to secure the future you want today?
"The history of mankind is a history of the subjugation and exploitation of a great majority of people by an elite few by what has been appropriately termed the 'ruling class'. The ruling class has many manifestations. It can take the form of a religious orthodoxy, a monarchy, a dictatorship of the proletariat, outright fascism, or, in the case of the United States, corporate statism. In each instance the ruling class relies on academics, scholars and 'experts' to legitimize and provide moral authority for its hegemony over the masses."
Ed Crane
Human Rights First Comments on Fair Labor Association Report In the last decade the global expansion of the market economy has produced what some call a “world without walls”. In the rush to find cheaper and quicker ways to produce shoes, apparel, and other labor-intensive goods for the global marketplace, multinational corporations are moving much of their manufacturing to countries where basic legal protections for workers are non-existent and union organizing is prohibited or discouraged. Workers drive the new international economy, yet millions of them—typically women and children—daily endure substandard working conditions ranging from inadequate wages to inhumane hours to life-threatening hazards in the workplace. http://www.humanrightsfirst.org
/workers_rights/index.aspDec. 10th Mobilization: Largest-Ever for Workers’ Rights Working families and their allies are gearing up for the nation’s largest-ever mobilization to support workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain collectively. Throughout the week of Dec. 5–10, thousands of workers in 63 cities—and the number is growing daily—will take the fight to restore workers’ freedom to form unions to the White House, statehouses and front doors of employers that deny workers’ rights.
The nationwide events are part of a massive global mobilization on Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the 1948 ratification of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes the freedom of workers to form unions.
http://www.aflcio.org/joinaunion
/voiceatwork/ns10262005.cfmWe are stronger together.
We have to fight
to get our fair share.We can win,
just like we have in the past.
