By *Verity Burgmann*

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was established in Australia
first in Sydney in October 1907, two years after the founding of the IWW
in the United States in June 1905 in Chicago. Known as the ``Wobblies’’,
the IWW was a revolutionary industrial unionist organisation. It
preferred this terminology to ``syndicalist’’: while it acknowledged
much in common with European revolutionary syndicalism, it proposed a
less decentralised industrial organisation. It maintained that: workers
should be organised on the basis of the industries in which they worked
rather than on the basis of their particular craft or trade skills;
ultimately all workers should come together in One Big Union, which
would take over control of production, distribution and exchange from
the employers; and this process, while revolutionary could be
non-violent, because if all workers were already in One Big Union, its
power would be so great that the change to a new socialist society could
be achieved peaceably.

The IWW had developed due to dissatisfaction with craft unionism, which
was seen to pit workers against each other and make it easier for
employers to control and exploit all workers. Its emergence was an
intelligent response from within the labour movement to the increasing
centralisation of capital and industry; it aspired to present a
concentration of labour power to meet a concentration of ownership of
capital.

Full article at http://links.org.au/node/1104

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