This editorial is a response to the November 13, 2025 article, “Rebuilding the IWW.“
Why do we need to be connected to the labor left? The fellow worker presents two main reasons: we need to be “relevant” and visible to them, and that we lose good organizers to DSA and other groups.
But why be visible on the labor left? I’ve also had the experience of going to labor events and meeting people who saw the IWW as a relic or simply as irrelevant to what they were doing. It can be demoralizing — many of us in the IWW identify as part of the “left,” so we intuitively should be in the labor left, but we are often not noticed. I won’t deny that part of the reason is that we are small and many of our branches are barely active or effective as an actual labor union. That’s something we want to change, but why should we measure ourselves by whether Labor Notes or the DSA talks about us?
The “labor left” encompasses many different groups: Labor Notes, members of DSA labor subcommittees, members of various socialist and communist micro groups who are union members or staffers, Leftist current or retired union staff like Joe Burns. They all have critiques of mainstream unions that the IWW broadly agrees with: they aren’t organizing new shops, they hold workers back when they want to go on strike in contract negotiations, they are bureaucratic and undemocratic, their members are disengaged, they can be protectionist and exclusionary, they rely on a legal recognition scheme that isn’t in unions’ favor. Some have criticisms we probably wouldn’t agree with: unions need to be subordinate to a workers’ party, unions are inherently conservative without intensive “political education” about the group’s particular political tendency, unions in North America represent the global labor aristocracy benefiting from exploitation of workers in the global south and should be fighting for those workers instead of themselves, etc. But even when a labor leftist outside the IWW gives a spot on analysis of how the NLRA was anti-worker legislation, every time they will turn around and reinforce that system. Their positions and investment in other unions and organizations seems to make it impossible for them to actually imagine an alternative. Even when they are aware of the IWW and the way we organize, and critical of mainstream labor relations, they aren’t very interested in what we’re practicing as an alternative. Other unions are structurally unable to do what the IWW does, and why would people who have devoted themselves to improving those unions be interested in something they can’t actually do, in a criticism that says that what they have been devoting their time and effort and intellectual energy to is fundamentally conservative and co-opted?
90 percent of workers in the US aren’t in a union, but over half of them say they would like to be. The IWW has a strategy and training program that develops worker capacity to organize ourselves, not relying on professional staff organizers or negotiators. Given these facts, why would we want to recruit from the Labor Left, who are already members of business unions, union staffers, or dedicated to a political project of organizing the kind of unions we think are so limited? It’s tempting to look to them and their institutional power and influence among intellectuals and leftists for validation, but we should resist that temptation. I’ve seen too many Wobblies slide slowly away from the radically different and powerful kind of organizing we do into arguing for us to be like other unions (but with radical politics!) because they want respect and recognition in Labor Left spaces. We shouldn’t give in to this. It’s hard to see when we’re steeped in Labor Left writing and ideas, but what other unions or the DSA is doing is actually irrelevant to us. As the fellow worker quotes from Weakening the Dam, our task today is like that of the unions in the 1890s that came together to form the IWW. They weren’t recruiting from members or employees of an entrenched system of “unions” blessed by the state, they were organizing in an environment where unions were brand new and undefined, where there were many competing ideas of how to be a union. We should do the same.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not purport to represent that of the IWW or Industrial Worker as a whole.
This was a response to the article Rebuilding the IWW by Fellow Worker x423752 that ran on November 13, 2025.