So eager volunteers from the IWW sometimes succeed in helping a union form, the workers involved generally don't join the IWW, and then the union folds or if it lasts it breaks away.
This really does not matter, functionally, to the IWW. It's full of people who pay dues whether they have a workplace union or not. The IWW gains nothing if a union push succeeds and loses nothing if it fails, because the same money to pay staff is coming in.
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Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
There are two main tendencies in response to this that have recurred throughout the organization's history:
1) let's get serious and just become a union
2) let's give up on actual unionization and become a leftist group
Neither one works. I've written about this before: the IWW has only survived because it's a union, and the only reason for it to exist is as a leftist group. A mixed existence is the only existence it can have.
But for the part of it that is a union to function as a union in the US, it has to finally aim at goals that US law proscribes for unions. Its activity does not work otherwise.
/fin
by Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ ;
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