The following editorial is republished from the Summer 2026 edition of the Industrial Worker by IWW member James Haywood. Haywood responds to three articles published over the last several months in the Industrial Worker as members strategize on growing the union, how to relate to the labor left, and diagnosing the issues the IWW faces today.
Three articles over the past several months in the Industrial Worker with three views in correspondence with one another. Three views – despite ebbs and flows between them – largely reflect the current outlook of many IWW members. A Ypsilanti fellow worker initiated it all with “Rebuilding the IWW”, followed with A Response by fellow worker Carmen Molinari, and most recently a response to both by another anonymous fellow worker. What can we deduce from all three? In short, the persistence of dual unionist thinking within the IWW, a reaffirmation (even if implicitly or unconsciously) of syndicalism, and sectarianism following it.
Granted, the initial “Rebuilding” article correctly identifies the problem of “isolationism” (which is a symptom of sectarianism) of the IWW, but their prescriptives miss the mark. Yes, agitprop is a baseline for any union trying to raise their profile among the working class. Many unions now have social media managers working to popularize their campaigns and slogans. But building ties to social movements which are not working class in character and which are integrated into the NGO industrial complex, leading to the graveyard of social movements – the Democratic Party – are not going to fix the problems of the IWW.
The two responses to “Rebuild” with their counter-proposals also miss the mark. Fellow worker Molinari poses the following questions to the Ypsilanti FW: “Why do we need to be connected to the labor left?” “Why be visible to the labor left?” “Why should we measure ourselves by whether Labor Notes or DSA talks about us?” to paraphrase further “why care what these types think when they are dedicated to conservative and co-opted unions?” “why would we want to recruit from this milieu?” Not much in the way of answers from FW Molinari other than to bypass these types and go straight to the US working class which is 90% nonunion and unorganized.
Our third FW attempts to reconcile the two and goes on to say “we must also take seriously the risk of drifting toward becoming a group of labour activists, indistinct in our activity from numerous others except in our branding as a union and the historical cache of our name”.
Hasn’t this already happened?
“If we allow our focus to become growth among those who are politically sympathetic rather than among our coworkers, we are undercutting our very raison d’etre. We need to acknowledge that many skilled organizers leave the IWW for other unions due, at least in part, to an internal culture that sometimes emphasizes posturing over real workplace organizing”
Again, hasn’t this already happened? Any GOB will tell you a huge proportion of our union membership are at-large members divorced from any IUB or GEB and found their way to the IWW via the internet and memes. It has become and has been for a long time a leftist social club despite its legal status as a labor union. How do we correct that? Yes, as the Ypsilanti FW says, we must look outward, be outward facing, but it also must be strategic, that any outreach we do must be to build new contacts with the working class wherever we may be, not the activist scene that may have some workers involved, but which has no working class orientation. We can mingle in these spaces, we can raise our profile at a No Kings protest without compromising a strategic view to organize workers primarily at the point of production, but if unpaid labor is to be expended by an all-volunteer membership of workers in a GMB or IUB let it primarily be to reach unorganized workers.
This also doesn’t mean, as FW Molinari suggests, to simply ignore organized labor. The state of the US working class – including the minority of unionized workers – is our business. We should build bridges between workers across unions. The relative power of the working class is based on the highest level of unity achievable among the entire class. This is a basic position of a revolutionary politics. Dividing the working class is historically the behavior of reactionaries within the labor movement, whether based on craft, skill, or social identity. Industrial unionism is based on the recognition that the class is strongest when all divisions are overcome. Our task must be to unite the class on a principled basis – a united front that cuts across political and social differences. This is how reactionary and opportunist leadership among the working class is exposed and how workers under their influence are won over to a revolutionary position. Let the reactionaries show themselves to be the dividers, not us.
This is why we must care what workers who go to Labor Notes or are in the DSA think about the IWW. If they arn’t thinking about us that is a reflection of the IWW’s relevancy, or irrelevance, to the US working class. The IWW and the big unions are in a similar situation. Union density keeps shrinking, we haven’t been able to reverse this decades-long trend whether through enacting business unionism or solidarity unionism. The big unions do have some sectoral power that we don’t though. We can’t name a single multinational corporation which would be shut down through an IWW-led strike, unlike the UAW or the Teamsters. They do have substantial resources. We can’t pretend the billions of dollars these big unions sit on don’t exist, those funds come from workers, those funds should be used as a war chest to raise a labor army and have that labor army storm the capitalist headquarters.
There are fellow workers in these unions who are fellow travelers, who aspire to abolish the wage system. We even have wobblies dual carding between our union and these others unions. We should be working towards unity across unions on this shared understanding and there has been a promising and recent effort to do so.
During the latest Labor Notes Conference a breakaway meeting occurred nearby in Chicago under the banner of “For A Fighting Workers Movement”. This featured panelists from a variety of militant caucuses within the big unions to struggle against their union misleaders in Starbucks Workers United, the International Association of Machinists, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the National Education Association, The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Amalgamated Transit Union and Transport Workers Union. The basis of unity for these workers, which my IWW branch endorsed, are very in line with the wobbly spirit:
- Workers within the established unions must organize themselves on a class-struggle basis to oppose the misleadership of boss-linked officials.
- The working class and the employer class hold no common interests.
- Unions must break from the capitalist class political parties.
- The struggle of the working class is an international struggle against a global capitalist class system of wage labor exploitation and requires international solidarity between workers of all nations to succeed in realizing its aims.
- Building working-class strike power remains an indispensable and central pillar to advancing the independent interest of the working class in defense of wages, living standards, and in forcing greater political demands against the class of employers and their state.
- Unions must break from timid subordination to the capitalist state’s legal-regulatory apparatus, that of the National Labor Relations Act and Taft-Hartley, which mandate recognition of employer rights, suppress sympathy strikes, and were historically used to purge unions of their most militant leaders.
Advancing this effort across unions builds the much-needed working class united front. The IWW has a role to play in this if we can overcome sectarianism and stop pretending we have the perfect organizational form and principles to liberate the working class. It is delusional to think the IWW can accomplish the abolition of the wage system on its own, as if the majority of US workers will flock to the union some day in the future if they only knew the good word. This is the thinking of sects, whether they be stalinist, anarchist, trotskyist, etc.
The IWW itself was formed out of a fusion between multiple unions and socialist organizations, any new revolutionary workers movement will require the same and can only happen when we prioritize a principle unity – a united front – across unions. Otherwise we are no better than the gonzaloists who offer their New Labor Organizing Committee as the answer or the Northites in the Socialist Equality Party who advocate “rank and file committees” to workers in the big unions through their World Socialist Website publication. That is what we can look forward to with a dual unionist orientation. It has been a pernicious tendency within the leftwing of the US workers movement all the way back to at least the DeLeonist Socialist Labor Party and their Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance.
The reactionaries dominating the big unions want us to leave them alone as we look inward to the IWW. But we miss key opportunities to demonstrate to workers under their influence that their misleaders sell them out when Teamsters President Sean O’Brien cuts a deal with UPS to avoid a strike or when UAW President Shawn Fain endorses a senile capitalist politician like Biden while calling Trump a “scab” all the while Biden broke the 2022 railroad strike with support from “the squad”. Why should we abandon our fellow workers who are fed up with the compromised misleaders of these unions and are actively struggling to transform their unions into schools of communism? Wouldn’t the US working class be in a better position to go on the offensive if these fellow workers had breakthroughs in taking back control of their unions on a principled basis? Wouldn’t the IWW benefit as well, especially if our dual carders joined in these efforts? We miss the forest for the trees when we have a purely inward-facing orientation that doesn’t factor all this in.
With all this said, this still doesn’t negate the importance of revitalizing the IWW. Our third FW in their response claims that “we nevertheless have a structure which is prepared to accommodate organizing on a mass scale, i.e. to move personnel and resources throughout North America, to train thousands of organizers, to carry out agitation, education, and action in a way that most other groups oriented to shop-floor organizing cannot. While it is not impossible that another group might be able to achieve this in time, it is absolutely certain that the IWW has these resources right now”.
This is wishful thinking. We struggle to find trainers for OT101s and 102s, we struggle to train more trainers. Our members have applied for years now to receive training for trainers only for these sessions to be cancelled. It has created a bottleneck in the union which is costly for the locals and the union as a whole. Until this is rectified we will be in no position to handle a mass influx of workers. We must tackle the dual task of reforming the IWW and relate to the broader working class, including those in the big unions. We need to put our full support behind forging a working class united front!
The Virginia Worker 
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