Industrial Workers of the World

And today we're going to be talking about some other kind of union election.

That's just to say union election in the IWW.

And yeah, here with me to talk about that is.

is Pam Sweetland-Hallis, who's an IWW member in D.C., also Andrew D. Ferguson, who's an at-large member from Houston, and Elizabeth Coppice-Duclos, an IWW member and is the Associate Treasurer of the Portland branch.

Yeah, you three, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

So let's start, I guess, by...

I mean, Pascal, he addressed it in quite a few of his writings.

Especially when we're talking post-setting up of the Wobblies, heading into the First World War, he wrote heavily, not just about class things, but when he would address a crowd and talk about racism in the United States, he would admit, I had... horrible ideas about race at first and these are the the events and the people that led me to change my perception to make me a better socialist right so i mean it i mean one you know we we got to look at you know like jason brings up a lot you know let's look at the historical context in which this person grew up Right.

He was born in 1855.

He was 10 years old at the end of the Civil War, and he lived in a segregated city in Indiana, which, lest we all forget, to this day.

And the folks that came into where you were previously working would do it there too.

So the great IWW have definitely draw us.

Several lessons from different campaigns up to the present day in the book, for sure.

And, you know, not separate from, but because he was a Wobbly at one point, but of course is best known for his work in the Mexican Revolution.

Doesn't matter to me what race you are.

You know, we, and, you know, I contrast that with Hubert Harrison, who, It was this great Harlem radical, went through different phases, but had a very compelling take on race and class intersection.

I get into local aid of the IWW, which was really, really exemplary on that front as well.

And, you know, whether someone's interested in electoral politics or not, If you look at the Zoran Mamdani campaign in New York, right, where I'm at, that was a really good example of class integrated with race, right? Hitting very hard on issues that will be beneficial to the working class as a whole, but will have disproportionate benefit to workers of color.

Yeah.

The IWW, they got smashed to pieces.

That was their goal.

They looked past everything.

Among them were three especially whose conversation was even lower than their brows.

I think I can best describe their conversation by saying that in all probability Boccaccio's lady companions out Fiesole way, at the time of the plague that drove the Florentine 400 beyond the city limits, would have fled blushingly before it, taking refuge by preference in the pure undefiled Rolloisms of the Decameron itself, while poor old Rabelais, not always a master of reticence in things better left unsaid, would, I am sure, have joined a literary branch of the IWW in sheer rebellion rather than sully the refinement of his pen by taking down any part of it.

One has to listen to a great deal of this sort of thing en route, and pending the discovery of some kind of vocal silencer that shall render such communications as noiseless as they are corrupting to good manners, or a portable muffler which the unwilling listener may place over his ears, The wandering platform performer who has not yet reached a point where he can give up his cigar and be happy must needs endure them.

Indeed, he is doing well if he is not lured into a shamefaced enjoyment of such talk, for it must be admitted that some of the traveling companions one meets thus by chance have rare powers as storytellers, and pour forth at times most objectionable periods with a smiling enthusiasm almost fetching enough to tempt a simian stylite down from the top of his pillar into the lower regions of their alluring good fellowship.