The Emerging Industrial Relations of China, edited by William Brown and Chang Kai. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017, 266 pp., ISBN: 978‐1107114418, Price £22.99, paperback.
| Author | Chris Smith |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12462 |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12460
57:2 June 2019 0007–1080 pp. 408–418
BOOK REVIEWS
Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW, edited by Peter Cole,
David Struthers, Kenyon Zimmer, Pluto Press, London, 2017, 280 pp., ISBN:
9780745399591, Price £19.99, paperback
In 1905, a motley crew of socialists, radical trade unionists, anarchists and Marxists
founded the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Chicago, Illinois. Among
them were some of the biggest names in US labour movement history such as
‘Mother’ Jones, Eugene Debs, Lucy Parsons and ‘Big’ Bill Haywood. Central to their
radical unionism were direct action, sabotage and the general strike. For the IWW,
the general strike would hail revolutionary change and socialism. Consequently, the
IWW did not only distinguish themselves from the rest of the trade union movement
who placed their faith in signing collective agreements with employers, but also
parties of the newly founded Second Internationale who argued for the ‘primacy of
politics’. Thus, the Wobblies’ ‘pure’ and militant tradeunionism continues to spark the
imagination of radical labouractivists such as the Industrial Workers of Great Britain
or United Voices of World in Britain, SI Cobas in Italy which stands for ‘Sindacato
Intercategoriale Cobas’ or the Brandworkers in the United States.
Despite the IWW’s extensive global history and continued inspiration to radical
labour activists, historical research on the IWW is sketchy, fragmented and almost
exclusively US focused. Wobblies of the World, the first global history of the IWW,
wants to remedy this and succeeds in doing so. Divided into three parts, the book
outlines with the transnational influences on the IWW, the IWW’s role in the wider
world and the IWW’s influences and legacies. By bringing together dierent authors
from across the world engaged in archival research of non-English sources, every
chapter of this book illuminates another facet of the IWW’s world-wide network of
radical trade unionists in the early twentieth century. This is reason enough to discuss
this book in the pages of this journal. This reviewwill discuss how this book contributes
to the on-going employment and industrial relationsdebates on organizing, immigrant
participation in trade unions and the diusion of tactics.
The trade union organizing agenda, with its tenet of ‘organizing the unorganized’,
has been a central research area in industrial and employment relations research.
Wobblies of the World does us a great service by revisiting how the IWW organized
workers. Unlike the craft unions of the American Federation of Labour, the IWW
organized workers regardless of their ethnicity, gender,race, occupation or skill level.
As a result, the IWW’s membership was predominantly rooted among immigrants in
the Northeast, migratory workers in the Great Plains, mineworkers, timber workers
and harvest workers. The historical evidence presented in this book reveals that the
IWW’s organizingdiered from how it is conceptualized in today’s debateswithin our
field and journals. Influenced by anarchism,the general strike might have been central
C
2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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