SMALL GUY: The effectiveness of IWW organizes like Bray remains an open question. |
Batting for the small guy
During its pre-WWWI apex, the IWW had a strong presence in Rhode Island and other Northeastern states, playing a leading role in staging dramatic industrial strikes in such cities as Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Patterson, New Jersey. Although the union never entirely vanished, its strength was broken by prosecution and persecution as part of a Red Scare in 1919, according to Scott Molloy, a professor of labor and industrial relations at the University of Rhode Island.
The Cincinnati-based IWW now claims about 2000 members in the US, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and Germany. Bray attributes what he calls faster recent growth in the union to active organizing efforts, not a reaction against the prevailing conservatism in national politics. “It’s happening because we’re making it happen,” he says.
Bray, a native of River Vale, New Jersey, grew up with liberal values (his father was ostracized from his family, he says, and faced taunts of being a nigger-lover for having attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, and his mother marched against the Vietnam War). The PC grad student became interested in the IWW after learning about it in the course of his studies of American and European history. He wound up in Rhode Island, he says, since his girlfriend attends Brown.
Union members generally see the IWW, Bray says, as part of a social movement to benefit society at large.
Wobblies have been working to organize workers at Starbucks’ shops in New York and some other US cities. According to www.wobblycity.org, theWeb site of New York City-based IWW members, two years of organizing in New York’s food industry has resulted, among other gains, in higher wages, better conditions, respect on the job, and NLRB-supervised elections.
It was this latter campaign that led Rhode Island-based Wobblies to conduct the August 11 march on Mineral Spring Avenue that ended in a clash with North Providence police. The IWW had accused Jacky’s Galaxy restaurant of buying supplies from a New York company that the union says has substandard labor conditions. While the restaurant’s owner has said that he had already stopped using the supplier, skeptical IWW members express¬ed satisfaction when he ultimately repeated the statement in court and under oath.
The question of how Svoboda was injured remains disputed. IWW members call her the victim of a violent police attack on a peaceful demonstration, while the police have defended their conduct. Michael Healey, a spokesman for Attorney General Patrick Lynch, expects that a review of the matter by North Providence police, the state police, and the AG’s office will take a couple of months.
While it’s hardly a stretch to think this will result in a lawsuit, Scott Svoboda, Alex’s father, says in a phone interview from Lincoln, Nebraska, that the family’s priorities are his daughter’s recovery and the dropping of several related misdemeanor charges against her.
A wide swath of Americans can agree on the right to be able to peacefully protest, but what about the Wobblies’ core message?
To a few curious onlookers at last Sunday’s protest, the band of gathered liberals and lefties were remnants of discredited political theories. Yet Svoboda, pointing to the fight for decent wages and overtime for immigrants and others, says of his daughter’s friends and allies, “They’re going to bat for the small guy, and that appeals to anybody.”
George Nee, secretary-treasurer of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, had received a call from Bray before last weekend’s protest and as of last week, hadn’t yet caught up with him. He expressed unfamiliarity with the IWW’s local chapter, saying, “I don’t have a clue [about its potential].”
Roxana Rivera, director of the Rhode Island division of Service Employees International Union, Local 615, which staged an August 22 march on behalf of unionized janitors in New England, was more bullish. “I definitely think that they’re trying to provide a voice for workers that don’t have one right now,” she says.
For his part, URI’s Molloy detects some parallels — particularly reactionary bureaucracy and a hostile environment toward immigrants — between the present moment and the Wobblies’ bygone heyday. “Sometimes, the window of history opens ever so briefly and the fresh air comes in,” he says. “It seems to me a perfect opportunity to make disenchantment and malaise into something positive.”Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis@phx.com. Read his politics + media blog atwww.thephoenix.com/notfornothing.
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