World War I and the Domestic Casualty of the Industrial Workers of the World :: World History Workers Work Essays

World War I and the Domestic Casualty of the Industrial Workers of the World The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) worked in the early twentieth century to organize all moil to collectively strive for the interests of labor and in order to create a more democratic society, in breach of possible resistance from the interests of capital and the repercussions that were to occur in reaction to organizing (Bird et al 1). Although, in a mostly defunct form, it still exists today as an internationalistic labor union, the height of the labor movement occurred towards the mid-late 1910s, with the practical demise of its influence occurring during the time in which the United States entered into the First World War (Bird et al 4). Persecution and physical harassment by the federal government, the exercising of the force of legal rational authority by state governments, cultural hostility toward the IWW, and internal quarrels of leadership and doubt in the IWW were the key factors tha t lead to the downfall of the Wobblies. The burden placed on common workers at the turn of the century, whether in industry or agriculture, was great. A heap of surplus labor at this time, literally millions of laborers, (Bird et al 3) had created a situation in which the private owners of the means of production could exercise a great plug of economic power over individual workers. While jobs were relatively few, unemployed job seekers and drifters were many. Thus, using the capitalist values of the marketplace, the market value of the commodity of labor was generally very low, and the workers, each individually powerless against the strength of employers, were, when fortunate enough to land a job, given subsistence level wages while ofttimes working under very hazardous work conditions. While owners were securing what is perhaps the greatest interest of capital, profit, workers were coerced by the situations of reality to sell their labor to merely take in charge to survive. Under the desperate drive of many hungry stomachs and desolate lives, workers saw a need to organize, giving rise to labor several labor movements. genius of the most prominent and perhaps most radical and revolutionary of the movements was the IWW. The Wobblies, as they would become more commonly known, were officially formed on June 27, 1905. (Bird et al 2) The IWW was founded in the aftermath