A few years ago I included a piece titled “It Takes More Than Direct Action” in the column I used to edit for the Industrial Worker called “Workers Power.” The good folks who edit Solidaridad, the Spanish language blog of the Industrial Workers of the World, have seen fit to publish a translation of it: “Se necesita más que la acción directa.” It’s the first text of mine that’s been translated...
Recently Juan Conatz put a copy of my 2007 article “The Chicago Couriers Union: a lesson for IWW solidarity union organizers” up on libcom. The piece appeared in the Industrial Worker and served as the basis for my “The Chicago Couriers Union: A Case Study in Solidarity Unionism,” which was published in Working USA. You can read the Industrial Worker piece here.
This past summer I had the opportunity to spend a few days with members of the Confederación General del Trabajo in Barcelona. With a membership of about 60,000, the CGT is the largest anarcho-syndicalist labor union in the world. It split with the more famous Confederación Nacional del Trabajo in the late 1980s over the issue of participation in government sponsored works councils. Without...