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S: This is Sprout
C: and this is Charyan, and we are the hosts of Molotov Now!, on The Channel Zero Podcast Network, thank you for joining us on this episode of the podcast.
S: if you like what we do here and want to support it, you can do that by going to linktr.ee/al1312 and clicking donate, or scrolling to the bottom for Patreon.
C: Today we have Royt on the podcast to talk about organizing the unhoused into a union here in Aberdeen. Royt, an organizer and activist with the IWW, and various mutual aid efforts around the region, has been assisting with the local efforts to fill a need that has been identified in the community.
S: Through tireless organizing, deep observation, and countless meetings these organizers are attempting to revive a culture of solidarity unionism, through the effective unionization of those living on the streets. Royt also has written a zine that we will be producing an audio version of today all about this effort and its importance.
C: We will be back with our monthly radical news roundup right after this message from our sponsor.
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Foreign company proposes polluting wood pellet plant in Hoquiam
Many factories these days take wood slash and turn it into pellets for fuel. This has become a growing industry over the last two decades. A proposed wood pellet plant in Hoquiam, WA is slated to churn out more pellets than any other in the state thus far. The proposed facility, the second in the area after one already approved in Longview, would be among the first industrial-scale wood pellet manufacturers in the Pacific Northwest.
This recent push into Washington by this industry comes after establishing itself in the American Southeast, then getting a foothold in British Columbia, and comes on the heels of the industry’s push for use of wood as a renewable fuel instead of coal across the world. This is a serious threat to air quality in any place where these plants exist. No precedent has been set for the pollution generation of these types of plants, making the job of the ORCAA — the Olympic Regional Air Quality Agency very difficult when considering approving this plant.On Jan. 16 the agency hosted a public hearing in Hoquiam for a proposal from a company called Pacific Northwest Renewable Energy, which is seeking approval to build and operate a pellet mill at 411 Moon Island Road in Hoquiam, near the Port of Grays Harbor Terminal 3.
Which is owned wholly by this company based in the UK:
The company, PNWRE, submitted its application in July, proposing to build a plant, storage silos and a new conveyor on a 60-acre parcel located east of Bowerman Airport through a lease with the Port of Grays Harbor. The facility, capable of producing nearly 450,000 tons of wood pellets per year, would connect by conveyor to a nearby chip mill, Willis Enterprises, to access its ship loadout facility.
Wood pellets would then be exported, via vessel, to international markets, including Asia and Europe, in a desperate attempt for those countries to obtain their climate goals. UK-based researchers found last year that burning wood is a “disaster” for climate change because older trees release large amounts of carbon when they are burned and aren’t always replaced with replanted forests. Even when trees are replaced, it can take up to 100 years to cultivate a wooded area that soaks up as much carbon as was previously released. And the fuel burned in shipping wood pellets to Europe is also a significant source of emissions.
From Resilience.org:
It’s not a magic trick. It’s an accounting trick, and it’s endorsed by international climate bodies like the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and written into the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive. Consequently, signatories to the Paris Climate Agreement can classify woody biomass as carbon neutral, in effect pretending they are fixing the problem of climate change while actually making it worse.
The scheme goes like this: When a forest is cut down in the US it’s considered a carbon debt. So, to avoid counting the debt twice, the pellets produced from that forest can be burned in say, the UK, without emitting any CO2 at all—at least according to the carbon ledger sheet. The carbon was already supposedly emitted when the trees were cut down back in the US.
When the forest is replanted, we have theoretically generated electricity using a carbon-neutral system. Unfortunately, all too often the forests are not replanted. And even when they are, it may take decades before the new trees are back to sequestering as much carbon as the ones that were cut down.
The fact is, cutting down trees and burning them is not, as the pellet industry claims, fighting climate change, but rather accelerating it. Still, massive government subsidies are propelling manufacturers to aggressively expand production. Enviva, for one, announced last year it hoped to double output by 2027 by building two new mills a year.
Health metrics are among the worst in the state here in Grays Harbor, meaning that this plant would expose some of the poorest and most unhealthy people in the state to unknown levels of pollution and noise. Concerns have been raised by citizens, politicians, and local organizations.
Sam Davis, a scientist with the environmental group Dogwood Alliance, did a study that examined the demographics of counties where these types of plants were located.
“We looked at the locations of all the wood pellet mills and found that they were twice as likely to be located in environmental justice communities versus affluent white communities,” Davis said in an interview.
That means more often than not, pellet plants are located in Black or minority counties. Compared to their state averages, more residents in these counties live in poverty, are unemployed or receive SNAP benefits.
Because pellet facilities release tons of pollutants into the air, they bring with them health risks for neighborhood residents. The gritty wood dust that settles on cars and outdoor furniture is something locals complain about most often because it’s the most visible discharge from the plants. But the air they are breathing also contains a witches’ brew of other far more dangerous pollutants.
“The pellet making process can release carbon monoxide, nitrogenous gases and other hazardous air pollutants, including things that are naturally in wood, like formaldehyde and other volatile organic compounds,” says environmental scientist Davis.
Some of these chemicals can be toxic or carcinogenic, even in small amounts. Residents are also breathing what scientists call PM2.5, a pernicious dust so fine that it can lodge in the lungs and enter the bloodstream, aggravating asthma and causing heart attacks.
On Nov. 30, after three amendments to the application, ORCAA issued a preliminary decision to approve it.
According to ORCAA, primary sources of pollution at the pellet plant would come from burning woody debris for heat and dust created from wood processing. For each source, the agency requires emission control technologies that reduce the actual amount of pollutants that reach the air.
Based on the plant’s potential to emit a certain amount of chemicals like carbon dioxide and particulate matter, ORCAA considers it a “major source” of emissions, although the projected emissions aren’t high enough to require a pre-construction permit from the Washington Department of Ecology.
But a group of environmental lawyers says PNWRE may have significantly underestimated the hazardous pollutants it will spew into the air.
On Jan. 8, two lawyers from the Southern Environmental Law Center sent a letter to ORCAA regarding the proposed plant in Hoquiam. Since 2017 the center has reviewed permits for more than 35 wood pellet plants in a dozen Southern states. According to the center, it has compiled a database of emissions tests from the smokestacks of wood pellet plants.
In its application, PNWRE estimated the proposed plant will emit 1.3 tons of Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) each year — a projection the law center says is “deeply flawed and based on incorrect and/or outdated emission factors … factors that are not specific to wood pellet plants.”
“Recent stack tests and air permit applications that are specific to wood pellet plants show that a facility this size and with the controls proposed by PNWRE will emit at least 40 tons of total HAPs per year,” the law center states, calling for ORCAA to withdraw the application until the issues are addressed.
When asked how PNWRE reached its emissions calculations, the company deferred to the air quality agency.
“ORCAA will be responding to all the comments within the required time frame very shortly,” Kim Alexander, PNWRE’s vice president of operations, said in an email according to the Daily World.
Dan Nelson, a spokesperson for ORCAA, said there is no set timeline for responding to comments. After reviewing comments, he said, staff will draft a final determination on the application and present it to the executive director.
Despite short-term rental laws in County, Seabrook developers get the go ahead for Pacific Beach expansion
“Project will bring more than 150 units of ‘attainably priced’ housing.” That’s the newspeak of The Daily World, as they quote developers of Seabrook, WA. A strange turn of phrase with no clear meaning, but certainly not “affordable”. Developers of Seabrook, including owner Casey Roloff, recently received approval for its first housing development in the nearby community of Pacific Beach, because of course they did. Not only that but it passed unanimously, by only three individuals with the power to approve such a massive development.
On land adjacent to state Route 109 and across from the Naval property, developers plan to build 82-single family homes, four duplex lots and 68 condo or apartment units in neighborhood pedestrian-friendly streets, green open spaces and courtyards similar to Seabrook.
The sugar daddy property developers got many exemptions to the normal rules and regulations. But the kicker is that they wont have to abide by the recently passed short term rental permitting requirements, as long as they are all managed by a single company. Roloff told The Daily World last year that all vacation rentals in Seabrook are managed by the town’s hospitality department, meaning it already has the infrastructure, like security and staffing, to mitigate potential problems with rentals, and because new developments are built from scratch, any short-term rentals won’t displace existing neighborhoods.Roloff said the new development is intended to provide primary housing, not vacation rentals.
Local fascist council member Riley Carter arrested for domestic violence
Recently elected right wing psycho Riley Carter was arrested this week on charges of fourth-degree assault/domestic violence and interfering with the reporting of domestic violence, both misdemeanor offenses, according to a news release by the Aberdeen Police Department. APD first received a call at 1:32 a.m. Monday from a 32-year-old woman who reported being physically assaulted by her husband. Upon arriving, police interviewed both parties and detained Carter, transporting him to the city jail. Because Carter is a city council member, recently entering his first term in office, Hoquiam Municipal Court will handle the case to avoid a potential conflict of interest.
The Daily World reached out for comment and was asked to respect their privacy at this time, but they did publish this part of the WA state code: “According the Washington state code, “the conviction of a public officer of any felony or malfeasance in office shall entail, in addition to such other penalty as may be imposed, the forfeiture of his or her office, and shall disqualify him or her from ever afterward holding any public office in this state.”
An Aberdeen man and city council member was arrested early Monday morning by Aberdeen police.
Riley T. Carter, 39, was taken to the Aberdeen city jail and booked on charges of fourth-degree assault/domestic violence and interfering with the reporting of domestic violence, both misdemeanor offenses, according to a news release by the Aberdeen Police Department.
APD first received a call at 1:32 a.m. Monday from a 32-year-old woman who reported being physically assaulted by her husband. Upon arriving, police interviewed both parties and detained Carter, transporting him to the city jail.
We support all survivors of domestic violence and do not believe that the State or the police are a responsible or safe way to deal with such a pernicious problem. Mutual aid and community organizing can create strong bonds outside of the nuclear family which disrupts abusers attempts to isolate and manipulate their victims. We can create a society free from this oppression only if we first acknowledge all the ways that patriarchy contributes to the oppression of us all.Some DV resources in so-called Grays Harbor:Domestic Violence Center of Grays Harbor
2306 Sumner Avenue
Hoquiam, WA 98550
(360) 538-0733
(800) 818-2194Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence (WSCADV)First Steps (Women at Risk); 360-532-8631 ext. # 237Beyond Survival: 360-533-9751Chehalis Tribal Domestic Violence Prevention Program Office: 360-709-1733Chehalis River Mutual Aid Network: Text: 206-530-7806
Aberdeen city council denies festival funding for new mayor’s nonprofit
The Aberdeen City Council on Wednesday evening halted lodging tax funding for a nonprofit led by Mayor Douglas Orr to hold a pair of prominent art festivals in the city, with some councilors citing a broad city charter that strictly prohibits city officials from having an interest in city contracts.
The vote came two meetings after a divided council sent back initial recommendations from the city’s Lodging Tax Advisory Committee (LTAC) to award funding for Harbor Art Guild, for which Orr serves as president of the board of directors, with the council requesting more discussion and information about a potential conflict of interest.
Wednesday’s council, which has since Dec. 20 turned a handful of seats to Republican candidates, denied funding for the guild nearly unanimously, with only Scott Prato opposed to the motion and Liz Ellis abstaining.
The vote was a tumultuous finish to Orr’s first month as mayor of Aberdeen that put his new role as leader of the city at odds with the work that helped get him there. It also cast uncertainty over the future of the Rain Glow Festival and Aberdeen Art Walk, annual summer art festivals downtown.
That money comes from taxes imposed on hotel, motel and short-term rental stays, and must be spent for the purpose of drawing tourists back to Aberdeen. The LTAC committee that recommends funding amounts to the council is comprised of five members, including applicants, hospitality business owners and the city’s finance committee chair, in this case Councilor Debi Pieraccini. They cited legal concerns over conflict of interests and said they were guided by the city charter in coming to their decision. Many citizens complained about the decision, including Orr, whose response was as unstable and petty as always. He said, “If the council and the city doesn’t want to have that kind of event and they don’t want to do those kind of things, then that’s on them. I’m not going to beg them to allow me to waste months of my time putting on an event they don’t want.” Whatever happens it seems these events are up in the air this year.
January 8, 2024 Marvin Haynes Exonerated and Released From Prison After 19 Years
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January 18, 2024 Greek Anarchist Collective Targeted by the State
January 19, 2024 Thousands of Asylum Seekers Stranded Along Border Wall Near Sasabe, Arizona
January 23, 2024 Palestinian Paints Murals on Rubble Amid War on Gaza
January 24, 2024 Protests Against Smith Foundry, Ex-EPA Scientist Calls Pollution Regulations a ‘Smokescreen’
It’s Going Down is a digital community center for anarchist, anti-fascist, autonomous anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements across so-called North America. Their mission is to provide a resilient platform to publicize and promote revolutionary theory and action. You can find the following articles on their website at itsgoingdown.org:
Crimethought is everything that evades control:
CrimethInc. is a rebel alliance. CrimethInc. is a banner for anonymous collective action. CrimethInc. is an international network of aspiring revolutionaries. CrimethInc. is a desperate venture.
2024-01-08 Gaza Solidarity Actions Continue from Durham to Seattle:With a Report from the Blockade of I-5
2024-01-17 Getting There :The Road to the Zapatista Encuentro
2024-01-18 The 2024 Zapatista Encuentro:A Report-back with Footage of a Play about the Movement to Stop Cop City
2024-01-19 How to Host a Haunted House:A Guide for Anarchists with a Video Walkthrough
2024-01-23 Three Classic CrimethInc. Books in Portuguese:Receitas para o Desastre, Espere Resistência, & Dias de Guerra, Noites de Amor
It looks like it is time for a musical break so we will be right back with our interview with Royt, but first here is Which Side Are You On? by Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers. Hit it!
Music:
Segment one:
Sprout: Welcome back to Molotov Now! Today we are joined by local IWW organizer and activist Royt, to talk about the efforts being taken here in Aberdeen to organize the unhoused into a community union. He also wrote the audiozine that we will be airing about these efforts. Could you introduce yourself for our audience and describe any relevant organizing you’ve done?
Royt: Howdy. I joined the Industrial Workers of the World back when I lived in Portland because I wanted to organize the bakery I used to work at. I heard about what they had accomplished with unionizing Burgerville and I was impressed. After joining, I was able to take the org’s two levels of organizer training classes (OT101 and OT102), and I learned a lot. Since then, I’ve been involved in a lot of organizing within the service industry. I’ve also had the privilege to work as an outside organizer on a number of campaigns, supporting the development of nascent freelance unions in the service industry, in academia, in tech, in publishing, in aerospace, and many other fields. I believe that humble people taking collective action is the solution to most of the problems currently facing our society.
Long before I joined the union, however, I was involved in direct aid & advocacy for houseless people in my community. From when I was a young teenager onwards I had friends who were experiencing housing insecurity, sometimes along with their entire family. So, when I was in high school I got involved with Food Not Bombs, and the local needle exchange, other groups like that. When I was in my 20’s I worked in the non-profit/shelter system and saw a lot of people who needed more help than they were getting. It made me a big believer in the principle of “solidarity not charity.” Many houseless people don’t need the kind of half-assed bandaid support the liberal non-profits are offering. Their main need is for people like cops and landlords and real estate developers to stop making things worse for them.
The IWW defines a union as two or more workers working together to change their industry. But I think that union tactics can be applied to a wide range of situations. Labor unions already rely on significant community organizing to accomplish what they do. I think that a primary failure of the labor movement thus far has been to relegate this community organizing to second class status.
Put another way, if we are intent on organizing to actually confront & defeat capitalism, then that must also include tenants unions, houseless unions, unions of disabled folks, transit unions, unions of unemployed folks. Workplace organizing is important, but so is community organizing. Capitalist oppression happens in many areas of life besides work. It must be confronted in many areas of life besides work. And, happily, many of the same tactics that work at our jobs, also work in other areas of life.
The difference between a union and a generic activist group is that I advocate using the specific tactics of the IWW: transparent, democratic, ahierarchical management by the masses of the membership, and a focus on direct action and mutual aid rather than advocacy and reform. I say, instead of two workers working together to change their workplace, that a union is two or more people working together to change their world.
Charyan: So, you are not from Grays Harbor but you were contacted by people from Grays Harbor about starting an unhoused union here, correct?
Royt: Yeah, a mutual friend from Olympia reached out to me and said people in Grays Harbor were looking for an organizer from the IWW. I don’t represent the IWW in any official capacity, in fact I haven’t even paid dues recently, but the whole point of the IWW is to “organize workers not jobs” and “make every member an organizer.” So here I am. I’ve always had kind of a soft spot for Grays Harbor. It seems like this was a region that rebelled very hard in the early part of the 20th century and has been being punished by the ruling class ever since. And, I had been hearing good things about the Chehalis River Mutual Aid Network for awhile. So when we got in touch, I was pretty excited.
Sprout: Yes, CRMAN does some great work in the community here. I imagine lots of the conversations they have had is what has led up to this push for unionization. What is the need that has been identified in the community that led to the initial plans for this union?
Royt: Well, primarily it seems there is an encampment of about 100-150 people living down by the waterfront, and many people sleeping rough around Aberdeen, Hoquiam, and Cosmopolis besides that. BIPOC folks and the so-called “mentally ill,” including those struggling with chemical dependency, are over-represented in this community because of the different (but sometimes interlocking) oppressions they face. In concrete terms, what we are talking about is a situation wherein people are living 4-5 adults to a tent, or else 2 adults with 1-4 kids. Illnesses and malnutrition are common. Access to medical care is limited. These tents are pitched near, but not beneath the bridges in downtown Aberdeen, in abandoned lots by salt water which occasionally flood at high tide. Parts of the encampment are surrounded by large barrier rocks that look straight out of Mordor. The city saw fit to place these rocks where CRMAN had been distributing free meals to the community.
On a larger scale, though, the problems with housing in Grays Harbor stem from chronic underdevelopment of housing infrastructure combined with gentrification and a lack of stable employment in the area. We need to ameliorate the desperate conditions individuals are facing this very night. And we need to simultaneously engage the larger social factors that have led to this intolerable situation in the first place.
For the last few years there has been a lot of community support in the form of hot meals and other direct aid. At some of these meals, the CRMAN organizers passed around a questionnaire asking the people who attended what kinds of things they needed. Almost everyone said that they wanted a union for unhoused people. So, following those instructions, we are now attempting to do the people’s work.
C: So it sounds like lots of prior organizing has laid the groundwork for this campaign, what are the goals of this new push for unionization of the unhoused here in Aberdeen?
R: This is a great fucking question. My personal goal is to empower people who are sleeping outside to organize themselves as a community, and to support them in doing whatever they need to get permanent housing. I have some ideas on tactics and things that might work, but really we are attempting to do something here which hasn’t been done before. So it will require new ways of thinking and organizing. And it is important that this campaign be genuinely led by people sleeping outside. I don’t have a grand plan and a bunch of resources, that I can wave my wand and save everyone in Aberdeen. I would if I could. This is the next best thing I have for you.
So, my short term goal is to give unhoused people in Grays Harbor some tools to become organizers themselves. That’s why I wrote this zine, and the plan is to hand it out to folks along with notebooks, pens, and some other basic supplies so that they can deeply observe & record what they’re experiencing.
To organize the community, we need to understand the community. We need to have eyes and ears observing the community. This first wave of organizer-scouts will investigate the real conditions of the community, find out who is living where, what they need, and what is the best way to get it to them. Once we have made these social charts of the community, we can decide where to best focus our strategic efforts. Flexing the muscles of communicating and working together in ways very different from how we are trained to by the capitalist system. We are going to ask people what they would change about their community if they had the power. Then we are going to organize the people so they have that power.
I want to share with the community tools for democratic communication and decision-making that will allow the people to directly conceive & act upon their own goals. Once that happens, the aim will be to gain strategic initiative over the local ruling class and begin to enact large scale, irreversible changes such as decommodifying existing housing, and building new housing. Ultimately, we will make it so that no one has to sleep outside in Grays Harbor. I don’t think it’s possible without directly confronting colonial capitalism.
S: Thats a beautiful goal, not simply the eradication of the currently unhoused, but true equity in housing, so that there are no members of our community forced to be unhoused in the first place.
Aberdeen has a long and storied history of IWW and unhoused organizing, in fact this was where the industrial union took over the American labor movement in the early 20th century. The people of the region participated in major struggles for their beliefs and their rights, and were brutalized for it. Is this new campaign taking this history into account and how does this history inform the decisions going forward?
R: Absolutely. This has already come up a fair bit and I expect it will come up more as we talk with the larger Aberdeen community. I’ve always been struck by a great paradox of local history whenever I visit Grays Harbor: it’s like people know about the history, but they also don’t know. It seems like it’s only spoken of in whispers. I’ve met more than a few old timers out here who seemed like crusty Republicans at first, but once you get to know them they’re to the Left of Makhno. I feel like some bad shit happened here during McCarthyism that no one wanted to talk about with the following generations. But the Red Scare didn’t completely kill the memories of rebellious workers.
Regardless. Few people around here have a neutral reaction to the Wobblies and I think it’s interesting that the union still has such a reputation in the NW after all this time. Since I don’t know the Aberdeen community as well, I guess I’m not sure how exactly it will go.
I will say that in the modern day, community safety is a huge part of our concern. The whole point of what we are doing is to make a safer, friendlier community, where people can live healthier lives. I can honestly say that everything we are doing is part of an attempt to work towards a more peaceful and prosperous Aberdeen.
I think a lot of people around here know bits and pieces of the story of the IWW’s history, but few people appreciate how huge it was. The IWW directly operated cooperative mills, and factories, in Grays Harbor, around Willapa Bay, and in Olympia, Tacoma, and Seattle. In these mills and factories the union democratically controlled hiring, firing, & all workplace policies. There were even logging towns where the union kicked out the bosses completely, and operated their sawmills as cooperative enterprises. In the early 20th century, these IWW towns were refuges for Japanese, Indigenous, and Latine workers because the IWW didn’t practice racial or gender discrimination when other unions did. During the Depression and especially after WWII, the ruling class came down hard on all of this, closing up cooperative businesses and union shops with a heavy hand. And, it’s a large reason for the economic underdevelopment in Grays Harbor today. I think it’s especially important that the young people around here should know the history of the radical struggles here, and how that relates to the region’s current economic depression.
C: Yes, education has been a very central part of the organizing we have documented on the Harbor, getting people to connect with their history and reject the political labels that have been ascribed to them. Its so important that we commit to political education of the region. We have had this population in our community for generations and we can trace the cycle of poverty that capitalism engenders. Has the current IWW as a whole been supportive of the renewed interest in organizing this population? What pushback has there been?
R: Probably the biggest disappointment I experienced upon joining the IWW in the 2010’s was realizing that they don’t actually organize houseless & unemployed people anymore. I have a theory as to why. In the 1950’s, after the 2nd Red Scare, the IWW was down to about 300 members. The core of the organization remained but only as a kernel. Many old ideas and systems were left dormant. The IWW did not grow again significantly until the later part of the 1960’s, when an organization called Students for a Democratic Society split due to FBI infiltration. The ones who weren’t feds somehow networked the “New Left” together with the “Old Left” and joined the IWW old timers holding it down in Chicago.
This saved the organization, but it changed its character. The injection of largely middle class and white college student organizers had the effect of changing the IWW from a mass-scale working class organization to an elite middle class organization. In many real ways I think that ILWU and a few other unions have remained more in touch with the radical working-class roots of the IWW than the actual current IWW does. I don’t mean to sound overly negative about the union, these are just my honest impressions, and things that I wish people in the union talked about more candidly & less partisan.
Basically, today the IWW is undergoing a culture shift back towards its mass-scale working class roots. There are some folks–in the union, we call them “wobservatives”–who seem to like things the way they are and I’ve never really understood that. But I don’t want to compete or argue with them. I just focus on educating and organizing the people around me. It can be a problem, however, because it seems to me that these people & their workerist focus are the reason the IWW no longer organizes houseless & unemployed people. They are very focused on procedure, and making sure that people pay dues, and seem uninterested in people who they perceive as unlikely to pay dues regularly. Historically, it seems many IWW locals took the opposite approach and just didn’t charge dues to people if they were unemployed. I think this makes sense.
Today, several individual branches have made moves to stop charging dues from unemployed and/or disabled members, and there have even been stipends to pay unemployed workers to engage in organizing. I think this is the way forward and I hope that IWW Central continues to support programs like this. The mission of the IWW is to organize the working class industrially, as an entire class. We have always accomplished this by organizing those that the more traditional unions have deemed un-organizable.
S: This group you refer to as “wobservatives” sounds a lot like the old union vanguard that was in place before the first push by what was then called the “overall brigade” or “bummery” to organize the unhoused and unemployed. In the early part of the century this so called “bummery” basically took control of the IWW at its convention in Chicago and began fervently organizing among the travelers, unemployed, and unhoused. Listeners can read more about this campaign on our website, We have republished the article from the new Aberdeen Bulletin being put together by the new Aberdeen IWW.
The IWW once said its goal was to organize workers, not jobs. How can the current IWW membership be swayed into supporting this cause and living up to these lofty goals?
R: I think your analysis of the history is basically correct. There have always been workerist tendencies within the union, and there will always some degree of tension due to internalized classism with the union. I think a large solution to this classism is political education, but there also just has to be regular interaction between these different parts of the union. There is a lot to be learned from how the historic IWW dealt with similar situations. The real problem with the wobservatives is their tendency to slow down operations. I believe they are and always have been a minority in the organization, and it seems like every day I have conversations with wobs from new locals who are like “um excuse me but what the heck is Central doing?” To be completely honest, I ran out of answers in 2020. Due to the influence of wobservatives on a lot of the union bureaucracy, the IWW missed a lot of great opportunities to support tenant organizing, mutual aid networks, and the movement for racial justice in 2020. In my opinion it hasn’t regained strategic initiative since.
For instance, the first Starbucks store that was organized, in Buffalo NY, was actually organized by former wobblies–using IWW techniques–who had left the union because a number of high-profile wobservatives said that “Starbucks is too hot of a shop to organize.” (In labor organizing, a “hot shop” is one where there is already a high degree of conflict between workers and management). A lot of the wobservatives don’t like to organize hot shops because the campaigns fail a lot. However, I notice that the wobservatives’ campaigns also seem to fail a lot. It seems that organizing unions is just difficult. I also notice that the IWW itself was formed by miners from the Western Federation of Miners, who worked in hotter shops than most of us can possibly imagine.
Now, Starbucks Workers United is actually larger than the entire IWW with 385 stores unionized. Those could have all been IWW shops if the central leadership were more daring. IWW membership was consistently rising from roughly the 1970’s until 2015 or so, at which point there was a massive upswing in membership. Since 2020, that massive upswing has been reversed, and the IWW now has fewer regular dues-paying members than it did when I joined. In a time of union ascendancy, when the so-called “business unions” are seriously talking about 4-day workweeks, the IWW can ignore these trends at their own peril.
I don’t really care one way or the other because I don’t think that orgs splitting is inherently a bad thing. The IWW didn’t get big historically by having a lot of 1:1 conversations, it got big by affiliating with other unions. Almost as soon as the IWW was formed, a lot of the most radical members–indigenous dockworkers in Vancouver, BC–split off, forming their own organization called OBU (One Big Union). They didn’t disagree with the goals of the IWW, just how the IWW was going about them, and said they could always re-affiliate later. And in fact, in the last few years, many IWW locals and IWOC chapters have done exactly that. The union isn’t real. It’s just all of the individual relationships between people in the union. The relationships are more important than the formal structure, and always have been.
In Marxist terms, I believe that the lumpenproletariat has always and will always lead the revolution. These were the people who historically made up the so-called “Bummery” and “Overalls Brigade.” Historically they were traveling workers hopping freight trains, today they are people facing housing insecurity in small post-industrial towns across North America.
C: So earlier you mentioned some historical examples of the IWW organizing in the PNW outside of traditional labor organizing such as running directly operated cooperative enterprises even whole settlements where they kicked the bosses out of town entirely. One could harldy imagine what a community ran by labor might look like. Could you talk about how the community organizing of the IWW of old showed itself in these settlements?
Royt: Yeah, I mean the main, the main one that I know about is a town that was, well, is now a ghost town around here that’s kind of about halfway in between Chehalis and Raymond that’s called Walville, which was named after, you know, one guy who ran the logging company back in the name was Walton and the other guy was Somethingville and so they put the two bosses names together and they got Walville.
And there’s, most of the information that I know about this comes from a few friends of mine who live in the area who did a bunch of deep diving research reading the old newspapers that they have in Chehalis. There’s a lot of cool, old stuff to be learned from like local newspapers in this area. They Often did not have very good things to say about the IWW but they were still covering them constantly because it was like, it was a constant thing.
There was a, there was a large rural working class resistance in this part of the country. Anyway, so Walville to, to make a long story short, you know, they had a union campaign, there was a, it was a company town, logging, they had a logging mill. They had a short line railroad that went up into the hills to get all the logs and, you know, they had bar and other things like that in the town.
But the only way in or out was on the railroad. There wasn’t like a road back then. And so. The union organized the logging mill and eventually got to the point where they were running everything directly. They, you know, they kicked out the management and the bosses and they were just making money selling timber products and splitting the money amongst themselves.
Charyan: So the whole town just ran by the IWW?
Royt: Yeah, I mean, essentially, yes. I wish that I knew more about specifically how they were operating, because what I’ve been trying to find is, and if anyone listening to this out there knows anything about this, help me out, what I’ve been trying to find is IWW records that talk about this, which may be a long shot, because the entire organization was like 300 people in a box of files in Chicago in the 50s, right?
So like, Basically, all the old IWW records from that period are gone. However, there’s a part of me that’s like, I don’t know, maybe there’s something somewhere. I’ve been looking through a lot of the old archives and stuff and trying to find information about this and, and other towns. I don’t even know the names of some of these other towns, but I’ve, I’ve found all these like weird rumors.
There was a lot of shit going on back then. So, with Walville specifically, the whole thing kind of fell apart. Basically, because of the depression, there was a, there was a large fire. At the mill and no one would give them a loan to rebuild it because they were like, Oh, these are the weirdo anarcho communists.
Like, don’t, don’t give those guys a loan. And so It, things kind of fell apart, and people had to move elsewhere, and now, now it’s a total ghost town. The only thing that’s left is there’s some of the foundation of the sawmill itself, and, as I said earlier, the only way in or out was on the trains, so when the white people in the town died, they would get, their bodies would be taken on the train to Chehalis and buried in the In the graveyard there, but there were also a lot of Japanese workers there because the Wobblies weren’t, didn’t practice racial discrimination, they would, they would, they would tolerate them unlike all the other towns in the area at the time were like no Japanese people.
So. The only other thing that’s still out there besides the remnants of the sawmill is there’s a small Japanese graveyard that’s out there that has like maybe a dozen graves or something. They’re all in, all the, the gravestones themselves are all written in Japanese, so I don’t know what they say, you know, but, I don’t know, it’s, it’s a very interesting Spot to go to.
It’s kind of right off the highway. And I don’t know. It’s an interesting little, little piece of history because I have like all that stuff really did happen out here. Like people were like freeing space and kicking out the, the, the ruling class, you know, and, and no one talks about this. The people in the union don’t talk about this.
Whenever I talk to people in the IWW about this, they’re like, what? And I’m like, yeah, no, like this happened. It’s interesting. I mean, it’s something that needs to be researched more, you know, like I’m sure there’s all kinds of old stuff in the old newspapers out here and, you know, and, I don’t know, like, maybe some old timers know some stuff that I would love to talk to them, you know, I don’t know.
Sprout: Yeah, that sounds like a fun project for Sabot Media, actually, is cataloging some of the local histories. If anyone in town or in the area who’s listening, Would like to get a hold of us and talk about any of the history that they’re aware of in town. You can do that at Sabot_media@riseup.net. And we would be, we appreciate that quite a bit.
Well, certainly organizing this population is going to pose its own unique challenges, and require its own set of tactics. What kind of thought has been given to what measures would be effective in pressuring the city, for example, into capitulating to your campaign’s goals?
R: I think that we need to be studying community organizers from a wide variety of different contexts. What worked historically, and what’s working right now. Not just unions, but also groups like the Black Panthers and the Zapatistas. Ultimately, I believe that a strong, organized community will be able to work in its own self-interest and change realities on the ground in ways that the city government is not only forced to accept, but actually welcomes as positive change.
The Zapatistas talk about cultivating a situation where “the people talk, and the government listens.” In the IWW we talk a lot about “flipping the script” with bosses and managers. By inverting power dynamics in unexpected and unpredictable ways, we can accomplish things that may now seem distantly unlikely. Ultimately, I would guess that few people want the status quo to remain in Grays Harbor. Something has to change. If we form a group of people, a union, which has the clearest understanding of the local problems, then we can clearly articulate the most effective local solutions. If we can solve real problems for the masses of people, they will recognize the honesty & effectiveness in what we are attempting to do.
Our power is based in the community, not the government. When the people can form and clearly express their own collective will, nothing can stop them. We want to build a stronger, kinder world in the here and now. Everyone stands to benefit from that.
C: There is unfortunately a persistent culture of far right wing politics in this county. Sabot Media has documented how most of our elected officials subscribe to ideas that border on white nationalism and some go as far as to spout Q Anon esque conspiracies. This culture will undoubtedly oppose what you are trying to do here. How can you safeguard this movement against the eventual attempts to halt progress or dismantle the movement?
R: This is a difficult question, especially because most of the people who talk about this kind of stuff tend to be in large cities. Without having any sympathy for the far-right, it’s easy to see that they also have a strong desire to change things. While we may disagree strongly with the reactionaries, we are not trying to protect the status quo either. So it’s easy for us to say that we aren’t democrats and that we also distrust the government. Often, I find that this throws right-wing people off-guard.
The other thing to remember is that while these types are loud, they are essentially just bullies. If they detect that the majority of people in a given situation are against them, they become increasingly likely to disengage. If they think they are being made to look foolish or ignorant, they become increasingly likely to disengage. If you’re able to publicly embarrass them? They usually just leave straight up. My most used line on these trolls is “Dude, do you really think you’re making yourself look good right now?” Appeal to their sense of narcicissm. In my experience it almost always makes them shut up.
This is not to downplay the rising threat of fascist violence in North America. It often needs to be confronted directly. However, fascism is created by larger social factors. The solution is not to engage individual fascists, but rather to cultivate larger scale stability and political education within the community. People turn to conspiracy theories when they don’t understand the bad shit that’s happening to them, and they don’t have good info about it. The ruling class doesn’t want us to have good info about how our communities are working. That’s why we have to go around and talk to people directly and take notes.
Ultimately, what I think we should be doing is focusing on building a culture of community care. No one wants to live somewhere with tents on the street. The conservatives just have limited vision and blame the individuals who are sleeping in tents. But the real fault lies in greater social factors, the interactions between government regulations, real-estate developers, and large-scale property holders. Making people aware of this, giving them words and tools to describe what is happening to them in late capitalism, is fundamental.
I think most people want change, but they’re not sure what to do. The ruling class wants them to feel powerless. People need clear plans of action. They also need better ways to communicate with each other. Capitalist culture encourages us to feel atomized. It discourages us from supporting each other by making us feel like no one will have our own back when it’s our turn. Often it prevents people from having our back in real ways. If we build a culture of mutual trust and respect throughout the community, through building a good record of actually solving problems for people in the community, then there’s no telling what will happen.
S: That component of culture building is crucial, what can be done to build that culture of mutual aid and solidarity in our community?
R: Political education and practical solidarity. Learning together, encouraging people to self-learn, and proactively solving problems for each other. We need to show people in Grays Harbor a better path, and then walk it with them. No more and no less. A lot of people are cynical about organizing to make things kinder in such a cruel world. But it’s harder to dismiss people with idealistic-sounding words when they are also on the ground, hearing the peoples’ concern and proactively solving their problems.
No one is coming to save Aberdeen except for the people who are already here. No one is going to tell you it’s time to free yourself. Only you can decide when that time comes. Bluntly, the bosses, along with their police and their bureaucrats, have failed this region by any metric. We have to do better. I believe the community can & will do better.
These are hard times. I think the most important thing is to always remain focused on how they could be better. Then, make yourself the reason things do get better. Focus on the future. Things will be brighter when we make them brighter.
C: We are glad to see this kind of organizing taking place here in Aberdeen, but ultimately, this needs to spread to every place. Have you thought at all about how to replicate this model in other locations?
R: Replicability is something we’ve been talking about since day one. We intend to record what we’re doing and create living documents which we can share with people in other communities. Recording our meeting notes, recording our actions, recording the results–and analyzing them. Once we analyze them we can see what worked and what didn’t work, and share the stories with other communities.
At the same time, we also need to be aware of what people are doing elsewhere. I’ve heard some pretty interesting stories about people organizing a union for houseless people in Sacramento, for instance, and I’m sure many other areas. A lot of my old friends from Portland have been doing some inspiring direct aid work to unhoused people lately. I’d like to learn more about all of these projects, network together, share what works.
S: If people want to learn more about this type of organizing and keep up with the latest from here in Aberdeen, or if people want to read or download and print the zine where can they find it?
R: I don’t even know if we figured this out yet! I just wrote it and was focusing on getting physical copies into peoples’ hands, because so many unhoused people have irregular access to phones and computers. We should host it on y’alls website I guess? You’re better at all this social media stuff than I am haha.
S: There are already a few articles detailing some of the deeper history that we’ve skimmed today, and future plans for the local union up on the website aberdeeniww.noblogs.org. Sabot Media will be co-publishing the new Bulletin produced by the Aberdeen IWW on our website so our audience can stay up to date with whats going on in this invaluable campaign. We can probably host the zine at both websites.
Now we would like to debut the the audiozine, Organizing the Unhoused, An Organizer’s Manual. But first we have a musical break with I’m Gonna Join That One Big Union by Woody Guthrie. Hit it!
Music:
Segment two:
Welcome back to Molotov now! Now we would like to debut the release of the audiozine Organizing the Unhoused: An Organizer’s Manual, read and written by Royt, originally published at sabotmedia.noblogs.org
I wrote this booklet because I find it difficult to sleep in my nice warm house when there are so many people around me sleeping rough in winter conditions.
Please fight the system. There are other rebels out there. Ⓐ
Outro:
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Molotov Now! We hope you found it informative and inspiring. Our goal with the podcast is to reach out beyond our boundaries and connect the happenings in our small town with the struggles going on in major urban centers. We want to talk to you if your a big city organizer, we think we have a lot you can learn from, and we know you have much to teach us. If you would like to come on the show please email us at sabot_media@riseup.net with the header “Molotov Now!” and we will be in touch about setting up an interview and crafting an episode to feature you.
We want to give a shout out to our friends at:
- C: Sabotage Noise Productions for putting on awesome benefit shows, including one for The Blackflower Collective, and for being all around awesome people who help us immensly in putting together our local upcoming events section.
- S: The South Florida Anti-Repression Committee who have launched a solidarity campaign for two individuals facing 12 years for an alleged graffiti attack on a fake Christian anti-choice clinic that does not provide any reproductive care. This Federal overreach and use of the FACE Act, an act meant to protect people visiting reproductive clinics from harassment, is unprecedented. To support this solidarity campaign please visit bit.ly/freeourfighters
- C: We want to thank The Blackflower Collective for their continued support and wish them luck in their fundraising efforts. To support them or learn more their website is blackflowercollective.noblogs.org.
- S: Kolektiva, the anarchist mastodon server, is growing faster than ever thanks to Elon Musk’s stupidity as many activists close their accounts for bluer skies as can be seen in the fluctuation of followers over on IGD’s socials, join at kolektiva.social and follow us and other online activists on decentralized federated internet.
- C: Chehalis River Mutual Aid Network is holding a fundraiser for their weekly meals with Food Not Bombs. To donate visit linktr.ee/crmutualaidnet
- S: The Communique is looking for artist and upcoming event submissions, please write to sabot_media@riseup.net to submit your entry.
- C: Thank you to Pixel Passionate for producing our soundtrack, please check out their website at www.radicalpraxisclothing.com and check out their portfolio in our show notes.
- S: and Thank you to the Channel Zero Anarchist Podcast Network. We are proud to be members of a network that creates and shares leading critical analysis, news, and actions from an anarchist persepctive.
Remember to check out sabot media’s new website for new episodes, articles, comics, and columns. We have new content all the time. Make sure you follow, like, and subscribe on your favorite corporate data mining platform of choice and go ahead and make the switch to federated social media on the kolektiva mastodon server today @AberdeenLocal1312 for updates on Sabot Media projects such as The Harbor Rat Report, The Saboteurs, The Communique, our podcast Molotov Now! and many other upcoming projects.
That’s all for tonight. Please remember to spay and neuter your cats and don’t forget to cast your votes at those who deserve them.
Solidarity Comrades,
This is Molotov Now! Signing off
Music this episode:
Molotov Now! Theme by Pixel Passionate
Upcoming Events Background Music:
Solidarity Forever by Pete Seeger
One Shovel by sole and DJ Pain 1
Stand Up For The Revolution Palestinian Rebel Song
Mutual Aid: A Quarantine Music Video by Rissa Boo
Featured Songs:
Which Side Are You On? by Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers
I’m Gonna Join That One Big Union by Woody Guthrie
Audiozine soundtrack: Album – Mayday by Slime Mold:
- There is Power in a Union
- Fraser River
- The Popular Wobbly
- The Commonwealth of Toil
- Solidarity Forever
BONUS TRACK:
@sabotmedia