After nearly one hundred years, we have returned to the Harbor to reclaim what is ours…our labor.
With the re chartering of the Aberdeen IWW we intend to bring back the wobbly labor organizing that is our tradition here. Aberdeen has a long and powerful history of IWW organizing, a history we honor and build upon. The goal of the IWW is, as always, to create a world in which workers have direct control over their labor. It is our goal locally to expand the definitions of who should have control over their time and energy beyond the traditional “worker”. It is our hope that our organizing can benefit those living on the streets, those without employment, and those who cannot work. We do not fetishize the position of the “worker” as an end in itself, but seek to liberate our very time from the exploitation of the ruling class. Only once all have what they need will we be satisfied. Until then we agitate, educate, and organize for a better future.
We intend to study and learn from our past struggles on the Harbor and do not intend to be ran out of town again. We mean to remember those lost to the industries that built this city and the fights against the bosses that took place here 100 years ago. Through this we will reclaim a place on the Harbor for radical labor organizing, reminding the workers here who has the power. Reminding them of their exploitation at the hands of their bosses, and reminding them that there is a better way.
Selected from From Red Harbor, by Aaron Goings:
In the first four decades of the 20th century thousands of workers in Grays Harbor either joined or supported the IWW. The region also experienced a series of epic labor struggles, frequently led by the IWW. Thousands of men and women labored in Grays Harbor’s lumber industry during the early twentieth century, performing the work necessary to allow the region’s industry to reach such impressive heights. Early twentieth century lumber workers labored long hours in treacherous conditions for low wages. Until strikes led by the IWW forced Pacific Northwest lumber employers to grant the eight-hour day, lumber workers worked ten hours per day as a rule.
The IWW found strength among Grays Harbor’s immigrant workers who struggled to survive in an industry where low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions were the rule.Thousands of immigrants joined thousands more native-born workers to perform the paid and unpaid labor that enabled Grays Harbor to become the world’s lumber capital. Aberdeen, Hoquiam, and Cosmopolis each had their own ethnic communities, complete with a diverse array of immigrants and immigrant families, immigrant-owned institutions such as restaurants and newspapers, and rich sets of social and cultural activities based, as often as not, around the group’s meeting halls.
During the first decades of the twentieth century, Grays Harbor had one of the most densely unionized workforces in the Pacific Northwest. Still, the local trade union movement did not represent the local working class as a whole. Instead, the dozens of craft unions that comprised the movement during its first dozen years were designed to represent a small group of privileged workers in selected industries. African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, women, and so-called “new immigrants” who hailed from southern and eastern European nations, represented only a small minority of union member.
The IWW stepped into the vast void created by the region’s trade unions, promising to organize workers regardless of race, sex, or skill. But the Wobblies were not merely more open (or “industrial”) versions of AFL-style craft unions. Instead, the Wobblies were (and are) committed to challenging capitalism itself, working to break the chains of industrial bondage. In June 1905, a collection of socialists, anarchists, militant unionists, and other labor radicals met in Chicago to found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), an industrial union (a term that contrasted with “craft union” and meant a union that included unskilled workers as well as skilled craft workers) and a revolutionary organization. The IWW hoped to organize all workers, regardless of race, sex, or skill, into “One Big Union.” They advocated for workers to use direct action on the job, such as strikes, sabotage, and slowdowns, rather than political or electoral action. Wobblies understood that capitalism is an inherently exploitative system, one in which workers and employers are locked in a perpetual struggle in which both sides seek to gain at the other’s expense. In other words, the Wobblies understood that workers desire the full fruits of their labor, while employers want a free hand to extract as much wealth as possible.
In Grays Harbor the Wobblies organized primarily among lumber workers, establishing their first local in Hoquiam in early 1907. The local IWW grew dramatically during the Aberdeen Free Speech Fight of November 1911 to January 1912, when IWWs joined Harbor socialists in their successful efforts to overturn a municipal law banning left-wing political speeches in Aberdeen’s downtown. Efforts by Wobblies to establish a stronghold on the Harbor triggered a six-month-long coordinated attack on the radicals by Grays Harbor employers and agents of the state. Employers formed citizens’ committees – members hailed from local chambers of commerce – in Aberdeen and Hoquiam to disrupt and remove the IWW presence on the Harbor. The vigilante groups arrested and jailed activists, used fire hoses to disperse their meetings, sought to “starve out” strikers by refusing them credit at local merchants, imposed exorbitant fines for minor criminal offenses, deported activists from town, violently assaulted them with clubs and firearms, and raided and closed their halls. The Hoquiam Citizens’ Committee armed itself with shotguns and clubs, and formed a cavalry to ride down the strikers.