The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or the “Wobblies” is an organization founded in Chicago in 1905 by many historical figures of the Labor Movement. Working class organizers such as William “Big Bill” Haywood, “Mother” Jones, and Eugene Debs. Its original cause of radical unionization and solidarity inspired rhetoric encouraged tens of thousands to rally across the United States from 1905-1920. Increased federal and local violence towards IWW members culminated in the Palmer Raids of 1920 that detained and deported thousands of “Wobblies.” The surviving Industrial Workers of the World could not recover in an increasingly modern United States that had federally organized labor relations laws that criminalized radical organization in favor of bureaucratic control of unionization. Regardless of past adversity and oppression the Industrial Workers of the World is still organizing modern workers and still holds true to their founding constitution’s preamble: 

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth. We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. 

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity.

BK: My name is Bernard Klinke. I’m currently the correspondence secretary for the IWW Austin’s general membership branch. I was our lead organizer. 

BC: How large would you say IWW is?

BK: Back in 2020, IWW was doing an assessment of branches and membership numbers. They noticed that Austin had to have categories of membership. We have “at-large” and then “branch” membership; At-large members are just kind of all over the place and in places where there isn’t a branch. We didn’t have a branch and they contacted us and said, ‘Hey, do you want to form one?’ We had the right mix of people that all said, yes, so we officially were approved or formally approved in July of 2021.

BC: This branch in Austin is a newly formed one? 

BK: Yeah. There have been a couple of branches here in the past. It’s been several years since there was a branch in Austin. We’re a year and a half, two years old if you want to count when we actually started organizing.

BC: Why do you think unions are beneficial to workers?

BK: Workers are at a disadvantage compared to their employers. Their employers have the resources, the means of production, the power, and the ability to make life-or-death decisions for their workers’ lives. In general, business interests are very, very well organized. They have organized trade groups that look out for the restaurant industry and things like that. So workers are already at a disadvantage coming into any industry because their bosses are organized. That gives them the power to make unilateral decisions about things that really impact workers’ lives. One of the only kinds of organizations out there that really advocates for workers is unions. If we didn’t have unions, the landscape of work in the US would look very different. We would not have weekends, 40-hour work weeks, child labor laws, OSHA, or the Office of Safety and Health Administration. There are so many things that people today take for granted. People have fought and were killed for these rights that people have now and if, again, if we didn’t have unions, we would not have those things.

BC: How did you first hear about IWW?

BK: Back in 2012 I ended up getting a job with the American Federation of Teachers, the Texas branch. I was a teacher’s union organizer for eight years. Prior to that, I had no real good knowledge or understanding of unions aside from vague leftist support of unions because ‘unions are good.’ During my time with the Texas AFT, I ended up meeting a bunch of other organizers in the professional organizing world. There’s a lot of cross-pollination; people get sent on assignment to other unions to help out with campaigns and stuff. I just met a lot of really interesting people. That’s how I heard about the IWW. At first, my interest in it was just because it seemed cool, edgy, and super leftist. Then I researched the organization and read through the Constitution. Its constitution was about the campaigns that it was working on and its philosophies. It really fits with my personal beliefs, values, and thoughts about organizations. Eventually, I joined and I joined in 2016. I’ve been a member ever since. I’ve been part of this branch, and I’m also an instructor for our organizer training.

I think there’s a pretty significant difference between the IWW and most other unions. in that we typically refer to most other unions as business unions because they frequently mirror the kind of power structures of the businesses and employers that they are intended to regulate. They’re very hierarchical, some more than others, but the IWW is an aggressively democratic organization. That just stood out to me a lot.

BC: Do you generally feel satisfied being in your union here at the IWW? How much do you pay, dues wise?

BK: Yes. I’m still a member and I probably will be till the day I die. As with any organization, especially any left-leaning organization, there are always going to be frustrations and disagreements. In general, my membership is probably one of the most meaningful things in my life, second to my wife.

One of the interesting things about the IWW is our dues are roughly based on your income. The dues are either $11, $22, or $33. At the top, I pay $33 a month because I can and because I believe in this organization and contribute to it financially. It’s just one small way that I can support the work that we’re doing. But there’s also a “hardship” dues category that is just $6 a month and an astonishing number of our members join at that level. For a lot of campaigns that we work on with service industry workers, we’re talking with people who are already very poorly paid with somewhat unstable incomes who are dependent on tips and often are experiencing issues like not getting enough hours, having inconsistent scheduling, having weird tips, share platforms that the employer puts in place that doesn’t give them everything that they’re owed. Once we get organized with them, I always say to join at that level. If they think that their membership in the IWW is meaningful enough and they are capable of paying more, I tell them to do it.But it’s not an obligation. And we don’t check your income.

BC: You said earlier that the IWW is a democratically-run organization, more so than other unions. These dues that we were just talking about, where do they generally go?

BK: If you’re an at-large member, all your dues go to our national headquarters in Chicago and are redistributed to various programs. We do also have some paid staff, but compared to most other unions, it’s a very, very small group. We have a membership manager, an IT guy who works on our websites. Those are salaried people. If you’re in a branch, then half your dues come back to the branch. We use them for organizing and for logistics and infrastructure and stuff like that.

BC: What would you say the core beliefs of the IWW are and what are the goals? What is the goal of the IWW? 

BK: I don’t know that I can speak for the IWW at large. I can say that for our branch, our values are that the working class is an oppressed class in many ways. It is vital for the working class to be informed, educated, and organized. Training and education are core values; we put a big premium on training. Anybody interested in organizing, regardless of whether or not they’re a member, can attend organizer training in person and virtually. I don’t care if anybody joins the IWW, all I care about is that they’re organizing that they’re building power at their workplace with their co-workers so that they can push back on bad faith employers who are paying poverty wages and leaving unsafe working conditions in place.

Our philosophy is that the current system that we have in place, capitalism, is a very effective system and it works really, really well for certain people. But that’s a very small percentage of the population, and for the vast majority of people, capitalism does not work. The wage system is very oppressive. Ultimately, we are an organization that has stated in our constitution that dismantling capitalism is something that must happen for our very survival. It’s a very entrenched system and we recognize that that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. In the meantime, building worker power, training people, and giving them the skills to organize themselves and their co-workers is one of the most important things.

BC: What are your experiences with organizing? Where has your organization recently been successful? Have you had setbacks?

BK: Yeah, organizing is mostly about setbacks. My very first experience organizing (that I didn’t realize was organizing) was in an apartment complex, where we had one of those where the building surrounds a courtyard and all the patios face inwards. We had a lot of people that we knew didn’t have hot water for several months. We kept going to the management and saying, ‘Hey, guys, please fix this. We haven’t had hot water. It’s the middle of winter. Taking cold showers when it’s freezing outside really sucks.’ They just put us off until eventually I got a petition together and went around to all my neighbors, talked to them, had them sign it, sent it in, and then said, ‘We’ll be calling the city to do inspections on the water lines,’ because there are certain city codes that require heated water. Eventually, we were successful and got them to replace a faulty boiler.

Then, I was a school social worker for years. That got me in with Texas AFT; they were doing a really big push to build membership out in districts where they didn’t have it. After that, I worked for a couple of organizations.Organizing is about building relationships. A lot of our work is just talking to people, having conversations. Talking about people’s fears, their hopes, what motivates them, what their passions are, and trying to tap into those passions and addressing fears about everything from ‘Will I get fired?’ to, ‘Am I going to get demoted?’ or, ‘Will my boss take me off the schedule?’

In my past organizing, we’ve had a lot of successes. We worked for a couple of different locals in the state and we had some very successful organizing campaigns for organizing school custodians. We pushed for better pay for school social workers, which was a really important thing for me. Since coming to work with the IWW, we’ve had a lot of struggles and failures, more so than our successes, but that is kind of the nature of organizing when you’re organizing outside of an established union. When you’re organizing for, say, Austin ISD, they have been around, they are established, they are known. They have the closest thing that you can have to collective bargaining in the state of Texas for public employees.

For IWW, It’s explicitly illegal for public employees, including school district employees to have collective bargaining agreements. Private sector workers can but public sector workers cannot.

In education Austin, they have what they call elective consultation, which is a kind of collective bargaining light. And so they have a lot of mechanisms through which they can make change. We’re really like a lot of our organizing is people who come to us, no structure, no organizing, they’ve never organized in their lives. There’s never been any organizing taking place at their workplace. And so we are starting from scratch.

The most visible campaign that we have, that has had some quiet successes, is organizing the Alamo Drafthouse. We went public with that campaign back in February of 2022. Since then, the organization has resulted in a bunch of union busting and some pretty low tactics from Drafthouse management, but it has influenced them to take some actions that they never would have taken before. Thinking of increasing base pay for pretty much all workers except for the projectionists. So all the servers, the runners, the bar staff, the cooks and they also started having all staff meetings just magically once we started organizing. They said that they would have them all the time before we started organizing. That just never happened and then we started organizing suddenly they got all staff meetings happening. Just purely coincidentally, I’m sure.

Our successes haven’t been real public, but they’re slow and steady. And as long as we’re making any kind of progress, I’m happy. With that said, There are a couple other campaigns that we’ve had some successes on but they’re not public yet so I can’t really talk about those externally. But I mean, gosh, the number of like, organizing leads, you know, people who reach out to us for organizing help that nothing has come out of for every one campaign that has success at least two dozen that just go nowhere. But when you’re organizing from scratch, that’s the nature of the beast.

BC: Recently, there was a Gallup poll of how many Americans supported unions and it’s the highest it’s been since 1965. Have you seen a change personally as an organizer?

BK: So I love that poll, because it’s interesting to contrast that with the current union members’ average like union membership numbers in the country. It has gone up, but not as much as support has surged. It’s certainly a cause for optimism on the part of labor organizers and I’ve definitely seen more interest in unions and organizing. But there are also a lot of misconceptions that people have about unions and especially in Texas, people are heavily propagandized against unions. So I have conversations with people who will share some really concerning takes on unions. I can’t even tell you how many times people would be like, “wait you’re with a union? I thought unions were illegal in Texas.” Wow, let’s start unpacking that, right, there. That’s not true. There are tons of limitations our state government puts on unions, but we’re not illegal. Also, supporting a union and being a union member and organizing to be clear, they’re very, very different things. I could support the Austin Football Club. I call myself a supporter because I like them. I think they’re great. Have I ever been to a game? Have I ever bought their merchandise? No. Ever, ever seen one of their games? No. But I can call myself a supporter. So it’s great that people are being more supportive of unions, but it would be really cool to see that actually turn into action. Right? 

BC: So you would say you haven’t really seen action?

BK: More so than in the past. But I mean, if you want to look at the percentage of the workforce in the country, that is union members. It’s still staggeringly low compared to other nations, but you know, like the EU nations, Australia, Canada, Mexico, even our union membership is very, very low. It’s increasing, but the level of support is increasing far quicker. So it’d just be nice to see that turn into a commitment to unions rather than just kind of vague broad support. Right.

BC: When I was searching for unions to contact it was difficult to get into contact with some of them. I found that the IWW was generally the easiest one. I had a poor time when I tried to contact the AFL-CIO. Are they a business union?

BK: They’re the umbrella business union. I have mixed feelings about the AFL-CIO. I know several of the people who work for the Texas AFL-CIO and I have a great deal of respect for them as people. I would say, to stick to your question, the AFL-CIO has a checkered history. If you look into the major mergers of the AFL- CIO, the CIO was really the coalition of unions that represented people of color, because back in the day, unions were all white. If you weren’t white, you couldn’t be a member of a lot of unions. So you had this two tiered union system eventually the AFL forcefully absorbed the CIO, forming the AFL-CIO. There’s some history of downplaying the organizing and successes of organizers of color. Almost every union that you could think of just off the top of your head almost all of them are going to be members. Of the AFL-CIO. That includes police unions. That’s something that we very strongly oppose. We view police as enforcers of the capitalist system, and protectors of capitalist interests, rather than peacekeepers. The ‘Protect and Serve’ moniker or motto that they often plaster on everything that wasn’t even a thing until a PR campaign in the 60s and 70s. When somebody said, “let’s come up with a PR campaign to promote police and make people think of them better.” They came up with a motto: ‘Protect and Serve.’ My assertion is that the police union should not be a member of the AFL-CIO. There’s a lot of controversy about that. Even though we are among AFL-CIO members, it’s an important organization because it has a lot of money and power and like they have a stable of paid lobbyists in general. I generally hate lobbyists but I actually like those guys because they’re decent guys and decent people. But they very much want to protect the status quo system.

BC:  I asked that question because, historically speaking, there was a rivalry between the IWW and AFL. Which brings me to my next question. The IWW, historically was stomped on by the federal government in 1919, so many people if they’ve heard of the IWW that they think it’s something that ‘s a closed book, that was just a chapter and it’s gone now. How is the modern IWW if at all different from that idea of the IWW that was destroyed?

BK: Well, we’re subject to modern labor laws. I think that’s probably one of the biggest things. Some of this is my interpretation of things, some of this is history, but you could accurately point at the formation of labor laws like the Taft Hartley Act and the National Labor Relations Act as responses to IWW’s very, very effective organizing. The IWW was a very militant union back in the day. But that was partially because we were literally being murdered. Organizing in mining towns, If you go Ludlow, Colorado and read up about that massacre that happened there that was workers who were striking, some of whom were IWW members, and they were murdered, wholesale, just slaughtered by US federal agents, police and hired thugs, Pinkerton agents and the like. Their lives were literally on the line. Our tactics were also a lot more aggressive. If the boss didn’t pay an IWW shop, that shop might show up at that boss’s door and burn down the house. So the efficacy of those tactics, the federal government saw and, wealthy business owners understood the danger that this was one of the only things that could truly threaten their economic hegemony, and so, they crafted our current labor laws, which very much hamstring our ability to use some of those tactics that we used in the past. Like the process through which somebody has to go to become a recognized official union through the National Labor Relations Board. It’s a really lengthy process, and it’s very bureaucratic. It gives the employer a ton of opportunities to sabotage the whole process. It is meant to be ponderous and bulky and awkward and really to be challenging, and make it an uphill battle to organize a union. So now, we decide our strategy is very distinct from modern business unions in that we reject the assertion that it is necessary to go through a formal NLRB election to be a union because our definition of union is two or more workers who get together to strategize solutions that can improve their working conditions. That’s the spirit of the Union. It’s not a bureaucratic structure. It’s not  having a president, it’s not being given this kind of peanuts of recognition by the US government, it’s that workers do the work to organize and that’s what a union is. If the workers determined that they really, really, really want to do an NLRB election. We’re a democratic organization. So if they independently determined that that’s the best course of action for them, then cool, we will do what we can to assist them but that’s not our first choice of ways to build worker power. It’s direct action instead.

BC: To close, do you have any advice to give to people who want to organize their workplaces? I know that you host training programs.

BK: I’m of the mind that everyone should have a union. I don’t care where you work, how much you get paid. Everyone should have a union. A little known fact is that the paid staff of unions,  the organizers, the administrative professionals, and the clerical support. They have their own unions. Union employees have a union because they need a union to negotiate with the union bosses. That is a very good example of what everybody needs, because everybody has situations in their workplace, they as an individual cannot change. But if they were to band together with all of their coworkers, and stand in solidarity, they can make those changes. If somebody’s interested in organizing, tell them to reach out. We are happy to talk to people about how to get started organizing. Getting trained is really, really important. Because there are a lot of potential missteps that somebody can make in the very, very first stages of organizing that we can  tell people about and help them avoid. I tell people to do your research, go read up on the different unions, try to contact one that is appropriate for your industry and talk to their organizers. See what their advice is and if you have trouble getting in touch with somebody at one of those unions, move on to the next one. We will talk to anybody except for cops and bosses. As long as you don’t have the unilateral authority to hire or fire someone, then yeah, come talk to us. We would be more than happy to share the strategies that we’ve seen to be effective, the pitfalls that people can fall into and some of the strategies that bosses will use to union bust. When it comes down to it, organizing is fundamentally about relationships. And it’s about caring, at least kind of in our philosophy. of it. You cannot organize your workplace if you don’t care about your coworkers. So building relationships with them and building trust is absolutely vital. If somebody wants to get started before they even contact somebody, the best way to do that is just get to know your coworkers, care about them. Learn about their lives, what motivates them, what are their passions, what are they afraid of? You don’t have to be their best friend. You don’t have to agree with them politically. But get to know and care about them. Then once you’ve built some trust, find out what they want to make better at the workplace then then get in touch with us.

I just advise that literally everybody should have a union. So if you don’t have one, and I’m talking if you get paid at all, because people are organizing grad students right now, because grad students in a lot of universities are actually teaching. They are teaching undergrads and they get paid for it. So they’re workers and they are very, very badly exploited across the board. It doesn’t matter what you do. As long as you’re not a cop. We will help you organize. If you don’t contact us, like I said, I don’t care if you’re an IWW member or if you’re a member of any other union. All I care about is that you’re organizing and building power with your place and trying to make it a better workplace for you and your coworkers and anybody that comes after you.