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Concept
Industrial unionism
Summary
Industrial unionism is a trade union organising method through which all workers in the same industry are organized into the same union, regardless of skill or trade, thus giving workers in one industry, or in all industries, more leverage in bargaining and in strike situations.
Industrial unionism contrasts with craft unionism, which organizes workers along lines of their specific trades.
In 1893, the American Railway Union (ARU) was formed in the United States, by Eugene Debs and other railway union leaders, as an industrial union in response to the perceived limitations of craft unions. Debs himself gave an example of the inadequacies that his fellows at the time felt towards organising by craft. He recounts, that in 1888, a strike was called by Train drivers and railway firemen on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railways, but other employees, particularly conductors, who were organised into a different unions did not join that strike, with strikebreakers brought on to help their employers.
In June 1894, the ARU voted to join in solidarity with the ongoing Pullman strike and, within hours of the union lending support to the boycott, traffic from the Pullman Company traffic ceased to move from Chicago to the Western United States. The sympathy strike then spread to the Southern, and then Eastern, United States. A statement was issued by the chairman of the General Managers Association, which represented railway companies that were mainly situated around Chicago, admitted that:
We can handle the railway brotherhoods, but we cannot handle the A.R.U.... We cannot handle Debs. We have got to wipe him out.
The General Managers turned to the United States government, which immediately sent the United States Army and Marshals to force an end to the strike.
In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was formed in Chicago at the First Annual Convention of the IWW, six weeks after the formation of the Asiatic Exclusion League.
Official source
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