Interview Conducted by Crawdad Nelson – Anderson Valley Advertiser, May 23, 1990
Web Editor's Note: Although this interview was published over a year after the California Earth First! Rendezvous, the context of the questions suggests that it took place on the weekend of September 16-18, 1988. Billy Don Robinson traveled from Oregon to assist Gary Cox and Judi Bari in their teach-in on the IWW; he officially initiated Bari, Darryl Cherney, Dakota Sid Clifford, and others, and participated in the “Greenhouse” demonstrations covered in "Guilty, Guilty: Earth First! - IWW Greenhouse Demo" before returning to Oregon where he would help organize joint actions with Earth First! there.
Wobblies have been branded as traitorous and anarchistic by those whose interests they threaten, and official programs of extermination have been carried out against them, until people think they are all dead, or intimidated, old men. Robinson is young, alive and far from intimidated.
Crawdad Nelson: What do you say when people call you a communist?
Bill Robinson: I tell them that IWW opposes the authoritarian model, whether it is in the United States or the U.S.S.R.
CN: Do you characterize the Soviet government as just another kind of capitalism in disguise?
BR: I just say it’s the same thing. It’s the patriarchy, the authoritarian model, it’s top-down, it’s anti-democratic, it’s a dictatorship, and we are definitely opposed to that. We refer to it tongue-in- cheek as the “Soviet Union’s Workers Paradise,” and everybody gets a good laugh at that, because everyone knows those people aren’t even eating.
CN: Relatives of mine went to Stalin’s “Worker’s Paradise” and were never seen again.
BR: That’s right. You know there were Wobblies going over there after 1917, trying to work with the Bolsheviks, and they came back and said, “Hey, this is a crock of shit.” IWW went over there and checked it out, realized what it was at the outset and rejected it.
CN: Are there any Wobblies in the Soviet Union now?
BR: Zero. We have 700 in the U.S. There are also Wobblies in Canada, Sweden, Great Britain and Australia.
CN: Are most Wobblies active workers?
BR: Absolutely, but nobody[1] is excluded from the IWW. For instance, we have a department for housewives, a department for students; any unemployed worker can just register in the department in which they last worked.[2] Nobody’s excluded from the IWW on the basis of not earning a wage, although we are all active workers. We’re doing a prison organizing campaign in Ohio. Those prisoners are working for 8 cents an hour, under miserable working conditions. A lot of people would say IWW shouldn’t be organizing prisoners.[3] There are murderers, rapists, some of them have done horrible things. Why is the IWW there? Well, we’re saying these people are victims of the authoritarian model. They are workers. The IWW’s place is organizing among the workers, and that’s what we’re going to continue to do. The thing I’d like to see IWW do is have a department for the disabled. That’s hard work. I’ve been disabled. I’d also like to see a department for the homeless. I’ve been on the street. Living under bridges is not easy.
I’ve talked to some people among Earth First! about how trees are workers. They’re making air for us. IWW is an organization for workers, for producers. It doesn’t say anywhere in the constitution that that is limited to humans. I may catch hell for saying that, but I think a lot of people are going to realize that production is more than just a human job. It’s the earth’s job. When we talk about One Big Union, we’re talking about every-thing.
CN: Now do you keep in contact with other Wobblies?
BR: We have membership meetings at least once a month so the members can get together and talk. Also, whenever a member pays dues they have to contact their delegate in some way. Meetings go on more than once a month, or once a week; they go on all the time.[4]
CN: Are there IWW locals at any industrial plants?
BR: You bet. We have lots of IWW collectives. You can tell it’s an IWW shop by the union bug. It looks a lot like this little button I have on, and it goes on everything produced. In Portland the workers at Oregon Sane Freeze, which is political canvassing group, invited IWW organizers to come in and organize their office. Working conditions were unsatisfactory. One of them got fired for making a proposal that management didn’t like. They didn’t have a grievance procedure. They didn’t have a lot of protection they should have had.
So they invited me to come in and help them organize. Oregon Sane Freeze[5] is about to become an IWW shop. The NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) election is coming in October, and we have about 50% plus one better, which is the required majority under NLRB / guidelines. Since we’ve been organizing, we have instituted a grievance procedure, and we have fought off a dress code which management proposed. A number of benefits have been won before we got the contract and certification by NLRB.
We’re being fought by Greenpeace. Generally, when they have any hint of any IWW organizing at a Greenpeace office anywhere in the country, they shut it down. They don’t trust the people who work for them to do right by the organization. They’re not the ones going door-to-door, the ones on the telephone. They’re sitting in an office dreaming stuff up. What they’ve done in Seattle, with hired canvassers, is require a $250 minimum pledge. The canvassers only get paid according to the pledges they can bring in. So they threw out $30,000 worth of pledges. They said, “We’re not going to even try to collect on these.” And $30,000 worth of workers’ income was thrown away by the national office of Greenpeace, because they didn’t want to fuck with the small pledges.
What they do now is get the canvassers to harangue: “Give us $250, that’s what we need. Are you for saving the world? Then give us $250.” When the workers at Greenpeace Seattle saw what was going on, they protested and they started organizing with IWW. So Greenpeace shut down the shop, just like they did in New York and Boston.[6] There’s a whole history of that.
Political canvassing groups are really the wrong way to be curing the problems of the world, because what they do is take highly motivated, idealistic people and work the dog shit out of ‘em until they get tired and quit, or, if they start complaining about conditions, they fire ‘em without due process, and then go ahead and put fresh workers in. The PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) are the worst. Greenpeace is pretty bad. Fair Share is not as bad, and so on. The IWW organizing drive among these groups (we’ve been invited in by them), is trying to address this problem, because there’s no way that the good work these groups need to do to save the world is going to get done as long as they keep imposing the same patriarchal, authoritarian model on us that has been shitting in the soup so long we’re all choking.
Another thing they like to do is use a lot of seasonal employees like students, because that subverts any labor organizing that you try to do, and it keeps the bosses in power. PIRGs are horrible—they are run by lawyers.
CN: Sounds bad already. What do they do?
BR: OSPIRG in Oregon, NYPIRG in New York. It’s the Nader organization, basically. It’s really tricky talking about these things, because the work that Nader did, and all these people, it’s the right idea. It’s just that they’re going about it bassackwards.
It doesn’t have to be that way. I was talking to a fellow here who said that he was from CBE, Citizens for a Better Environment[7], and he said that the difference there is that the workers have maintained control of the canvas, which you can do at the small, local level. And the local ones are generally better. But the national ones are terrible, an entirely different story. The way they’ve got it set up, they’ve got the wages and working conditions down so low, unless you have money coming in from outside, unless you’re fairly wealthy, you can’t stay with the organization long enough to become one of the managers. So there’s a class bias already built in. Rich folks have taken it over and are running it for rich folks along rich folks’ lines, and if that isn’t what has been fucking up the earth all along, I don’t know what is.
Here are the ones that are supposed to save the earth, getting in the way of progress. The IWW agrees with their goals; we’re desperate for it. We may have one generation to pull this off, if that.
CN: How much contact is there between the IWW and other unions, such as big timber unions, like IWA and LPIW?
BR: Among our membership we have a number of people who carry two cards, as we put it: they are members of regular AFL-CIO unions and also members of the IWW. Their allegiance is to IWW, but the fact is, on their jobs, in order to get protection and in order to show solidarity with their fellow workers, they go ahead and pay their union dues.
CN: In most cases workers at mills are required to join their certified union within a certain period of time after hiring.
BR: That’s the other thing. IWW refuses to do a dues check-off. We’re against closed shop[8] and we’re against check off. We’re not into twisting anybody’s arm, which makes a big difference between us and AFL-CIO.
Fellow worker Dave Frazier, from the Denver-Boulder branch, is a Delegate for his Postal Workers union, and he’s had a lot of opportunity to do some really progressive things. For instance, his union had their meeting in Portland this summer, and there was a postal worker there from El Salvador who was being harassed by the death squads. He knew this because a friend of his had been found beside a road, in little pieces, with a pamphlet nailed to him which said, “these people are next,” with this postal workers name right at the top of the list. He got the impression that it was time to do something, so he split. He is in the United States illegally, seeking sanctuary. He was staying with David and Elizabeth Linder, Ben Linder’s parents.
What Dave Frazier was able to do, working with an organization called “Postal Workers for Peace,” delegates of the Postal Workers union, was go to a convocation and guide a floor fight, so that the national union would accept the El Salvadorian and declare that they were for amnesty. Frazier couldn’t have gotten that done through IWW. We don’t have the clout, but you can get it done through the Postal Workers, and he did and the fellow is getting sanctuary now. The irony of it is, that same Postal Workers union is run by William Dougherty, whose father was the president of that union for 25 years.
He’s the director of AIFLD, the American Institute for Free Labor Development, in Virginia, which is a CIA front. What they do is go to Central and Latin America, recruit people to bring back to the states and then train them to be AFL-CIO type labor organizers, send them back home, then go ahead and strike at strategic times to undermine certain administrations. They have claimed direct success for the overthrow of Salvador Allende. In Brazil and El Salvador they have claimed success. They are doing the same thing in Nicaragua right now. So there is the irony of it. Fellow worker Frazier is able to do this good work with the help and influence of his union, but the leadership of this same union is involved in the destabilization of progressive labor movements in Latin America.
Basically, the IWW feels about the AFL-CIO and other unions like the Teamsters: the rank-and-file have been had.[9] We’ve all been had. Our solidarity is with the rank-and-file of these workers, and to effect any change, wove got to remain engaged.
As far as among the lumber workers, it’s the same deal. AFL-CIO has gone in and organized these people after the IWW was literally crushed, with the bayonet, the rifle, the vigilante’s rope, the nut cutter’s knife. Female workers were raped. The most incredible violence was directed against us, in concert with the federal government, in 1917 and 1920—The Palmer Raids—where they rounded up thousands of people, Gestapo-like, in the middle of the night and deported them, jailed them, shot them. Wobblies were directly attacked by U.S. Cavalry in the 1917 Spruce Strike. We were striking against a war industry; they made struts for airplane wings out of spruce. Basically what happened is the boss class came in and destroyed the fighting union, the popular union, the union that did not compromise in any of their direct actions for the benefit of the working class. They crushed us cruelly and then brought in the AFL afterward to sign everybody up.
The CIO used to be a fighting union, but it took about 20 years for the FBI and that bunch to infiltrate them, kill off the leaders and jail the rest of ‘em. It took a little while, but they got ‘em defanged and they were fit to merge with the AFL in 1957.[10] It’s business unionism. If you took a business leader and a union leader in a sack and shook ‘em, you couldn’t tell one from the other.[11]
CN: How actively is the government keeping track of you right now?
BR: Any package I get from Chicago headquarters is opened. Any big package is opened entirely and rewrapped, with a little sign on it that says, “Arrived in Portland in too bad a condition to deliver; rewrapped by the post office.” They have their eyes on us. We were on the Subversives List until 1972. We weren’t even allowed legally to organize. Ironically, it was Richard Nixon who did away with that, and I never figured that out.
CN: As I understand the word “subvert,” it means to work at a lower level toward displacing the higher level. Isn’t that the objective of the Wobblies?
BR: In that case we are 100% subversive. The thing that worries me about a lot of this terminology is how it’s been used against us. The term anarchy, for instance. I’m proud to be an anarchist. But if you say the word anarchy to a person, they’re going to think violence and chaos. What it means is we are anti-state socialists. We are against government. We think it’s based on slavery, that no government can exist without enslaving its people. It’s based on violence, and it’s wrong, not to mention unnecessary. What we are against is the state, which is the way the boss class organizes to keep workers enslaved. We are for a new social order—that’s all anarchy is.[12]
The boss class says “Anarchy can’t work because of human nature. You need us to govern you. You’re too mean and nasty to govern yourselves.” Well, that’s horseshit. What they’re talking about is like, you take a young dog, chain it out to a tree, starve and beat the shit out of it all its life, and then they say, “This sucker has a vicious nature.” Well, the violence comes from the people who did that to the dog, and it’s the same with human nature. Under the state system we are chained, beaten and starved, and told we can’t govern ourselves. The only way human nature can show its potential is when we smash this goddamn state. That’s anarchy.
CN: When is that coming?
BR: As quick as we can get around to it. The boss class is subverting themselves faster than anybody else could. They’re shitting in the soup. They’re fucking the dog and trying to sell us the pups.
Footnotes:
[1] Robinson meant “nobody who isn’t a member of the employing class.”
[2] Actually Robinson actually means industrial unions rather than departments, as the latter are a distinct entity in the IWW’s industrial union classification system . The Department of Housewives is actually Household Service Workers Industrial Union 680, and is open to homemakers and domestic workers of all genders, not just “wives”.
[3] This is still a matter of debate within the IWW.
[4] Now, of course, the IWW also uses the internet. In fact, iww.org was the second union in the entire world (An Israeli teachers’ union was the first) and the first international union to have a website (as early as 1995).
[5] Sane Freeze is now known as Peace Action.
[6] This story was detailed in the September 1988 issue of the Industrial Worker. See also “Thompson, Fred and Jon Bekken”, The Industrial Workers of the World: Its First 100 Years, Cincinnati, OH, 2006.
[7] They’re now known as Communities for a Better Environment.
[8] Actually, that’s not accurate. The IWW leaves that decision up to a democratic vote by the workers in the union in the shop. Also, what Robinson is referring to is a “union shop” as defined under the National Labor Relations Act, wherein all workers must join the union after a negotiated probationary period as part of a collective bargaining agreement. “Closed shops”—wherein a worker must first join the union before securing employment, and the union controls the hiring of said employees (usually based on a union-based seniority system) have been illegal since the passage of Taft-Hartley (though maritime unions tend to have exemptions if they have hiring halls). The distinction is understood by few, but significant.
[9] The International Brotherhood of Teamsters was separate from the AFL-CIO until 1985.
[10] Actually, the merger happened in 1955.
[11] See Boyer, Richard O. and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, Pittsburgh, PA., United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, 1955, and Lembcke, Jerry & William Tattam, One Union in Wood, A Political History of the International Woodworkers of America, 1984 International Publishers, New York, NY.
[12] Not all IWW members are anarchists, however.