Saturday, June 06, 2020

The Justice Department Campaign Against the IWW, 1917-1920

THE BLACK WORKING CLASS IS UNDER ASSAULT BY THE POLICE 
JUST LIKE THE IWW WAS A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, 
POLICE BRUTALITY
HAS BEEN AROUND A LONG TIME

The Justice Department Campaign Against the IWW, 1917-1920

by Steven Parfitt

 IWW picnic to raise funds for "class war prisoners," Seattle, July 20, 1919. UW Libraries, Labor Archives and Special Collections. (click to enlarge)
The Palmer Raids are usually remembered as the high water mark of the First Red Scare. Under the leadership of A. Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General from 1919 to 1921, the Bureau of Investigation launched raids in November 1919 and January 1920 against anarchists, members of the new Communist and Communist Labor Parties, and others seen as supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Hundreds of foreign nationals were deported to Soviet Russia with the help of immigration officials from the Department of Labor. The Palmer Raids have been immortalised in literature and cinema. They launched the career of J. Edgar Hoover, then only twenty-four but a rising star within the Bureau of Investigation. They also launched the Bureau as the federal government’s first line of defence against Bolshevism in particular and left-wing radicalism in general.
All the attention given to the Palmer raids, however, has obscured the first great use of the Bureau of Investigation several years earlier against a domestic enemy: the Industrial Workers of the World. On September 5, 1917, agents of the Bureau of Investigation, in conjunction with local law enforcement, raided every office of the IWW across the United States within the space of twenty four hours, with possibly the widest-ranging search warrant in US history. They took five tons of material from the national headquarters of the IWW in Chicago alone, and took tons more from 48 local offices and the homes of leading Wobblies (IWW members). Federal agents seized everything from office furniture to paper clips. The District Attorney for Detroit complained to Thomas Gregory, Attorney General from 1914 to 1919, that it ‘became necessary to procure wagons to haul the stuff’ removed from the home of only one Wobbly, Herman Richter.[1]
Steven Parfitt is a Teaching Associate at the Universities of Nottingham and Loughborough and Associate Lecturer at University of Derby in the UK. He is author of Knights Across the Atlantic: The Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland, forthcoming in 2016 with Liverpool University Press. He has written articles on American, British and global labour and social history (including the IWW) in journals including Labor, International Review of Social History and Labour History Review, and is currently working on a global history of the Knights of Labor. He can be reached at spar232@aucklanduni.ac.nz .
Some government officials claimed that the seized material ‘was sought by the government as evidence tending to connect I.W.W. leaders with the German war office.’ The District Attorney for Philadelphia hinted at other motivations when he described the September raids as done ‘very largely to put the I.W.W. out of business.’[2] Justice Department officials then used the captured documentation to prosecute more than a hundred IWW leaders at Chicago. The Chicago trial became one of the largest show trials held outside Stalin’s Russia. The defendants were all found guilty, after less than an hour’s deliberation by the jury, of more than 10,000 individual violations of federal law. Fifteen of them received twenty-year prison sentences, and though some of these sentences were later commuted the raids, trials, and other repression hamstrung the IWW at one of the most promising times in its history. This essay concerns the September raids, the trial that followed, and the elaborate mix of censorship, propaganda and other methods that federal agents used to secure the conviction of the Chicago defendants. It is, in other words, the story of an unprecedented attack by the federal government against a political movement on more or less explicitly political grounds.
 Raids, Censorship and Surveillance
 The reasons behind the federal government’s campaign against the IWW stretched back almost to the foundation of the IWW in 1905, but the immediate cause of that campaign lay in the wider war in Europe. When the United States entered the First World War in April, 1917, the IWW became one of the leading voices against the conflict. IWW organisers roamed the United States and established powerful branches in two crucial wartime industries in particular – copper mining and lumber. They did so in the context of an industrial boom, stimulated by the demand for war material from the United States and Allied governments. That boom brought unemployment down from 15% in 1914 to 8% in 1917 and, at the same time, encouraged a wave of unrest across the entire country that broke all records for industrial conflict.[3] Three thousand strikes took place between April and November 1917.[4] Business and government leaders worried that these battles might hamper if not completely disrupt the war effort, and the Wilson Administration moved to grant concessions to unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor in return for industrial peace. The IWW, the most radical, anti-war and uncompromising section of the American labor movement, was marked out for repression instead.
Click to see the University of Arizona Special Collections web exhibit
That repression came from several quarters. Employers, particularly the Phelps Dodge Corporation, which owned a string of copper mines in Arizona, were not about to let the Wobblies lead their employees on strike. In July 1917, after IWW locals called strikes at Phelps Dodge mines in Bisbee and Jerome, Arizona, the company and biddable sheriffs struck back. On July 10, mine supervisors and vigilantes rounded up more than a hundred men in Jerome and deported 67 of them to Needles, California. On July 12, the local sheriff and a posse of more than 2,200 men rounded up more than a thousand suspected IWWs at Bisbee and left them in the desert 200 miles beyond the city limits, in cattle cars helpfully provided by the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad. A kind of corporate-vigilante axis got to work on the Wobblies in other parts of the country as well. In August 1917, masked men broke into the hotel room of an IWW organiser, Frank Little, in Butte, Montana. They hanged him from a railroad trestle and left a warning to other labor agitators on his body. Little had arrived in the town to support miners on strike against the Anaconda Mining Company, and the company was almost certainly implicated in his murder.
The military joined the anti-IWW crusade in earnest. The War Department claimed that during hostilities its soldiers put down twenty-nine revolts, most of which actually referred to strikes called by the IWW. Lawmakers gave army units the power to use force in defence of anything that state governors declared a “public utility.” In practice this meant that, as Robert Goldstein writes, military personnel ‘began a massive program of strike-breaking, including raids on IWW headquarters, breaking up meetings, arresting and detaining hundreds of strikers under military authority without any declaration of war, and instituting a general reign of terror against the IWW.’[5] Military Intelligence, which grew from 2 to 1300 employees from the beginning to the end of the war, contained a domestic counter-intelligence service, MI-4, which spent a large fraction of its resources in spying on and disrupting IWW branches across the United States. This included the Plant Protection Service, made up of informants at all the major munition plants in the country that kept tabs on the political activities of their co-workers and paid particularly close attention to the doings of the IWW.[6]
The Justice Department went farthest of all in their repression of the Wobblies. The Bureau of Investigation, founded in 1908, had only 141 employees in 1914. As war loomed the Bureau rapidly increased its force of special agents, quintupling them between 1916 and mid-1918. They could also draw on the services of 150,000 volunteer patriots grouped into the American Protective League, which acted as an auxiliary to the Bureau’s more reliable and effective force of special agents. Attorney General Gregory did not boast idly when he claimed, in the Justice Department’s annual report for 1918, that ‘it is safe to say that never in its history has this country been so thoroughly policed as at the present time.’[7] Once Congress voted to declare war on Germany in April 1917 the Justice Department turned to the IWW as Enemy No.1. Congress also provided the main legislative weapon that the Department used against the IWW: the Espionage Act.
It is easy to see why the Espionage Act has re-emerged as the weapon of choice for Attorney Generals in the Bush and Obama Administrations against whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Passed in June 1917, the Act contained provisions that prosecutors could use in almost any conceivable contingency. It demanded harsh sentences for causing or attempting to cause ‘insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States,’ and allowed for conspiracy charges for this crime. The Act further allowed the Post Office Department to restrict from the mails any material ‘advocating or urging treason, insurrection or resistance to any law of the U.S.’[8] William Fitts, a senior attorney working for the Justice Department, quickly noted the relevance of the Act to the Department’s campaign against the Wobblies. Along with several presidential proclamations and congressional resolutions the Act contained, as he later wrote to a colleague in July 1918, ‘the only statutes known to this Department which bear upon the activities of the I.W.W.’[9]
The Department soon acted on this enormous expansion of their legal powers. A memorandum from Assistant Attorney General Charles Warren to all Justice Department attorneys and agents on July 16 urged the use of every possible means to build up a complete picture of the IWW organisation, its plans and its leadership.[10] In September, the Los Angeles Times claimed that ‘for many weeks past, the activities of Industrial Workers of the World leaders have been under close scrutiny of the department’s bureau of investigation. Scores of field workers, chiefly in the West and Middle West, have devoted their undivided attention to alleged attempts on the part of leaders to embarrass the government in the conduct of the war by strikes and other disturbances called in the name of labor.’[11]
That report appeared just after the Bureau of Investigation conducted the September raids. They did so, as we saw at the start of this essay, partly to paralyse the IWW and partly to build up a more detailed picture of their activities. The raids certainly deprived the Wobblies of all the bureaucratic tools needed to run a national movement, from the pens, pencils and typewriters needed to write out reports and correspondence to the desks used to write them on, and the filing cabinets intended to catalogue and store them. The raids also netted the Justice Department an enormous volume of internal correspondence, mailing lists and other valuable information.
Attorneys scoured through the captured material and quickly drew up an indictment of 166 leading Wobblies that charged them with violating provisions of the Espionage Act, various presidential proclamations, and a number of other congressional resolutions and federal statutes. Taken together, the New York Times claimed, the Justice Department charged the defendants with ‘‘the crime nearest to treason within the definition of the criminal code.’[12] They proved these charges with a series of “overt acts,” which consisted, as Philip S. Foner has described it, ‘entirely of official statements, policy declarations, newspaper articles, and personal expressions of opinion in private and organization correspondence.’[13]  This novel definition of an overt act certainly rested on shaky constitutional grounds. Perhaps realising this, the Justice Department put together an impressive collection of attorneys to bring the prosecution to a successful finish. The Chicago Daily Tribune declared that ‘the array of legal talent now in Chicago working on these cases is perhaps the greatest which the government has called together since the famous “Beef Trust” case.’[14]
While the lawyers put together their case the Bureau of Investigation directed Special Agent George N. Murdock to arrange and classify the great mass of material captured in September. Murdock’s work must rank as one of the great bureaucratic triumphs of the FBI’s history. He drew up lists, arranged in alphabetical order, of all the newspapers, stickers and pamphlets captured during the raids. He compiled a dossier on each individual defendant, using seized correspondence, and listed and annotated the wide range of minute books, mailing lists, convention proceedings, account books and financial statements taken by federal agents. Murdock even made an “Incomplete Inventory Office Furniture,” giving historians an unrivalled view upon the table, chair and desk situation that Wobblies faced in the summer of 1917.[15] On a more serious note, Murdock’s labors allowed the Justice Department to build up a very sophisticated picture of the IWW’s finances, the number and names of its members, and its organising activities and plans. This knowledge allowed the Department to refine its indictment of the 166 defendants at Chicago and prepare new legal assaults against other Wobblies.
The federal campaign against the IWW did not stop there. The Espionage Act, along with the power to raid and indict subversives of various kinds, also gave the government the power to deny the use of the US Postal Service to publications and correspondence deemed harmful to the war effort. Justice Department officials began by harassing the IWW defence campaign and threatening foreign-born Wobblies with immigration proceedings.[16] With the date of the Chicago trial set for April 1918, the prosecution decided to prevent the IWW from using the postal service to send out their newspapers, circulate defence literature, or even solicit contributions through the post for their defence fund.
In this June 30, 1917 issue, Solidarity avoided outright opposition to the war mobilization while promoting lumber and copper strikes that the government claimed hurt the war effort. Click to see maps and details about IWW newspapers.
Prosecutors had a reliable friend in Postmaster-General Albert Burleson, a Texan who was no friend of organised labor. Burleson ordered the Solicitor General of the Post Office, W.H. Lamar, to decide whether IWW material was fit to pass through the mails.[17] That order had predictable results. Lamar banned the IWW’s two main publications, Solidarity and Industrial Worker, as well as all IWW defence bulletins and most of the organisation’s other correspondence. In one notable instance he declared that an IWW resolution against sabotage could not pass through the Postal Service on the grounds that it used the word sabotage.  Burleson reported to Congress in 1919 that all of the items that the IWW deposited for circulation at the Chicago Post Office ‘was of a questionable character and approximately 99 per cent was of a character prohibited by law.’[18] Indeed, Lamar lamented to the prosecutors that the sheer volume of IWW literature impounded by Post Office inspectors caused ‘congestion’ in the Chicago Post Office![19]
The IWW was not the only victim of Lamar, Burleson and the Justice Department. The Socialist Party was denied the use of the mails for its own publications and circulars. Lamar impounded certain issues of liberal journals like the Nation and threatened the New Republic with similar consequences. He banned a National Civil Liberties Bureau (predecessor of the ACLU) pamphlet that challenged one of his earlier decisions. He banned an Irish-American magazine that quoted Thomas Jefferson in support of Irish independence, on the grounds that it would embarrass America’s wartime ally, Britain. The director of a movie was even arrested under the Espionage Act for depicting a massacre of civilians by British redcoats during the American Revolutionary War. The title of the film, subsequently banned, was The Spirit of ’76.[20]
But the IWW always remained at the front of the censors’ minds. When Carlton Parker, Dean of the Business School at the University of Washington, wrote an article mildly sympathetic to their plight in the December 1917 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, the Justice Department sprang into action. Frank Nebeker, a leading member of the team prosecuting the Wobblies at Chicago and a former attorney for copper mine companies like Anaconda and Phelps Dodge, raged to the Attorney General that Parker’s article had failed to highlight the ‘anti-patriotic, anti-war and essentially criminal’ character of the IWW.[21]Claude Porter, another member of the prosecution team, urged serious action against ‘a propaganda... being organized that has for its object creating public sentiment favourable to the I.W.W. with a view of influencing the verdict of the jury in the Haywood case.’ Nebeker further demanded that anti-IWW censorship be extended to all federal employees. They should not, he told the Attorney General, be allowed to say anything in public that might be construed as sympathetic to the Wobblies.[22]
The IWW received a brief respite from this all-pervasive censorship just before the Chicago trial was due to start. In late March 1918, their defence attorneys attempted to use federal censorship as part of a general attack on the constitutionality of the methods used by the Justice Department to obtain the evidence displayed in their indictment. Attorney General Gregory reassured the prosecution that this was temporary. ‘Move for search warrants demanded by Post Office Department soon as you can safely do so,’ he wrote to them on March 18, ‘without complicating issue respecting the papers in Haywood case.’[23] After that temporary blip the programme of surveillance and censorship went on unabated.
 Trials and Lost Opportunities
William "Big Bill" Haywood was the lead defendant in the Chicago trial that opened April 1, 1918.
 The trial of IWW leaders at Chicago finally began, appropriately enough, on April Fools’ Day, 1918. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis presided. The 166 defendants, led by their leader, William “Big Bill” Haywood, had been reduced to 113 between September and April, and this number was further reduced when one of the defendants charged with convincing Americans to resist the draft, A.C. Christie, turned up to court in military uniform and on leave from his army unit. Eleven others were also dismissed, leaving 101 defendants in all. The trial almost collapsed at the outset when the court came to choose a jury. Obvious irregularities in that process aided the prosecution. There are suggestions that Attorney General Gregory had privately urged Landis to start the selection procedure all over again after the prosecution quickly used up their challenges on prospective jurors. The selection process was indeed halted, and the existing pool of jurors dismissed, after it was discovered that members of the defence team had approached one of their relatives. The new pool proved more amenable to the prosecution than the first might have been.[24]
The trial lasted for more than four months, from April 1 through to the middle of August. The prosecution made no attempt to prove the charges listed in the indictment. Prosecutors instead read out inflammatory passages from IWW newspapers, circulars and pamphlets to the court. They ‘indicted the organization,’ Melvyn Dubofsky writes, ‘on the basis of its philosophy and its publications.’[25] Guilt by the written word replaced guilt by deed. The defence team did its best under the circumstances. George Vanderveer, the IWW’s principal attorney, brought Wobblies to the witness stand by the score. J.T. “Red” Doran, one of the IWW’s most popular agitators, lightened the mood in the courtroom when he gave testimony in June and illustrated his lecture on political economy with chalk and blackboard. ‘Usually we have questions and literature for sale and collections,’ he finished, to laughter from the court, ‘but I think I can dispense with that today.’[26]
Vanderveer refused to give a closing statement, possibly on the grounds that as the prosecution had not attempted to prove their case there was no point rebutting arguments that had not been made. It probably made no difference to the outcome of the trial. In mid-August, Judge Landis, who had studiously maintained an air of impartiality throughout the proceedings, instructed the jury on how to go about determining guilt or innocence in a case involving more than 10,000 violations of federal law. The jury retired to consider their verdict on August 17.
"Fellow workers we are in Jail for you. What are you doing for us?" reads the inscription on this photo of IWW members on their way to prison, probably 1919. UW Libraries, Labor Archives and Special Collections
They did not make the defendants wait very long. Less than an hour later they returned and found all 101 Wobblies guilty on every charge that the prosecution had thrown at them. The defence was naturally shocked; but on reflection they probably should not have been. The government and press had carefully nurtured a public image of the IWW as anarchist bomb-throwers, pro-German saboteurs and slavish supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the prosecution team had successfully reinforced that image in the minds of the jurors even if they didn’t choose to substantiate the contents of their indictment. The defendants were the kind of people who might do such dastardly things, even if nobody had proved that they had done them; this was probably the line of reasoning that led twelve jurors to find the Wobblies guilty on all counts. On August 31, Judge Landis handed the accused their sentences. Fifteen received the legal maximum of twenty years in jail, thirty-three received ten years, thirty-one received five, eighteen received lesser sentences, and together they incurred more than $2 million in fines. It later transpired than one of them, 19-year-old Ray Fanning, was not even an IWW member. Guilty or not, the defendants were quickly bundled off to the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas.[27]
Other trials followed the one at Chicago. More than forty IWWs went on trial at Wichita, Kansas, in December 1919 after two years in prison conditions so poor that some of the defendants died before appearing in court. All surviving defendants were found guilty and were sentenced to between three and nine years.[28] Around twenty Wobblies initially faced similar charges at Sacramento, California, before thirty more joined them after unknown arsonists bombed the Governor’s Mansion. The police then added members of the IWW defence campaign to the indictment. Theodora Pollak, for instance, arrived to pay the bail of some of the IWW defendants. She was promptly robbed of the money by police, arrested, forced to undergo a medical exam usually performed on prostitutes, and locked up with the people she had come to set free. Again, all of the defendants were found guilty and given prison time.[29] IWW members who attended the 1917 convention of the Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union in Omaha, Nebraska were slightly luckier than the others. They were all arrested on 17 November, 1917, and were released in April 1919 without ever appearing in court.[30]
Wobblies outside prison suffered defeats as well. The mining companies, vigilantes and local, state and federal police conspired to keep them from returning to the copper mine towns of Arizona and Montana. Federal army units entered the lumber camps of the Northwest to remove the IWW’s influence there, and by the end of the war the production of lumber was carried out partly by uniformed soldiers operating under military discipline.[31] The Wilson Administration spared no expense, and left no means untried, in their campaign to root out the Wobblies wherever they happened to raise their heads and organise. Ongoing surveillance, the knowledge gleaned from the material captured in September 1917, and the removal of the entire national leadership to prison made this task much easier. The vast majority of victories that IWWs won against the federal government at this time were moral rather than actual ones. After a year of protests, for instance, an IWW local in Salt Lake City forced the Justice Department to return a typewriter, a waste paper basket and two lead pencils that federal agents had carried away in the September raids.[32]
IWW prisoners just before surrendering at federal penitentiary, Leavenworth, Kansas. UW Libraries, Labor Archives and Special Collections
The “guilty” Wobblies remained in prison during the great strikes of 1919, the Palmer Raids and all the repression of the First Red Scare. They remained there even when the new Republican Administration of Warren G. Harding decided to release Eugene Debs, the four-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party who had been tried under the Espionage Act for making an anti-war speech in 1918, from jail in 1921. Their cause suffered further when Big Bill Haywood and eight of their other leaders skipped bail and escaped to Soviet Russia in 1921, even as the question of whether the IWW should support or oppose the Bolshevik government divided Wobblies in and out of prison.
Justice Department attorneys exacerbated these splits with an offer to commute the sentences of all IWWs on the condition that they promised to ‘be law-abiding and loyal to the Government of the United States and will not advocate or encourage disloyalty or lawlessness in any form.’[33] Some of the defendants, mentally and physically exhausted by their treatment by the federal government, gave in and made that promise, which essentially prevented them from engaging in IWW activities in the future. The rest refused to surrender in this way and remained behind bars. Eventually, in the mid to late 1920s, the last holdouts were released from jail and the federal government’s wartime suppression of the IWW concluded, more than half a decade after the end of the war. 
The raids, trials, censorship and surveillance of the IWW during the First World War did not destroy the organisation, which actually reached its peak membership in the early 1920s and still survives into the present. But the federal campaign against the IWW in wartime deprived it of its entire national leadership, its records and correspondence, and even the tools needed for routine administrative tasks, at a crucial time in its history. There is no way to tell whether, in the absence of this concerted and almost certainly unconstitutional attack by the state against a political movement, the IWW might have ever come close to achieving its aim of a society run by the workers for the workers. They might, at least, have imbedded themselves more deeply within the American labor movement. The federal campaign against the Wobblies certainly made sure that neither outcome ever became possible.
At a time when the Espionage Act has again become the tool of choice for dealing with dissent, and when government surveillance of the people has reached levels undreamt of a century ago, the fate of the IWW during the First World is a cautionary tale that we can still learn from today. We should not take from that tale the lesson that radical movements are always destined to be smashed by state repression. It does mean, however, that these movements must be able to exploit divisions within that state if they wish to survive and get what they want. Lenin once wrote that a revolutionary situation occurred when the lower classes did not want to live in the old way and the upper classes could not continue in the old way. The IWW was a revolutionary movement, with revolutionary aims, but it never found itself during the First World War in a revolutionary situation that it had any chance to exploit. The upper classes were very happy to continue in the old way and used any and all means to preserve it. IWWs found themselves instead in a counter-revolutionary situation, pursued by counter-revolutionary forces. The fact that they survived after the war in any form at all is a tribute to the idealism, the determination, and the militancy of Wobblies across the United States and beyond.
 Copyright (c) Steven Parfitt, 2016


[1]  “US District Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan to the Attorney General,” October 31, 1917. Note: all correspondence cited here is from Melvyn Dubofsky and Mark Naison (eds), Department of Justice Investigative Files: Part 1, The Industrial Workers of the World (University Publications of America, Frederick MD, 1989).
[2] “Charges of Treason in Warrants Served on the Pacific Coast,” The Washington Post, September 6, 1917.
[3] David Montgomery, “The “New Unionism” and the Transformation of Workers Consciousness in America, 1909-22,” Journal of Social History 7:4 (1974), 513.
[4] Joseph McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern Labor Relations, 1912-1921 (Chapel Hill, 1997), 39.
[5] Robert Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America From 1870 to the Present (Boston, 1978), 116.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Michael R. Belknap, “The Mechanics of Repression: J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau of Investigation and the Radicals 1917-1925,” Crime and Social Justice 7 (1977), 50;  “1918 Report of the Attorney General,” 14 -15. Note: all congressional reports cited here are sourced from the US Congressional Serial Set (Readex). Available at: http://www.readex.com/content/us-congressional-serial-set-1817-1994.
[8] “The Espionage Act.” Available at: http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/espionageact.htm.
[9] “William C. Fitts to Frank Nebeker,” July 30, 1918.
[10] Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago, 1969) p505.
[11] “Government Suppresses "Reds" In Many Cities,” The Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1917.
[12] “I.W.W. Indictments Charge Crime Nearest to Treason,” The New York Times, September 19, 1917.
[13] Philip S. Foner, “United States of America Vs. Wm. D. Haywood, et. al.: The I.W.W. Indictment,” Labor History 11:4 (1970), 505.
[14] “High Official Working Here on I.W.W. Cases,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 28, 1917; “The Daily Bulletin of the IWW Defense News Service,” April 8, 1918. The Beef Trust Case was an antitrust proceeding by the Justice Department against an alleged interstate meat monopoly in 1905.
[15] “Affidavit of George S. Murdock at the Chicago District Court,” March 1918.
[16] Goldstein, Political Repression in America, 118.
[17] For Burleson’s battles against a union whose members fell under the wartime administration of the Post Office Department, the Commercial Telegraphers Union of America, see my essay “Whither Industrial Democracy? The Federal Government and Organized Labour in the Telegraph Industry During the First World War,” Journal of American Studies 48:2 (2014), 517-39.
[18] “1919 Report of the Postmaster General,” 112-3.
[19] “William H. Lamar to William C. Fitts,” March 15, 1918.
[20] For a fuller description of the federal censorship and propaganda campaign against the IWW during the First World War see my essay “Bringing the IWW Back In: Industrial Democracy and the Repression of Radicalism in the United States During the First World War,” Socialist History, 46 (2015).
[21] “Frank Nebeker to the Attorney General,” December 4, 1917.
[22] “Frank Nebeker to the Attorney General,” February 21, 1918.
[23] “Attorney General to Charles F. Clyne,” March 18.
[24] For a fuller account of the trial see Philip Taft, “The Federal Trials of the IWW,” Labor History 3:1 (1962), 57-91.
[25] Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 435.
[26] Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States (New York, 1967), 229-30.
[27] Taft, “Federal Trials of the IWW,” 75.
[28] Ear Bruce White, “The United States v. C.W. Anderson et al.: The Wichita Case, 1917-1919,” in Joseph Robert Conlin (ed), At the Point of Production: The Local History of the IWW (Westport, CN, 1981), 153-60; Clayton R. Koppes, “The Kansas Trial of the IWW, 1917-1919,” Labor History 16:3 (1975), 342-54.
[29] Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 438-41.
[30] Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 442-3; David G. Wagaman, “’Rausch Mit’: The I.W.W. in Nebraska During World War I,” in Joseph Robert Conlin (ed), At the Point of Production: The Local History of the IWW (Westport, CN, 1981), 127-31.
[31] For the army-run union that the government set up in the Western lumber camps see Robert Tyler, “The Government as Union Organizer: The Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review47:3 (1960), 434-451.
[32] “Isaac Blair Evans to Attorney General Gregory,” December 18, 1918; “Claude Porter to William V. Ray,” December 26, 1918
[33] “Memorandum for the Attorney General by James Finch,” November 28, 1922.

Copyright (c) Peter Cole, 2015

A Shorter Work Week: Full Employment and a Decent Life for Workers
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HUBRIS AND HYBRIDS A CULTURAL HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE



Human societies have not always taken on new technology in appropriate ways. Innovations are double-edged swords that transform relationships among people, as well as between human societies and the natural world. Only through successful cultural appropriation can we manage to control the hubris that is fundamental to the innovative, enterprising human spirit; and only by becoming hybrids, combining the human and the technological, will we be able to make effective use of our scientific and technological achievements.

This broad cultural history of technology and science provides a range of stories and reflections about the past, discussing areas such as film, industrial design, and alternative environmental technologies, and including not only European and North American, but also Asian examples, to help resolve the contradictions of contemporary high-tech civilization.


Review

"In their excellent book Hubris and Hybrids, historians Mikael Hård and Andrew Jamison engage in a cultural assessment of science and technology. They replace the traditional 'heroic tale' of scientific genius with stories of the frequently mixed blessings of science and technology." -- Nature


"These new stories of science and social movements, machine-breaking, environmentalism, and the politics of development lay the groundwork for a bold and much needed cultural assessment of technology and science." -- Thomas Misa, author of Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present


"Hård and Jamison have written a history of modern science and technology with a fresh perspective. Along with the play of ideas that captured the interest of an older generation of historians they have focused their narrative on current concerns -- 'knowledge that could actually be applied for the benefit of man.' It is a tour de force of science writing." -- Harold Dorn, co-author of Science and Technology in World History


"Hubris and Hybrids is an extremely important book for opening the debate on technology, democracy, science and society, knowledge and responsibility in a period when technology and science are reengineering the earth and our lives." -- Vandana Shiva, author of Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply


"Hubris and Hybrids is a wise and broadly synthetic work that brings coherence to a tremendous amount of historical research on scientific technology." -- Jeffrey C. Alexander, co-editor of Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity


"Highly Recommended." -- CHOICE


"Far from being a critique of the excesses of only modern science and technology, Hubris and Hybrids is an extremely wide-ranging historical survey. Its coverage begins with the Scientific Revolution, Britain's Industrial Revolution, and the Enlightenment. More modern topics include technocracy movements, artistic uses of science and technology from William Morris to the film The Matrix, appropriate technology, the greening of corporate America and Europe, film and industrial design, and Asian developments. The richness of the authors' observations on these historical phenomena is exemplified by their comments on the medieval period: "eyeglasses and mirrors created opportunities to experience a technically mediated reality"." -- Nature


"Hård and Jamison wisely offer no simple historical lessons, much less any silly predictions. What they provide instead are provocative and perceptive reflections that deserve to reach a wide general audience." -- Nature

"Hård and Jamison, have published an ambitious and necessary book about the history of technology." -- Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Sydsvenska dagbladet

About the Author

Mikael Hård is Professor of the History of Technology at the Technical University Darmstadt Scloss in Germany.
Andrew Jamison is Professor of Technology and Society at Aalborg University in Denmark.
Visit Professor Jamison's website at www.plan.aau.dk/~andy

Arguments For a Four-Hour Day

by Jon Bekken, ©2000
This pamphlet is a revised and updated version of an article which appeared in Libertarian Labor Review #1 (1986), based on a presentation on the fight for a shorter workweek sponsored by the Chicago General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World in January 1986.
The Fight for the Four-Hour Day
On May 1, 1886, more than 300,000 workers struck thousands of shops across the United States in a national campaign for the Eight Hour Day. In Chicago, center of the movement and a stronghold of anarchist, revolutionary unionism,40,000 workers struck and 80,000 workers joined a May Day parade organized by the International Working People's Association and the revolutionary Central Labor Union. In the decades that followed, the Eight Hour Day and Five Day Week became universal (the 40-hour week was even enacted into U.S. law in 1938), and in the 1930s the American Federation of Labor launched a short-lived lobbying campaign for the Six Hour Day.
Yet today the 40-hour work week remains the legal norm - a norm as often honored in the breach as in reality. Indeed, the average full-time worker in the U.S. now works nearly 49 hours a week, according to the Harris Poll. (Government statistics put the work week at considerably less, largely because they draw their data from employers; with the dramatic growth of part-time work someone putting in 45 hours a week on three jobs would be reported as three workers putting in 15 hours each - and drag the average down considerably. But the U.S. Labor Department reports that the average manufacturing worker put in 4.6 hours of overtime per week in 1998.)[1] And while we are once again seeing massive and often successful strikes for shorter hours in other countries (particularly in Europe, but workers in several Asian countries have also won significant cuts in their working hours), in the United States there is no serious movement in this direction today.
There have been no reductions in the average U.S. work week in the more than sixty years since the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed. Indeed, working hours have been held steady only by the rapid growth of part-time, low-paid work - the proportion of workers putting in more than 48 hours a week on the job has been steadily increasing since 1948.[2] The long hours we are putting in on the job have serious consequences for our health, for our fellow workers forced onto unemployment lines, and for our ability to lead the rich, fulfilling lives that should be ours by right. Our lives should not be dominated by drudgery and toil, slaving away for endless hours to make our masters rich. Sixty years of stagnation is long enough - it's time to resume the fight for shorter hours.
Working Ourselves Out of Our jobs
One in ten U.S. workers today is unemployed or working part-time because they can't find full-time jobs. (Government statistics putting unemployment at 4 percent or less ignore the huge numbers of workers involuntarily working part-time, as well as millions of workers who have been driven from the job market by employers' refusal to consider hiring them. Sociologist Harry Brill recently estimated that U.S. unemployment is actually about 11 percent.) There is a great deal of evidence that unemployment is substantially higher than the official statistics indicate, including. the fact that wages have remained stagnant in what the government insists is a "dangerously tight" labor market, and that it took unemployed workers 13.4 weeks on average to find a new job in 1999 - this at a time when millions of U.S. workers' financial condition is so precarious that they are but one or two paychecks from becoming homeless. Unable to find work in their field millions of college-educated workers are taking jobs as street vendors, janitors, bus and truck drivers, and sales workers. Census data shows unemployment rates of 17 percent for computer programmers over age 50, despite long overtime hours and employers' claims that they can not find enough qualified workers and must import them from overseas.[3]
For millions of our fellow workers, unemployment is a grim daily reality. For those of us who are working, unemployment hangs over our heads as a constant threat undermining our wages and working conditions and providing the bosses with a ready source of scabs. The unemployed, of course, are barely (if that) able to scrape by, often unable to afford the most basic necessities of life and so are often compelled to take work at whatever conditions the employers offer. Welfare "reform" makes their plight all the more desperate, while raising the tragic specter of millions of hungry children left to fend for themselves while their mothers toil away long hours in minimum-wage, deadend jobs.
A number of factors cause unemployment - some, such as economic recessions and depressions and so-called overproduction, are cyclical. But there are two major causes of unemployment which do not go away during eco nomic "recoveries" (that is, during periods of rising profits). The first, and most serious, is the economic system under which we live and work, which makes it profitable to cut payrolls even when the work we do is desperately needed. (When a corporate executive "needs" to boost his company's stock price, the first thing he does is put out a press release announcing that the company will ax thousands of workers. Many companies slashed so many jobs in these orgies of bloodletting that they have been forced to rehire many of those displaced wage slaves.) Thus we see construction workers facing massive unemployment at the same time that hundreds of thousands are without housing, and streets and other infrastructure are falling apart. We see farmers going bankrupt because there is no market for the food they grow at the same time that millions are starving. We see industries where the bulk of productive capacity has been mothballed, and others which no one could properly term productive going full steam because that's where the money is. This is the fundamental cause of unemployment, and as long as we allow this rotten system to persist want, misery and unemployment will always be with us.
Of course, this corporate bloodletting does not eliminate the need for work, so the bosses respond by piling more work on those who remain, and by hiring armies of part-time and temporary workers who typically work without benefits for a fraction of the pay, without even the faintest hint of job security. One week a temp might be ordered to put in 60 or 80 hours, the next week they might not work at all. Often, temps go into work not knowing how many hours they will work that day, or whether they'll have a job the next.
The other systemic cause of unemployment is automation, which eliminates jobs by enabling fewer workers to do more work. Automation is eliminating jobs not only in the manufacturing sector, but in "service" industries as well. And though these new technologies do create some new jobs in their wake, these jobs are generally lower-paid than the ones they eliminate, require less skill, and are far fewer in number. (The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that over the next decade 57 percent of job growth will be in occupations requiring little to no training or education beyond a high school diploma, with "low" or "very low" hourly pay.) Millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost due to automation in the last two decades, with the workers who remain increasingly tending robots. Automation is now deeply entrenched in service occupations as well. As the "information revolution" took off, the Science Council of Canada projected massive lay-offs in information processing and handling industries due to automation and new technologies, singling out the disproportionate impact of such unemployment on women. New technologies in the service sector have also led to skyrocketing occupational stress. Many workers are collapsing under increased workloads and inhuman work schedules, and our fellow workers' bodies are literally falling apart from repetitive strain injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome.[4]
"The conclusion is clear," reports the AFL-CIO's Industrial Union Department. "The new jobs being generated in most cases now involve a lower standard of living - for the individual worker and for the society as a whole. ... The occupations experiencing the largest net growth in number of jobs demand little skill, are only weakly organized into unions, and usually offer little pay - ranging from building custodians to fast-food workers."[5]
Making the Bosses Rich(er)
Automation and other innovations result in our productivity (output per work hour) doubling every 25 years or so. We now produce about three times as much in an hour of work as we did in 1947, but are we living three times as well or working a third as much? Far from living better, average wages (adjusted for inflation) are only slightly higher than they were 25 years ago. And we're not putting any fewer hours in on the job either, in fact we're working longer and harder - somebody's benefiting from the fact that our work is producing more; but it's not us.[6]
The machines that eliminate workers from payrolls are built by workers. They're paid for out of profits created by our labor. So why should we bear the costs, while the bosses reap the profits? And, for that matter, why should the decisions about whether to introduce this robot or that new chemical process be made by the bosses, instead of by us? After all, we're the ones who'll be working with the damn things.
I am not against automation - the prospect of drudge work being eliminated by new technology is, properly handled, a welcome one. (However, the new technology often realizes its increased productivity by forcing us to work harder. Some computer terminals now keep track of the number of characters typed per minute and report workers who fall behind company standards to management. At Hormel Meatpacking's Austin, Minnesota, plant workers found that a new high-tech line led to horrendous injury rates more than twice the industry average as workers struggled to keep up with faster line speeds.)
Eliminating useless work doesn't have to mean eliminating workers. But if we leave control of industry to the bosses, work the same hours, live the same way, and produce twice as much as we used to, it stands to reason that we're going to work ourselves right out of our jobs. The bosses don't employ us out of charity, after all.
Scabbing on the Unemployed
Fifty years ago the American Federation of Labor called for a 30-hour work week (the U.S. Senate even passed a 30-hour law, though it was defeated in the House); in 1961 the head of the New York Central Labor Council urged unions to campaign for a 4-hour day; but today the business unions won't campaign even for a 35-hour week. Indeed, many unions, including the United Auto Workers and the United Mine Workers of America, have watched massive overtime make even the 40-hour week seem a feeble joke while their members suffer record unemployment.
In the December 1985 edition of the United Mine Workers Journal, for example, a laid-off Illinois miner wrote in to express his feelings (and those of his 88 laid-off coworkers) "that most of us could be working now if our UMWA brothers and sisters were not working overtime. As long as they are working overtime, we feel we have no chance of getting called back." Soon afterwards, the Journal published a letter from a miner's wife explaining that her husband worked overtime - substantial overtime - not because he wanted to or was unconcerned with the fate of his fellow UMWA workers, but because the company would fire him (or any miner who refused overtime) if he didn't. (There has been no indication in the pages of the UMW Journal since then that the union is fighting to end forced overtime.)
In the 15 years since then the situation has only gotten worse. Manufacturing overtime hours soared in the 1990s, as employers responded to the economic recovery not by hiring new workers but rather by making their existing workers work harder. In the early 1990s, the bosses continued layingoff workers even as they piled on the overtime. A Bureau of Labor Statistics economist reports that between March 1991 (when the recovery began) and January 1998, employers added 601,000 production workers and increased overtime hours the equivalent of another 571,000 jobs. Eliminating the increased overtime in transportation equipment manufacturing (auto and aerospace), which has been decimated by lay-offs and plant closings, would have created 107,000 new jobs (eliminating overtime work altogether would double that).[7]
The question of unemployment - not just locally, but on the global scale on which the bosses now operate - is inseparable from the question of overtime, particularly forced overtime. Overtime is typically concentrated in those industries where unemployment is highest, such as automaking, shipyards and steel mills, and in many manufacturing industries 50- to 56-hour weeks and 12-to 16-hour days are not uncommon.[8] Sometimes this overtime is "voluntary" but often, even in organized shops, it's not. The bosses work us overtime because it's cheaper than hiring on extra workers to take up the slack. But overtime makes poor labor economics; like speed-ups, overtime inevitably leads to lay-offs and less income. To work overtime is ultimately to scab on ourselves, and to scab on the unemployed.
A Life At Hard Labor
It's absurd, but the typical U.S. worker puts in about as many hours a year today as British urban workers put in in the latter half of the 16th century. (They worked longer work days, but had many more days off.)[9] If you add in the increase in commuting time and such, our work week is about as long as what workers put in in 1850.[10] Productivity has skyrocketed in the intervening period, as have our living standards. But our living standards have not come close to keeping up with our increased productivity. Instead much of our productivity has gone to hire a host of supervisors and other non-productive workers, and to soaring profits.
Increasingly employment is concentrated in the so-called service sector, and in prisons and military production. Huge numbers of workers are employed - often at miserable wages - to keep track of and facilitate the flow of profits. Other service workers are engaged in providing vital human services, such as health care or education, and so are paid even less. But many, perhaps most, of our fellow workers are engaged in activity that is at best non-productive, and often actually counter-productive from the standpoint of meeting human needs.
Capitalism has literally sentenced workers to a life at hard labor. Fifteen years ago, in 1985, we saw two events that viewed together embody the total inability of the capitalist system to deliver the goods. On the one hand we saw hundreds of thousands of people organizing and donating to an effort to raise funds for Ethiopian famine relief. Shortly thereafter, tens of thousands did the same on behalf of American farmers who are desperately trying to cut back production and maintain government subsidies in order to stave off bankruptcy. (Since then, the number of family farmers has been sharply reduced and much agricultural land converted to suburban sprawl - famines continue unabated, often in the very same countries which are under pressure from international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to increase their exports of agricultural products in order to generate foreign currency to pay off the bankers.) Similar contrasts between unmet needs and unused productive capacity could be cited in virtually any sphere (except military production) of the economy.
Our Time Is Our Life
while ago I was speaking on the need for a shorter work week, and was challenged by a member of the audience who was working a 70-hour week at two jobs. He contended that he was better off than he had been when he worked only 40 hours, making more money but with nothing to do with his time but lie in bed listening to his radio and getting high. I take a slightly different view of such matters, and suspect that most of my fellow workers don't have lives so empty that we're better off letting the bosses keep us busy.
In 1962, New York City electricians struck for and won a 25-hour work week (though they were generally obliged to work an additional five hours at overtime rates). The strikes in the mid-1980s by Virginia shipyard workers demanding the right to have their weekends off or by German metalworkers for a 35-hour week would seem to indicate that large numbers of workers continue to want more free time, as would the long and ultimately unsuccessful strike in the early 1990s by A.E. Staley workers against rotating shifts and 12-hour days (autoworkers in Flint, Michigan, won a 1994 walk-out demanding that more workers be hired to relieve brutal workloads and overtime) and the 1998 strike by Danish private sector workers for the six-hour day and longer vacations.[11] In May 2000 nurses in Worcester, Massachusetts, won a strike against the Tenet hospital chain in which the main issue was Tenet's demand for up to eight hours a day of mandatory overtime; one of a growing number of labor disputes across the U.S. and the world against "flexible" work schedules, double-shifts, mandatory overtime and other such assaults on what remains of our free time and our lives.
Many other struggles against overtime or brutal "flexible" work schedules were defeated, but workers have made it clear that they are not willing to acquiesce to these assaults against our few precious hours of free time without a fight, and growing numbers are prepared to once again take the offensive and demand shorter hours.

The most important reason to fight for shorter hours is quite simple: Our time is our life. We are compelled to rent a major portion of our waking hours to the bosses for their purposes in order to buy back the things we produce and need so that we can live our lives (and have a little fun). The time we spend at work is not our own, and far too much of it is squandered on useless production, the support of parasites (bosses, supervisors, investment bankers, marketers and the like), the construction of the means of our annihilation, and so forth. A shorter work week, without loss of pay or speed-ups, would not only reduce unemployment and lead to fewer industrial accidents and deaths (a disproportionate number of which occur in the final hours of work, due to fatigue),[12] it would give us more free time in which to enjoy life.

We could use that time to nurture our families and rebuild our communities, to make art or music or to study subjects that interest us. We could socialize, party, reflect, relax. We could use some of the free time we so richly deserve to get together with our fellow workers to discuss the kind of society we would like to live in, and to begin a campaign to create it. More free time (for too many of us, any free time at all) would provide us the means to lead more fulfilling, truly human lives.
A campaign for shorter hours also has potential universal appeal - benefiting both the organized and unorganized, employed and unemployed alike. It could help reinvigorate a labor movement that has been stagnating since this fight was abandoned, and which was largely built around the struggle to cut the work week. And such a campaign would cut at the root of the bosses' profits by restricting the number of hours we work solely for their enrichment.
The Futility of Legislation
Rather than organize our class at the point of production, many labor "reformers" prefer to rely on Congress. But every reduction in the work week in this country has been accomplished through labor action, through strikes and direct action on the job. Our strength as a labor movement lies in our organization and our willingness to act in solidarity with each other, not in appeals to the politicians.
From time to time, legislators have proposed new laws to cut the work week or increase penalties on overtime work. Substantial energies and funds have been invested in such legislation for more than a hundred years, but those laws which have been passed have been almost wholly ineffective. Indeed, the U.S. government has never adopted enforceable legislation cutting the work week below that already won by the vast majority of workers except under threat of a general strike (as in the case of the 1915 Railway Act declared constitutional by the Supreme Court on March 15, 1917, under threat of national strike action). In England, parliament frequently passed legislation regulating the length of the work week, but M.A. Bienefeld shows that aside from a few cases where prevailing conditions were extended to industries employing predominantly women and children, these laws were aimed not at reducing the work week, but rather at maintaining or increasing its length. Similarly, by the time the U.S. Congress finally approved the 40-hour work, many workers had already won shorter working hours.[13]
This is because any meaningful sense of full employment is incompatible with our economic system. The financial press routinely speaks of the economic benefits of preserving a large reserve pool of unemployed workers, and warn of impending economic disaster when too many of our fellow workers secure jobs. They do not speak this way because they derive some sort of sadistic pleasure from seeing our class suffer, but because their economic interests require substantial unemployment (or, at minimum, ill-paid, insecure jobs little better than actual joblessness) in order to enforce labor discipline, contain wage costs, and ensure that workers are readily available when and if needed - that is, when or if it becomes profitable to hire them.
Labor activist William McGaughey, in A Shorter Workweek in the 1980s, argued that modest cuts in the work week to 32 hours would actually benefit the employing class. The bosses evidently did not find this argument convincing, and neither do I. Any effort to reduce or eliminate unemployment within the existing economic system necessarily entails costs - either for the bosses or for us. McGaughey, like most unionists who have spoken in recent years of the need for a shorter work week, believes that shorter hours should be fought for in the political arena - that workers should mobilize to persuade the government to adopt laws mandating shorter hours.
Such laws have been passed before (a whole series of state laws were adopted in the late 1800s purporting to establish the 8-Hour Day, for example), but they have done little good where workers have not possessed the industrial organization to compel the employers to accept shorter hours. In 1923, the IWW argued: "With the state the workers need not concern themselves except to recognize its class character and function. To scheme for concessions and favors from it, as an institution, is to cherish a delusion. To construct and develop an instrumentality by which the workers in the industries can assert and advance their interests... is to have generated a power that will compel the state to modify its programs and conduct so as to accord with the changes which the workers will force in this relationship to the employers." The same pamphlet noted that "Government has always been a disguise under which acquisitive predatory powers moved for the conquest of socially necessary things and by which they held the producers... in subjection. ... The acts of the legislative bodies, the decisions of the courts, the use of repressive forces by executives, the control of the educational system, all manifest a class hostility and all tend to'keep the working class in its place'."[14]
Recognizing this fact, the IWW seeks to organize workers at the point of production to win our demands through our economic power as producers. It was in this fashion that IWW-organized lumber workers won the Eight-Hour Day in the Pacific Northwest, simply by refusing to work the extra hours that the bosses demanded - backed up, of course, by solid organization.
The Four Hour Day
Not only is the work week not being cut, over the last 50 years it has grown substantially longer for millions of workers. This retreat on the shorter hours front follows more than a century of battles for a shorter work week. Yet a shorter work week is practical even within the constraints of a capitalist society. (Indeed, workers already put in far fewer working hours per year than we do in the United States in most industrialized countries; usually in the form of longer vacations.) If we move beyond the constraints imposed by capitalism, deep cuts in the work week are quite feasible. German economists concluded many years ago that a 20-hour week would suffice to meet socially necessary production given an egalitarian division of labor and the abolition of unproductive activity. This is, to say the least, a conservative estimate; in 1932 engineers at Columbia University demonstrated that workers could live extremely comfortably on four hours of work a day, if industry was properly arranged. And a study by the Goodman brothers published in the mid-1960s argued that "our present-day capabilities, intelligently used, could enable each one of us to work fewer than 10 hours a week" to meet our needs. More recently, Harvard economist Juliet Schor has demonstrated that a four-hour day could have been implemented in the United States a decade ago without any decline in living standards.[15]
Shorter hours, of course, are not a panacea. Minor cuts in the work week - say to 35 or 32 hours - would not eliminate unemployment, nor would they bring an end to the exploitation that we suffer every day on the job. But they could, if coupled with a strong fight against overtime and speed-ups and effective-resistance to pay cuts, lead to quantitative and qualitative improvements in our lives. (Without such a fight, overtime and speed-ups can quickly erode or negate these benefits. In 1850, Leeds (England) gas workers won a reduction of the workday from 12 to 8 hours, but soon complained that the employers "tried to put such a frightful amount of work upon them (the workmen) as would make them beg for the twelve hours day again."[16] In the U.S., rubberworkers had a 30-hour work week for many years, which was eroded through overtime and ultimately eliminated. Today, French workers are finding that employers are trying to cheat on the new 35-hour week by speeding up production. Clearly it is not enough to win shorter hours, workers must be organized to resist the bosses' attempts to recoup the time through speedups or overtime if we are to make lasting gains.)
The IWW argues that we should fight not merely to put people to work, but rather that we should organize workers as a class to reorganize society and production in our own interests. We favor substantial cuts in the work week, but these must be won by workers at the point of production - determined not to lose out through pay cuts, speed-ups or overtime - if they are to be effective.
For many years the IWW has called for a Four Hour Day. This may strike some as drastic or utopian, but only because the labor movement did not fight for and win the Six-Hour Day when it became practical sixty years ago. Significant cuts in the work week - to 16 or 20 hours - would require significant reorganization of production, and perhaps even the elimination of the host of capitalist parasites we presently support. But such cuts could be won by a working class determined to do so. The productive capacity exists to make a Four-Hour Day practical, though many of the necessary workers have been diverted into low-paid, insecure and socially useless labor. Even more modest reductions in the work week would be an improvement over present conditions, provided only that our class was organized well enough to ensure that we were not forced to bear the costs.
The four-hour day is practical, it's necessary, and we've already paid for it. Now it's up to us to organize to take our time back from the employers who have been robbing us of the product of our labor, our dignity, and enormous (and growing) chunks of our lives for centuries.
Notes
[1] "Americans Working More: Playing Less," The Harris Survey, December 26 1985; Monthly Labor Review, March 2000, p. 85. Susan Shank and Patricia Getz, writing in the February 1986 Monthly Labor Review, report an average workweek of 35.2 hours, noting that this low number is largely due to increased retail trade and service employment (with high levels of part-time work; government statistics show the average retail worker working just 29 hours a week). Harris' data is drawn from surveys of workers and uses a broad definition of working hours.
[2] William McGaughey Jr., A Shorter Workweek in the 1980s, 1981, p. 38. Shank and Getz (MLR< February 1986) report a decline from 1945 to 1985 of 5 hours in the average work week, which they attribute to the growing importance of part-time work. The Handbook of U.S. Labor Statistics (2nd Ed., Bernam Press, 1998, pp. 143-44) shows that the average work week for manufacturing workers is higher today than it was in 1947. Average overtime increased from 2.8 hours a week in 1956 to 4.8 hours in 1997 (p. 145) - a figure held down by the many workers who put in no overtime.
[3] Z Magazine, September 1999, cited in "Happy Days Are Here Again," Anarcho-Syndicalist Review #27, Winter 1999, p. 1; Harry Brill, "More Graduates, Fewer Jobs," Against The Current #82, September/October 1999, pp. 34-39; Monthly Labor Review, March 2000, p. 76 (1999 unemployment rate is 4.2 percent, but is 11.1 percent for young men age 16-24 - reflecting the huge numbers of young workers unsuccessfully trying to break into the work force, many of whom who will eventually become discouraged and disappear from the statistics). Brill's estimate takes into account substantial undercounting of poor people by the U.S. Census as well as correcting for peculiarities in how the government defines unemployment.
[4] Douglas Braddock, "Occupational employment projections to 2008," Monthly Labor Review, November 1999, pp. 51-77; David Noble, "Tools of Oppression," Dollars & Sense, October 1984, p. 16; "Free Time: The Case for a Shorter Workweek," Ideas & Action, Winter 1985; Science Council of Canada cited in Vincent Mosco, Pushbutton Fantasies, Ablex; Kim Moody & Simone Sagovac, Time Out!, Labor Notes, 1995. Among the top 30 occupations ranked by projected number of new jobs are retail sales (#2), cashiers (#3), office clerks (#6), home health aides (#8), teacher assistants (#9), nursing aides (#10), receptionists (#14), waiters and waitresses (#15), security guards (#16), food service workers (#18), child care workers (#19), and landscaping laborers (#20). Much of this (though by no means all) is essential work, but it is presently ill-paid, often temporary or part-time, and offers little if any prospect for workers to secure a minimally decent livelihood save through collective organization and struggle.
[5] "Deindustrialization and the Two-Tier Society," AFL-CIO, 1984, p. 11.
[6] Handbook of U.S. Labor Statistics, p. 199; Monthly Labor Review, March 2000, p. 109; Wm. McGaughey, p. 34; Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1983, cited in Gilda Haas, Plant Closings: Myths, Realities and Responses, South End Press, 1985, p. 13.
[7] Ron Hetrick, "Analyzing the recent upward surge in overtime hours," Monthly Labor Review, February 2000, pp. 30-33.
[8] Wm. McGaughey, p. 34; R. Hetrick, p. 32.
[9] Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, Basic Books, 1991; M.A. Bienefeld, Working Hours in British Industry: An Economic History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972, chapter 2; see also: I. Waldren and R.L. Ricklefs, Environment and Population (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973), for hours of British agricultural workers which were somewhat less than those of their urban counterparts.
[10] Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work and Leisure, Twentieth Century Fund, 1962; Vernon Richards, editor, Why Work? Arguments for the leisure society, Freedom Press, 1983.
[11] Joshua Freeman, Working-Class New York, The New Press, 2000, pp. 155 59; Eric Chester, "The Danish General Strike," Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 25, Summer 1999, pp. 8-11; Moody & Sagovac, Time Out!, pp. 5-6, 37-38.
[12] Joseph Eyer and Peter Sterling, "Stress Related Mortality and Social Organization," Review of Radical Political Economics, Spring 1977, pp. 16-30.
[13] Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work, Temple University Press, 1998; B.K. Hunnicutt, Kellogg's Six-Hour Day, Temple University Press, 1996.
[14] IWW Education Bureau, Historical Catechism of American Unionism, Summer 1923, pp. 87, 85.
[15] Cited in "35 Hours and Not One More, With No Cut in Pay or What's it For?" leaflet issued by the Free Workers Union of Germany (FAU-D) during the 1984 metalworkers' strike and translated and published in Ideas & Action, Winter 1985; Columbia University study cited in "So You're Out of a job," published April 1933 by the Industrial Workers of the World; Juliet Schor, The Overworked American; "It's Not In Our Genes," Socialist Standard, February 1986, p. 26. Benjamin Franklin similarly wrote, more than 200 years ago, that a 4-hour day would be more than adequate to provide a comfortable living for all.
[16] M.A. Bienefeld, p. 159.
 Book of Peer Production

Edited By Johan Söderberg & Mathieu O'Neil


CONTENTS

SOCIALLY USEFUL PRODUCTION

 THE CUNNING OF INSTRUMENTAL REASON 

AUTHORITY IN PEER PRODUCTION

 BECOMING MAKERS 

HACKLABS AND HACKERSPACES


Introduction to Book of Peer Production
 Johan Söderberg & Mathieu O'Neil

The Book of Peer Production is an off-spring of the Journal of Peer Production, an open access, peer reviewed journal dedicated to investigating the emergence of peer production as a new mode of production. Characteristic of peer production is that the output is orientated towards the further expansion of the commons; while the commons, recursively, is the chief resource in this mode of production. In fact, the commons and peer production are two names for describing the same thing: a particular kind of labour relation. This labour relation is predicated on voluntary participation and the selfselection of tasks. Participants may be driven by a variety of motivations, for instance, self-fulfilment, peer recognition, developing new skills, or something else again. We may call such motivations intrinsic. The high degree of intrinsic motivation in commons-based peer production is proportionate to a relatively low degree of extrinsic motivation. That is to say, monetary compensation for labour expenditure. This is testified in the willingness among participants to relinquish exclusive proprietary rights over the results of their labour in favour of public ownership licenses. Starting from this ideal type, we set out to scrutinise the inconsistencies and contradictions of peer production, placing emphasis on its hybrid co-existence with dominant forms of (wage) labour and property relations. A key area of investigation are cases where the output of the community is appropriated by a private rights holder. Commons-based peer production is thus turned into a model for exploiting free labour.1 We invite contributions from as many perspectives as possible in this discussion. The overriding goal is to conceptualise what peer production is and could become, as a step towards building a more just and sustainable future. In keeping with the topic of the journal and the book, we seek to position ourselves in-between the grassroots initiatives and discussions taking place on the Internet, driven by practitioners and activists of various kinds, and the theory and critiques coming out of academia. We are thus obliged to say some words about the match, and mismatch, between the concept of peer production and the academic world. This leads on to a much larger and thorny question: the state of the contemporary intellectual landscape. This has been brilliantly mapped by a French sociologist, Razmig Keucheyan, in his book Hémisphère gauche. Une cartographie des nouvelles pensées critiques. Leaning on Perry Anderson's diagnosis, Keucheyan makes two key points: first, it must be recognised that the New Left was defeated by the neo-liberal 1 For a more on peer production, see: Vasilis Kostakis and Michel Bauwens (2014) Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy. London: Palgrave. On the risk of exploitation of free labour, see: (ed.) Trebor Scholz (2012) The Internet as Playground and Factory. New York: Routledge. counter-offensive. Under the current circumstances, its ideas and tactics are a roadplan for continued failures. Second, it is clarifying to compare leading critical intellectuals of the early 20th century with their contemporary counterparts. Rosa Luxemburg, Trotski, Lenin, Lukàcs, Korsch and Gramsci combined incisive political analysis with the leadership of political organisations. There are still a handful of intellectuals closely associated with far-left micro-parties; in present-day Europe we have the late Daniel Bensaïd in France and Alex Callinicos in the United Kingdom; in Latin America, one may think of Álvaro García Linera, vice-president of Bolivia since 2006, and of Subcomandante Marcos of the Mexican Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional or EZLN). But the overwhelming majority of present-day intellectuals with a critical bent (the writers of this introduction included), are state employees in the service of the university system. From this observation Keucheyan concludes: This does not mean that contemporary critical intellectuals are not engaged, or that they are less radical than classical marxists. But, aside from their engagement, they are academics, which cannot fail to influence the kind of theories they produce.2 The claims about an ascendant mode of peer production seems to point in the opposite direction. As a counterpoint to the academisation of debates and politics, alternative forums and meeting places flourish where practitioners and activists reflect over their practice and its wider, societal implications. No-one personifies this stance better than Richard Stallman. His ideals of autonomy, creativity, sharing, and cooperation have been advanced through the creation of GNU software, the General Public Licence (or “copyleft”) and the Free Software Foundation. Those achievements have been coupled with an independent production of ideas, manifestos, forecasts and strategic plans. Recall the promise for the future that concludes the GNU Manifesto:
In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming.3



2 Keucheyan, R. (2010) Hémisphère gauche. Une cartographie des nouvelles pensées critiques. Paris: La Découverte. 3 Stallman, R. (1985) The GNU Manifesto. Available: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/ manifesto.html/

Trained social scientists are bound to react with a wry smile when reading the references to asteroids and robots. Most likely, they will proceed to formulate a critique of the logocentric, techno-deterministic, Western and/or patriarchal hacker culture.4 We invite such critiques as part of our collective undertaking to reflect over peer production. Having said that, a critique is not complete unless the critic includes himself/ herself in his/her analysis. As we saw, the position of the critic largely overlaps with that of the professional academic. One bias of this profession is a generalised anxiety not to be perceived as naive, against which the critical stance serves as an antidote. What is problematic here is that this attitude accords so well with the ironic, post-ideological hegemonic order of the day. In contrast, the convictions expressed by Richard Stallman and like-minded people have been rewarded with striking successes on the ground. The creation of peer production projects such as Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia and the many offshoots of GNU/Linux are some cases in point. Those accomplishments stand out all the more as the traditional left is struggling to come up with an adequate response to the mounting crisis of the capitalist system. Post-1989, the space for thinking and debating alternatives to neoliberal and/or keynesian capitalism is steadily shrinking, also within the left. It is in this light that historically and sociologically informed studies of the peer production model become urgent. Inquiries of the sort have been pioneered by Oekonux and the Peer-to-Peer Foundation. They have been involved in concurrent theory development, free software production and community organising, a mixture that has fostered conceptual creativity. The Oekonux project, originally launched in 1999 in Germany, has been at the forefront of critical theorising about peer production. In the view of Oekonux members and sympathisers, the Marxist critique of the capitalist mode of production (where the proletariat seizes the means of production through state power) is superseded by a peer production critique (where the wage labour relation and commodity production are replaced with commons-based production). The 4 Kreiss, D., Finn, M. & Turner, F. (2011) The limits of peer production: Some reminders from Max Weber for the network society. New Media & Society 13(2): 243–259 proponents of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation share many of the same concerns and analysis without being as closely tied to the Marxist tradition. The initiative to start the Journal of Peer Production came out of discussions at the Fourth Oekonux conference in Manchester in 2009; our ambition was to create a forum that accommodates these different perspectives. It is fitting that the book has been produced in connection with the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS). Since its beginning in 2007, FSCONS has been a rallying point for everyone interested in bottom-up technology development and its wider, societal implications. Equally fitting is it to have the book published on Nordic Summer University Press, a forum for independent thinking and self-organisation for more than 60 years. The same aspiration is expressed by the authors of this volume. In the opening chapter, Adrian Smith documents the story about The Lucas Plan. When workers in the U.K. arms industry faced layoffs in 1970s, they proposed to take over the factory and repurpose it for 'socially useful production.' In the next chapter, Johan Söderberg investigates an open source 3D printing project that set out to abolish the need for market exchanges. The ambitious goal of the project is compared with a longer history of utopian engineering thinking. George Dafermos demonstrates in his study of the FreeBSD project that a complex engineering project can be scaled up without it requiring traditional divisions of labour and associated hierarchies. The chapter by Austin Toombs, Shaowen Bardzell and Jeffrey Bardzell traces the many paths that leads to the adoption of a ”maker” identity. Maxigas' chapter, finally, calls attention to a tradition of Hacklabs, often set up in squatted buildings on the European continent, that predated the latest wave of Hackerspaces. The disappearance of that history in the collective representations of hackers is linked to the marginalisation of the more confrontational politics of Hacklabs. This leads us to a common theme in all of the chapters in this volume. Namely, the need for independent reflection and scholarly work to restore to our collective memory foregone and forgotten traditions of utopian technology development. Restoring that memory is a first step towards bringing about a different future.



Wordpress of Objects: Addressing
Layman Participation in a PostIndustrial Society
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2494091.2499206

Abstract
In this paper a perspective on layman participation in
the design of everyday products is presented. The
development of digital fabrication technologies such as
3D printing enables an increasing involvement of the
layman in appropriating the performance of objects to
their own needs and desires. The question is how
professional designers as well as laymen deal with
openness in product design. An analogy is made with
the content management system Wordpress to discuss
how could be dealt with openness in a toolkit that
addresses multiple skill levels of its users.

Author Keywords

3D printing; Computational design; Mass
customization; Performance-based design; Layman
participation

ACM Classification Keywords

H.5.2 User interfaces: User-centered design

General Terms

Design