Class Consciousness and Common Property: The International Fishermen and Allied Workers of America

Abstract

The story of the International Fishermen and Allied Workers' of America (IFAWA), a Pacific North American trade union, allows a closer look at the relation between class-consciousness and common property natural resources. In light of this story, I reexamine the range of organizational forms considered in the literature on common property natural resource management, and conventional assumptions about the context of union organization, to demonstrate that both are excessively narrow. The characterization of fishers and other smallholders as independent entrepreneurs belies the relations of production and class that hold in the fisheries, and organized labor can represent an effective attempt to restructure a particular political ecology. Working-class consciousness emerged among Pacific coast fishers during the first half of the twentieth century, and collective efforts to manage common property reflected that class-consciousness.