Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

Abstract

The way in which social movement groups organize themselves has considerable, and often unforeseen, ramifications. Among scholars, much of the debate regarding the degree of formalization centers on issues of tactics, with bureaucratic movement organizations charged by critics as too conservative. Yet there the implications for adopting a less formalized structure may play out in other ways as well. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, opposition by business elites and their allies in the state to unionization efforts, particularly among unskilled workers, often took the form of extreme repression, and bloodshed was not uncommon during this period. Nowhere was this more evident than in the case of the Industrial Workers of the World, whose radical goals and loose organizational structure provided considerable opportunities for repression.