Hi, I have been a lurker here for a while, and this is my first new thread. I considered putting it in the "newbie friendly" General forum, but it seems to be mostly jokey stuff over there, and this is a serious question/request for discussion and insight. Anyway, here is a question about something I have been wondering about the IWW (as far as I understand it) for a while now:
When the IWW was originally formed, it was out of the merger of a number of already-existing unions, so it began its life as a fairly large organization right out of the gate (i. e. relatively high membership of many thousands of experienced unionists). There was a lot of momentum going already in the unions which merged to form it, and the IWW was able to take this momentum to a greater level and to broaden its influence and reach for a while, achieving a lot of progress in its own terms and of course also engendering a lot of backlash and repression from the capitalists.
However, after becoming nearly memberless around 1960, the union has only managed to regroup slightly, hovering at around 2000 members for the last 20-odd years, with only a handful of campaigns going public a year, mostly at very small shops, and while experiencing high internal membership turnover -- arguably close to the bare minimum to avoid a formal disbanding of the organization.
I personally believe in the IWW's mission on many different levels and feel an affinity to it, so I am a member. However, given that the union's strongest time was under extremely different circumstances, I am also quite skeptical of its ability to emerge off of its now long-standing plateau of rag-tag marginality to become a major union again, and I was wondering what others thought about all this.
With increasing economic disparity under neoliberalism, we could see an resurgence in working class culture. This could be beneficial for IWW organising, in that it could make the public more generally open to our ideas. We need to organise for this to happen though. We need union halls that act as community hubs, and we need to train recruits so as to seed businesses with them.
Just my thoughts anyway.