A-Infos (en) Spaine, Regeneration: Industrial Unionism: From Proletarian Revolution to Decline, By EMBAT (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The union is organized not to reconcile, but to fight against the 
capitalist class... so that the workers become the owners of the tools 
with which they work.   Eugene V. Debs, 1905   In the United States, 
Industrial Unionism emerged as a structural and systemic response to the 
limitations of craft unionism. Unlike organizations of skilled artisans, 
the industrial model sought to unite all workers in an industry both 
skilled and unskilled to maximize their collective bargaining power and, 
in its more revolutionary branches, such as the Industrial Workers of 
the World (IWW), to abolish wage labor and capitalism.

The article will seek to synthesize the historical evolution of this 
movement, from the revolutionary socialist proclamations of Eugene V. 
Debs and Daniel De Leon at the beginning of the 20th century, who saw in 
industrial organization the necessary structure for a future kind of 
"cooperative republic", to more contemporary analyses of the "decline" 
of this model due to deindustrialization and the rise of the service 
economy.

We will use the term industrial unionism and not industrial syndicalism 
to avoid confusion, although they essentially mean the same thing. In 
Spain and France, the term Industrial Syndicalism was used, which 
corresponds to the industrial unionism typical of North America.

The theoretical foundations

When analyzing the evolution of trade unionism, we can identify two main 
models with distinct bases of action: the craft model and the industrial 
model. The former is guild-based. Its existence is centered on the 
mastery of a trade or a specific technical skill, which gives it a 
certain exclusionary character, reserved only for skilled workers .

In contrast, industrial unionism arises as a response to mass 
production, and the entire workforce of a sector is organized 
horizontally, thus integrating workers of different qualifications 
(regardless of their trade or level of technical skills ) under the same 
organizational umbrella.

This difference in composition determines their respective strategies 
for social pressure. While craft unions exert pressure thanks to the 
strategic control granted by the scarcity of their skilled labor (they 
see themselves as a labor elite) , industrial unionism appeals to the 
power of numbers and popular solidarity , seeking to exert total veto 
power over production through the complete paralysis of industry: the 
strike.

Finally, their objectives reflect their origins and composition. Craft 
unionism tends to be economically focused, concentrating on immediate 
improvements in wages and working conditions for its members. Industrial 
unionism, on the other hand, encompassing a broader spectrum of the 
production chain, often pursues goals that go beyond mere wages, seeking 
greater control over the work process and even aiming to transform the 
productive structure by controlling the means of production. Hence, this 
type of unionism fit perfectly with socialist ideals.

Historical tour

The founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Chicago in 
1905 represented the culmination of revolutionary industrial unionism in 
the United States. Among its founders were several figures associated 
with anarchism, such as Lucy Parsons and Mother Jones; others with 
revolutionary syndicalism, such as Big Bill Haywood and Ralph Chaplin; 
and still others with socialism, such as Eugene V. Debs and Daniel De 
Leon. Together, and many more, they propelled the IWW forward under the 
premise that, to effectively combat modern capitalism, the union 
structure had to reflect the structure of large-scale industry.

Debs developed a profound critique of the system: he denounced how, 
under capitalism, the worker becomes a mere "human commodity" who, 
lacking ownership of the means of production, is forced to sell their 
life force to the exploitative capitalist. In response, Debs pointed to 
the inadequacy of craft unions, which he accused of dividing the working 
class and allowing some workers to act as "scabs" against others. For 
him, the ultimate goal was not merely the improvement of conditions, but 
the "complete emancipation from wage slavery" through the seizure of the 
means of production. Debs satirized initiatives of the time, such as the 
Civic Federation, describing it as a "peace congress between the fox and 
the goose," and denounced how contracts within craft unionism were often 
used as iron chains that prioritized the "sanctity of the contract" over 
solidarity among workers.

For his part, Daniel De Leon established a key distinction between 
European syndicalism and American industrial unionism. While the former 
emphasized the role of the physical overthrow of capitalism (through 
revolutionary force), industrial unionism focused on structure, 
preparing the "organizational framework" that would allow workers to 
manage society once capitalism had been overcome. This vision implied a 
total rejection of any form of class collaboration.

The historical evolution of unionism in the United States reflects this 
tension or dispute between models. After the short-lived attempt of the 
National Labor Union (NLU) in the 1860s, the scene was dominated, from 
the end of the century onward, by the American Federation of Labor 
(AFL), an official organization focused on skilled workers, which 
ignored the unskilled masses of industrial production.

In response, the IWW gained prominence in low-skilled sectors such as 
mining and logging. Due to its revolutionary and anti-militarist 
orientation, it suffered fierce government repression for its opposition 
to World War I.

Derived from industrial unionism, the IWW coined a similar new concept: 
"One Big Union." This proposal aimed to unify the entire working class 
under a single organization. The goal was to overcome the fragmentation 
present in craft unionism by promoting class solidarity. The 
understanding was that if all workers were in the same union, a conflict 
in one sector could paralyze the entire industry through solidarity 
strikes in other sectors. This would give them unprecedented bargaining 
power. The logic is simple: a united front is much harder for employers 
to defeat or ignore than a multitude of small unions acting separately.

However, the "One Big Union" did not aim to reform capitalism, but 
rather to transcend it. Its ultimate goal, described in pamphlets as the 
"final solution to the labor problem," was a profound transformation of 
society that involved the "emancipation" of low wages and the overcoming 
of the conflict inherent in capitalism: layoffs, court orders against 
workers, physical abuse, and infighting among workers themselves 
(strikebreaking). The ultimate aim was that, with total control of 
production in the hands of organized workers, class struggle and its 
consequences would cease to exist.

However, in the early 1920s, the IWW entered a period of crisis and 
suffered splits (the most significant being the one promoted by the 
Communist Party) and defections to traditional unionism. This undermined 
the project, and from the 1930s onward, the IWW became a minority 
organization within the American left.

Congress of Industrial Organizations

The legacy of industrial unionism, despite everything, remained in 
several industrial trade union federations. During the crisis of the 
1930s, the Great Depression, a militant unionism reemerged with the 
intention of reorganizing the working class. It would be called the 
Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO.

It was a large American labor confederation that, between 1935 and 1955, 
organized unskilled workers in large industries. It originated as an 
internal committee of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), 
spearheaded by John L. Lewis, a leader of the miners, since the AFL 
refused to organize workers in sectors like steel or automobiles by 
industry. While the AFL grouped workers by specific trades (carpenters, 
electricians), the CIO proposed that unions include all employees of a 
company, regardless of their skill level (sometimes different trades 
coexist within a company, and that doesn't make them any less workers). 
This dispute led to the expulsion of the unions from the CIO in 1936 and 
their formation as a rival federation in 1938.

The CIO achieved its first victories through innovative and risky 
tactics, such as sit-down strikes. The most famous was the 44-day 
occupation in 1937 of the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, which 
forced the company to negotiate with the United Auto Workers (UAW). That 
same year, the Steelworkers' Organizing Committee (SWOC) reached an 
agreement with U.S. Steel, the nation's largest steelmaker. These 
successes attracted millions of members and extended unionization to 
entire industries. The CIO supported Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New 
Deal and maintained a more open policy toward African American workers 
than the AFL, as the IWW had done previously.

The rivalry with the AFL was intense and shaped the labor landscape for 
two decades. However, factors such as anti-communist pressure (unions 
with communist leaders were forced out of the CIO) and the wear and tear 
of competition led both federations to seek reunification. In 1955, the 
CIO rejoined the AFL, giving rise to the AFL-CIO, the largest labor 
federation in the United States to this day.

The difference with Europe

European collective bargaining offers a contrast to American trade 
unionism, having developed what sociologist Jelle Visser termed 
"political-industrial unionism." This model dates back to the large 
trade union federations of the early 20th century, which were aligned 
with social democracy. Some unions were merely conduits for political 
parties, while others maintained a degree of autonomy but sought to 
influence legislation through political connections. In short, this 
model does not conceive of union action as separate from politics, but 
rather integrates it into a strategy that combines representation in the 
workplace with the influence that can be achieved within state 
institutions. This model has nothing to do with revolutionary 
syndicalism or anarcho-syndicalism , which followed different paths.

In the postwar European context, this symbiosis between trade unions and 
political parties proved crucial for the construction of the welfare 
state. Social democratic and Christian democratic parties (two sides of 
the same coin) promoted in parliament the laws that the trade unions had 
demanded from the factories, and the unions, in turn, provided them with 
a significant number of votes and the necessary mobilization to support 
the governments that legislated in their favor. This relationship, 
although not without its tensions, endowed the European labor movement 
with a capacity for institutional influence unknown in other contexts 
and, as we see, it is a model that remains relevant today.

A second pillar of the model is sectoral bargaining , which operates as 
a mechanism of collective defense against the divisive logic of the 
market. By setting wages and working conditions by industry, sectoral 
agreements supposedly prevent companies from using precarious employment 
as a competitive advantage. This standardization has a protective 
function, since it guarantees that workers in different companies within 
the same sector have comparable conditions, while establishing a minimum 
standard of rights that companies cannot violate without facing 
government sanctions. Ultimately, it is about removing labor from the 
logic of commodification, taking it out of the competition of the market.

The deepest level of this integration is corporatism , which we 
understand as the incorporation of trade unions into the mechanisms of 
economic governance. In countries like Germany, the Nordic countries, 
Austria , and the Netherlands, trade unions not only negotiate wages and 
working conditions, but also participate in the administration of 
unemployment funds, the management of vocational training systems, 
company boards (through co-management), and the advisory bodies that 
design macroeconomic policies.

Not all that glitters is gold. This institutional participation, 
however, comes with a trade-off: unions assume responsibility for the 
economic system, which moderates their demands and forces them to walk a 
tightrope between defending their members and ensuring the country's 
economic prosperity. This dynamic has allowed for high levels of social 
peace and is criticized by those of us who see it as a form of 
integration that ultimately dilutes class conflict within the 
technocratic management of capitalism.

Decline and Contemporary Challenges

The crisis of industrial unionism is neither a recent nor a 
circumstantial phenomenon, but rather the result of structural 
transformations that have reshaped capitalism since the 1970s. Jelle 
Visser's diagnosis, in his 2012 work, accurately identifies the causes 
of this erosion. These are processes that have operated in combination 
to weaken the organizational capacity and political influence of trade 
unions in advanced economies. Consequently, we see a steady decline in 
unionization rates throughout the West.

The first of these factors is deindustrialization. It has been, in a 
sense, a major sociological shift. The collapse of industrial employment 
in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and France 
where it barely represents a fifth of the employed population has 
undermined the material foundation upon which mass unionism was built at 
the beginning of the 20th century. The factory, as a space for worker 
concentration and socialization within class culture, has ceased to be 
the epicenter of the work experience. This disappearance is not only 
quantitative but also qualitative: with it have also eroded the forms of 
sociability, the rituals of solidarity, and the collective identities 
that sustained union activism.

The rise of the service sector has filled this void, but on much more 
adverse ground for collective organization. Workplaces are far more 
dispersed, working conditions are far more precarious, the workforce has 
become increasingly feminized, and new forms of employment, such as the 
platform economy, have proliferated, making it extremely difficult to 
adopt traditional union methods in this new arena. Furthermore, 
white-collar workers tend to develop a professional identity that 
distances them from the classic image of the proletariat and leads them 
toward forms of association closer to professional guilds than to 
class-based unions. The result is a fragmentation of the world of work 
that reproduces, on a larger scale, the divisions of the old craft-based 
unionism.

The fragmentation and decentralization of collective bargaining 
constitute the third major factor of erosion. Under the pressure of 
global competitiveness, companies have driven a shift away from national 
sectoral agreements which guaranteed uniform conditions for large groups 
of workers within the same industry or sector toward decentralized 
negotiations at the company or even workplace level. This trend has a 
demobilizing effect: it atomizes workers' bargaining power, subjects 
working conditions to the specific circumstances of each company, and 
hinders the development of solidarity that extends beyond the immediate 
workplace. The standardization that had been the great achievement of 
industrial unionism is fading in favor of a flexibility that benefits 
almost exclusively employers.

On the positive side, the erosion of the large, negotiated unions that 
dominated labor relations opens the door to revolutionary unions, which 
may be able to operate company by company and which, for now, have 
almost no sectoral collective bargaining.

Finally, globalization has substantially altered the very logic of labor 
conflict. When capital can easily relocate to other countries with low 
wages and lax regulations, strikes lose much of their effectiveness as a 
tool for exerting pressure. Workers in Western countries find themselves 
caught in a race to the bottom with their counterparts in other regions, 
while companies use the threat of offshoring as a tool for labor 
discipline: "If strikes cause us losses, we'll move the company 
elsewhere." This new global scenario demands responses that national 
grassroots unions are ill-prepared to provide, and it presents us with a 
significant organizational and strategic challenge.

Perspectives and Future

The diagnosis of decline should not lead us to a defeatist conclusion. 
The legacy of industrial unionism, with its strengths and weaknesses, 
offers ideas for rethinking a renewal of the labor movement adapted to 
the conditions of the 21st century. The notion of a "post-industrial 
union" aims precisely to connect this legacy with today's deregulated 
labor market.

What industrial unionism must inherit, above all, is its egalitarian and 
inclusive spirit . Faced with the fragmentation and precariousness that 
characterize the contemporary labor market, the commitment to organizing 
all workers in a sector or region regardless of qualifications, type of 
contract, or immigration status remains the primary antidote to the 
division of the working class. This inclusivity is not only an ethical 
principle but a strategic necessity: only solidarity can counteract the 
power of increasingly concentrated and globalized capital.

There are other proposals, which have been put forward over the years by 
the trade union movement. From defining training curricula in relation 
to personal development, to co-managing unemployment or pension 
services, the trade union movement has actively intervened in all kinds 
of areas, usually linked to institutions. We don't believe that the 
strength of the trade union movement lies here, but rather in 
confrontation and self-management, which is what generates a strong 
class consciousness.

The world has changed, the tools are different, and workers are more 
diverse than before. But the fundamental aspiration the emancipation of 
labor from capital; the seizure of the means of production remains the 
horizon that gives meaning to union action. Our challenge lies in 
securing the means to achieve this end.

There can be no peace so long as hunger and want
are found among millions of working people, and
the few who make up the employing class have all
the good things of life.

There can be no peace while hunger and want
exist among millions of working people, and
the few who form the employing class have all
the good things in life.
The Road to Freedom, 1913

Blackspartak, a member of Embat.

Literature

Verity Burgmann (1995). Revolutionary Industrial Unionism. The 
Industrial Workers of the World in Australia. Cambridge University Press.

Eugene V. Debbs (1905). Industrial Unionism. From Industrial Unionism, 
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY Co-operative. Written for Editors' American 
Encyclopedia, perhaps never published. Republished as "Industrial 
Unionism" in Industrial Union Bulletin[Chicago], vol. 1, no. 36 (Nov. 2, 
1907), p. 5. Reprinted under the same title in International Socialist 
Review, vol. 10, no. 6 (Dec. 1908), pp. 505-508. 
https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1905/industrial.htm

Daniel De Leon (1909). "Industrial Unionism." Daily People, vol. 10 No. 
41. New York, 08/10/1909.

Joseph J. Ettor (1913). Industrial Unionism. The road to freedom. IWW 
(pamphlet)

William Z. Fosters (1936). Industrial Unionism. Workers Library 
Publishers, Inc. New York

Marion Dutton Savage (1922). Industrial Unionism in America. The Ronald 
Press Company, New York.

Jelle Visser (2012). The rise and fall of industrial unionism. Amsterdam 
Institute for Advanced Labor Studies AIAS. University of Amsterdam.

Liss Waters Hyde & Jaime Caro (2020). Industrials unions and the IWW 
explained. Industrial Worker

https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2026/04/20/el-unionismo-industrial-de-la-revolucion-proletaria-al-declive/
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