The IWW was founded in Chicago in June 1905 at a convention of two hundred socialists, anarchists, and radical trade unionists from all over the United States ( mainly the Western Federation of Miners ) who were opposed to the policies of the American Federation of Labor ( AFL ).

The British Advocates of Industrial Unionism, founded in 1906, supported the IWW.

Allen's group soon disappeared, but the first IWW group in Britain was founded by members of the Industrial Syndicalist Education League around Guy Bowman in 1913.

The Industrial Workers of the World ( IWW ), whose members became known as " Wobblies ", was founded in 1905 by a group of about 30 labor radicals.

The IWW was founded in Chicago in June 1905 at a convention of 200 socialists, anarchists, and radical trade unionists from all over the United States.

" Jack " McDonald-Former IWW, Industrial Worker Editor, Socialist Party of Canada member and owner of McDonald's Books ( founded 1926 ; 48 Turk St., San Francisco ); McDonald ( sometimes spelled " MacDonald ") published a periodical entitled On the Record.

An organization called the One Big Union Propaganda League ( OBUPL ) was formed in Brisbane on September 10, 1918, growing out of former IWW strongholds in the north.

Foster lost the battle, however, and soon thereafter left the IWW and formed his own organization, the Syndicalist League of North America ( SLNA ).

Foster, founder of an organization called the Syndicalist League of North America which was based upon similar policies and James P. Cannon, an IWW adherent from Kansas.

The convention, which took place on June 24, 1905, was then referred to as the " Industrial Congress " or the " Industrial Union Convention "— it would later be known as the First Annual Convention of the IWW.

" In particular, the IWW was organized because of the belief among many unionists, socialists, anarchists and radicals that the AFL not only had failed to effectively organize the U. S. working class, as only about 5 % of all workers belonged to unions in 1905, but also was organizing according to narrow craft principles which divided groups of workers.

The Wobblies believed that all workers should organize as a class, a philosophy which is still reflected in the Preamble to the current IWW Constitution:

Also of note was the Finnish IWW educational institute, the Work People's College in Duluth, and the Finnish Labour Temple in Port Arthur, Ontario which served as the IWW Canadian administration for several years.

The SLP's " Yellow IWW " eventually took the name Workers ' International Industrial Union, which was disbanded in 1924.

After the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1946 by Congress, which called for the removal of Communist union leadership, the IWW experienced a loss of membership as differences of opinion occurred over how to respond to the challenge.

In 1949, Tom C. Clark placed the IWW on the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations in the category of " organizations seeking to change the government by unconstitutional means " under Executive Order 9835 ( revoked in 1953 ), which offers no means of appeal, and which excludes all IWW members from Federal employment and even federally subsidized housing.

In very significant part this was due to the agitation of the IWW, a group which probably never had as many as 500 members in Australia at its peak.

) A number of other scandals were associated with the IWW, a five pound note forgery scandal, the so-called Tottenham tragedy in which the murder of a police officer was blamed on the IWW, and above all the IWW was blamed for the defeat of the October 1916 conscription referendum.

By the 1930s the IWW in Australia had declined significantly, and took part in unemployed workers movements which were led largely by the CPA.

Among current and more notable IWW shops in Canada is the Ottawa Panhandlers ' Union, which continues a tradition in the IWW of organizing disenfranchised workers on relief or in work camps started during the Great Depression.

In 1912, for example, Eugene Debs ( a founding member of the IWW ) polled 6 % of the popular vote as the Socialist Party presidential candidate — a significant portion of the popular vote considering that this was 8 years before the adoption of universal suffrage in the U. S. Some political scientists would, in part, attribute the lack of an American labour party to the single member plurality electoral system, which tends to favour a two-party system.

A member of the Industrial Workers of the World ( IWW ), Chomsky is a self-described Anarcho-Syndicalist, a position which he sees as the appropriate application of classical liberal political theory to contemporary industrial society: " Now a federated, decentralized system of free associations, incorporating economic as well as other social institutions, would be what I refer to as anarcho-syndicalism ; and it seems to me that this is the appropriate form of social organization for an advanced technological society in which human beings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in the machine.

One small packet of ashes was scattered at a 1989 ceremony which unveiled a monument to six unarmed IWW coal miners buried in Lafayette, Colorado, who had been machine-gunned by Colorado state police in 1927 in the Columbine Mine Massacre.

* July 12 – The Phelps Dodge Corporation deports over 1, 000 suspected IWW members from Bisbee, Arizona.

* November 11 – The Centralia Massacre in Centralia, Washington results in the deaths of four members of the American Legion, and the lynching of a local leader of the Industrial Workers of the World ( IWW ).

IWW members played a role in the 1934 San Francisco general strike and the other organizing efforts by rank-and-filers within the International Longshoremen's Association up and down the West Coast.

Many IWW members opposed United States participation in World War I.

A statement was issued that denounced the war, but IWW members were advised to channel their opposition through the legal mechanisms of conscription.

In 1917, during an incident known as the Tulsa Outrage, a group of black-robed Knights of Liberty, a short-lived faction of the Ku Klux Klan, tarred and feathered seventeen members of the IWW in Oklahoma.

The IWW members had been turned over to the Knights of Liberty by local authorities after they were convicted of the crime of not owning war bonds.

Members of the IWW were prosecuted under various State and federal laws and the 1920 Palmer Raids singled out the foreign-born members of the organization.

The 1960s Civil Rights Movement, anti-war protests, and various university student movements brought new life to the IWW, albeit with many fewer new members than the great organizing drives of the early part of the 20th Century.

IWW members have been active in the building trades, marine transport, ship yards, high tech industries, hotels and restaurants, public interest organizations, schools and universities, recycling centers, railroads, bike messengers, and lumber yards.

As of 2005, the 100th anniversary of its founding, the IWW had around 5, 000 members, compared to 13 million members in the AFL-CIO.

Eighty six IWW members immediately defied the law and were sentenced to six months imprisonment, this was certainly a high percentage of the Australian IWW's active membership but it is not known how high.

During the war over 100 IWW members Australia-wide were sentenced to imprisonment on political charges, including the veteran activist and icon of the labour, socialist and anarchist movements Monty Miller.

In 1939 the Australian IWW had four members, according to surveillance by government authorities, and these members were consistently opposed to the Second World War.

IWW members picket in Sydney, June 1981

More recently, IWW members were involved in the Liverpool dockers ' strike that took place between 1995 and 1998, and numerous other events and struggles throughout the 1990s and 2000s ( decade ), including the successful unionising of several workplaces, such as support workers for the Scottish Socialist Party.

moving toward revolutionary industrial unionism, Denver's labor radicals were not building from scratch ; rather, they drew upon and elaborated ideas and strategies generated by the previous twenty years of Denver's labor history ... the labor wars of 1903-4 may have triggered the formation of the IWW, the ideological synthesis it would uphold had been worked out in the American Labor Union's leadership by the summer of 1903 ...

He worked in various jobs and was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World ( IWW ), for which was active in California as a union organizer.

An outstanding and inspirational public speaker who was fluent in Italian and English, Ettor's earliest organizing work on behalf of the IWW took place in the Western United States, where he had worked unionizing miners and migrant laborers.