Explore a day-by-day database of more than 1800 strikes, protests, campaigns, and arrests as recorded in the Industrial Worker and other newspapers from 1906 to 1920.

Mexican workers organized IWW locals across the Southwest in conjunction with the PLM, the revolutionary movement led by Ricardo Flores Magon. This article tells the story of the movement and details the remarkable lives of two Wobbly PLM organizers, Fernando Palomares and Rosendo Dorame.

Local 8, which organized the city’s longshoremen, was the largest and most powerful IWW branch in the Mid-Atlantic and, most memorably, the union’s most racially inclusive branch.

On September 5, 1917, agents of the Bureau of Investigation, in conjunction with local law enforcement, raided every office of the IWW across the United States within the space of twenty four hours, with possibly the widest-ranging search warrant in US history. They took five tons of material from the national headquarters of the IWW in Chicago alone, and took tons more from 48 local offices and the homes of leading Wobblies.

The IWW was unusually effective in Grays Harbor, the lumber capital of the world, buiilding lasting support especially in the large Finnish-American community. The IWW grew dramatically during the Aberdeen Free Speech Fight of 1911-1912 and won wage increases and then then 8-hour day in 1912 and 1917 lumber strikes.

Sinclair's effort to help striking IWW maritime workers exposed the brutality of the Los Angeles police department and helped launch the ACLU in California.

Stealing rides on freight trains was critical for the IWW, making it possible for the union to move activists to sites of struggle. After 1915, the IWW also developed a strategy for using boxcars as organizing spaces, recruiting new members, collecting dues, requiring red cards to ride.

In the months following the clash at the Everett docks another clash unfolded as many different groups and interests fought to establish what happened and who was to blame. This was a battle to control the "story" and ultimately shape the history of the Everett massacre as it would be understood by later generations. .

The story of IWW "songbird" Katie Phar, a 10-year-old Spokane girl, and her correspondence with Wobbly martyr and songwriter, Joe Hill, brings to life the powerful synthesis of music and organizing that the IWW employed in the years before World War I when the radical organization was becoming influential in the Pacific Northwest.

Battered by vigilantee violence and government prosecutions, the IWW was on its way to recovery in the early 1920s before the disastrous split at the 1924 convention. This essay examines the years leading up to the split while assessing the issues and structural dynamics that contributed to the crisis.

Photographs of rank and file members of the IWW are rare. In the aftermath of the November 5, 1916 Everett massacre, Seattle police arrested 294 IWW members who had survived the gun battle. Seventy four were held for trial, facing murder charges. They were photographed as they were booked in Seattle and the Everett Public Library has preserved and digitized these remarkable images.

This timeline and maps detail the deaths of more than 170 I.W.W members who were killed while organizing, striking, taking direct action, or for carrying a Red Card. These members and bystanders were shot, stabbed, beaten, tortured, starved, strangled, lynched, drowned, disappeared, or executed.

To many of the locals in Seattle the strike was the beginning of an attempted revolution by the Industrial Workers of the World and others with similar radical tendencies. The insistence of these conservatives that the IWW was behind the strike, together with the state of the organization and its place in the labor movement at the time, has created a mystery as to just how much of a role the “Wobblies” played in the Seattle General Strike.

The Industrial Workers of the World had led the organization of farmworkers in Washington's Yakima Valley. On August 24, 1933, strikers faced 250 farmers, organized as a militia to put down the incipient union organizing among fieldworkers.

The 1933 battle between the IWW and farm owners was part of a long history of farmworker organizing in Washington's Yakima Valley, as well as efforts by radicals to form unions in the region.

Litchman was one of Washington's most ardent legal defenders of labor radicals and civil rights advocates. Throughout his long career he defended IWWs and other radicals while fighting for Socialism and civil rights.

View interactive maps of IWW strikes, campaigns, arrests. More than two dozen maps, charts, and tables show the historical geography of the IWW from 1905-1927

Browse collections of photographs and documents from the Labor Archives of Washington and University of Washington Libraries