In considering Smalls’ accomplishments as a leader, one is reminded of another charismatic, working-class Black labor leader, who harnessed the power of solidarity to build enduring worker power on the Philadelphia waterfront. Ben Fletcher, born 132 years ago this month in a vibrant multiracial neighborhood in South Philadelphia, was a dockworker and devoted organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), nicknamed the Wobblies.
In the 1910s, Fletcher co-founded the Local 8 branch of the IWW’s Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union, which ruled the docks for a decade and was an explicitly anti-racist, integrated union during an era where that was almost unheard of within organized labor, let alone the U.S. in general. He traveled up and down the East Coast, agitating workers and preaching the message of working-class unity, earning the respect of his peers and drawing the ire of the U.S. government, who imprisoned him and hundreds of other Wobblies for treason during World War I. He now stands as one of labor’s forgotten radical heroes, but his legacy lives on in organizers like Smalls and his comrades in the ALU.
What drew Fletcher to the IWW was its status as a firmly anti-capitalist industrial labor union that welcomed workers of all races and genders and pioneered the concept of solidarity unionism. The difference between solidarity unionism and its counterpart, business unionism, is hierarchical as well as political and strategic. While proponents of the latter seek to run their unions like, well, a business, in a top-down fashion that relies heavily on paid staff and political machinations to achieve its largely economic goals while leaving member involvement as an afterthought, solidarity unionists eschew entrenched hierarchies and level the playing field between the organizers and the organized.
While many major American labor unions can rightly be accused of exemplifying the business union model, the IWW employs a worker-first strategy, through which its member-organizers seek to build unions “based on the direct strength of workers on the job, without regard to government or employer recognition” and typically shun the NLRB-focused electoral process and contract bargaining that traditional trade unions consider essential.
The Wobbly approach continues to bear fruit in multiple industries (most recently, fast food and retail victories in the Pacific Northwest) but solidarity unionism has become bigger than one union. There are countless examples throughout history of workers taking it upon themselves to organize for change, with or without the support of a formal union structure; many of these efforts have been undertaken explicitly by and for people of color, especially Black workers, who for decades were shut out of majority-white labor unions or shunted off into segregated union locals.