One Big Union (concept)

The One Big Union was an idea in the late 19th and early 20th centuries amongst trade unionists to unite the interests of workers and offer solutions to all labor problems.

Unions initially organised as craft or trade unions. Workers were organized by their skill: carpenters, plumbers, bricklayers, each into their respective unions. Capitalists could often divide craft and trade unionists along these lines in demarcation disputes. As capitalist enterprises and state bureaucracies became more centralised and larger, some workers felt that their institutions needed to become similarly large. A simultaneous disenchantment with the perceived weakness of craft unions caused many unions to organize along industrial lines.

As envisioned by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – which for many years prior to 1919 had been associated with the concept – One Big Union was not just the idea that all workers should be organised into one big union. In the 1911 pamphlet "One Big Union", IWW supporters Father Thomas J. Hagerty and William Trautmann enumerated two goals: One Big Union needed to "combine the wage-workers in such a way that it can most successfully fight the battles and protect the interests of the workers of today in their struggles for fewer hours of toil, more wages and better conditions," and it also "must offer a final solution of the labor problem—an emancipation from strikes, injunctions, bull-pens, and scabbing of one against the other."

One Big Union

One Big Union may refer to:

One Big Union (Canada)

The One Big Union (OBU) was a Canadian syndicalist trade union active primarily in the Western part of the country. It was initiated formally in Calgary on June 4, 1919 but lost most of its members by 1922. It finally merged into the Canadian Labour Congress during 1956.

Background

Towards the end of World War I, labor activism in Western Canada became more radical. Western Canadian radicals protested the management of the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada (TLC), the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the governments in power. Western unions were represented by only 45 of 400 delegates at the September 1918 TLC convention. Their resolutions to condemn Canada's efforts for World War I were therefore defeated easily. Moreover, the socialist TLC president James Watters, who had had this post since 1911, was replaced by the conservative Tom Moore.

In those radical times, the federal government clamped down on radical publications and organizations, outlawing 14 different organizations including the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW). But labour activists and socialists did not allow the vision of that kind of society to die so determined to establish a new organization with the old IWW motto "The Workers of the World Unite" as their stated belief.