The IWW and the Smelter Strike of Nineteen Seven

Workers at the Tacoma copper smelter are said to have organized job actions in the early nineteen hundreds. The Industrial Workers of the World, the union known as the IWW or the Wobblies, was active among Pacific Northwest workers, which had been founded two years earlier in Chicago as a radical alternative to the craft unions of the American Federation of Labor. The IWW was open to workers regardless of skill level, trade, race, or gender, a deliberately inclusive organizing philosophy that was unusual for American labor in the early twentieth century.

Smelter workers of the era pressed for better pay. The work was hard and dangerous by any standard: copper smelting involved sustained exposure to extreme heat, toxic fumes, and heavy metals in an era before meaningful occupational safety regulation existed. Such pay demands were rarely met.

The defeat at the Tacoma smelter was one of many setbacks the IWW faced in its early years as it attempted to organize the extractive industries of the American West, the mines, the mills, the smelters, the lumber camps. The Wobblies continued to operate in the Pacific Northwest for years afterward, organizing timber workers and agricultural laborers and dock workers in campaigns that met varying degrees of success and repression. The smelter strike of nineteen seven is a small episode in that larger history, a moment when the workers who extracted metal from ore in one of the most polluted corners of the Pacific Coast asked for more and were told no.