The East Side Freedom Library invites you to our monthly labor history film screening and discussion.

Friday, November 13, 2020, 7pm

On ESFL’s Facebook page and YouTube channel

“The Wobblies” provides an overview of the rise and fall of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), complete with archival footage, loads of interviews, Wobbly art and songs. This 1979 documentary established a new, primary-research model for historical nonfiction—no narrator, no authorial perspective, just original documents and witnesses—but its subject matter was, and still is, its most radical characteristic. By the ’70s American culture had been made to forget that the Industrial Workers of the World had ever existed, just as in the century’s first decades the militant and visionary union was condemned, brutalized, legislated against, campaigned against, and demonized.

Today, things haven’t changed much. Deborah Shaffer and Stewart Bird’s film stands among a scant handful of books detailing this labor organization’s astonishing power and growth, its newspapers and songs, its diverse membership, as well as the sickening history of suppression, murder, and criminal injustice that was brought to bear upon it. At a time when American workers are facing the challenges of the COVID pandemic, rapidly changing structures of employment, monopoly employers like Amazon and Google, and a government which fails to enforce worker safety and organizing protections, the story of the Wobblies can provide needed inspiration.

Join labor historian Peter Cole, author of Dockworker Power and Ben Fletcher, Black Wobbly, for a brief introduction to the film and a post-film discussion.

Free and open to all

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