Excerpt: Union Competition for Glory

Ryland Grossinger was bred in Forest Hills, NY but he was raised in Los Angeles. He was toasted when he graduated from UCLA in law but he baked too long in the Southern California sun when he tried to butter up to his boss and was fired. Rather than loaf around, he yearned to go back east and see what was cooking. He became a barista for Dante’s Coffee and found his place at the table. 

      While Ry had no trouble getting settled with the handsome allowance his well-to-do parents provided him, he wanted to make a mark in legal world on the side of the oppressed. Being short brought him contempt for others who looked down on him. He felt he knew what it was like to be poor, black-bred, and to have to pump a nickel whenever they forked-out salary. He was going to help the workers of the world. A working class hero was something to be. 

      He went to the IWW website and discovered there was a branch in New York City meeting on the Lower Eastside in a place called ABC No Rio. One slow Sunday afternoon, he got on the subway at Broadway-Lafayette and took the F train to Essex Street, walking over to Rivington near the Streit’s Matzo Factory. He thought he would be late, and hoped to make a grand entrance, but the meeting, scheduled for 2 pm so that some members could get over their Sunday morning hangovers, hadn't started yet. Only Emerson was there to welcome Ry with Colonial Crutch from Macon, Georgia, on the throne downstairs. 

      "Is this the IWW meeting?"

      "It sure is. Are you looking for us?"

      "I thought there'd be more of you."

      "Some of them are coming late but Colonial Crutch will be right back; he's our legal expert."

      "I'm a lawyer, too; B.A. from UCLA."

      "Oh, Californian; the sunshine state,"

      "I was born in Queens; my parents moved west when I was young."

      "I didn't notice any New York accent." Just then, Eupheus Crutch's footsteps could be heard climbing the fragile stairs and walking back, entering the dilapidated room.

      "Well, what do we have here?"

      "You must be Crutch," said Ry without standing to greet him. Already Crutch was his brother in law and a sibling rivalry was brewing."

      Crutch sat down and opened his satchel removing a booklet with the IWW Constitution and another booklet called One Big Union. "Here you are; read these when you get a chance. Y'all living in New York now?"   

      "Yes, I live on East 12th near Tompkins Square Park." Ry had been living in the ground floor studio since arriving six months earlier.

      Just then, footsteps could be heard coming up the stairs, two sets of footsteps, both heavy, like the footstep of working men. Two male voices were talking loudly as they came through and slammed the open door. 

      "Oh so sorry," said Adonis, “I didn't realize there was anyone here." 

      "Oh he did that on purpose," Mack reached out a hand. Hi, you must be that fella from California. GHQ said you might be coming in. My name is Maynard, I'm a carpenter. Call me May."

      "Yeah, some carpenter. He's a fuckin' boss, I tell you," shouted Adonis as he threw his bag to the floor and roughly took a broken seat to sit on. "He still owes me two hundred bucks."

      "Now be polite, "Adonis," said May."You'll scare Ry away. Ry it is, isn't it?"

      "It's Ryland but my friends call me Ry, Ry Grossinger."

      "You know you're famous in New York."

      "Yeah, someone told me there was a Jewish bread company with my name."

      "It's okay. The Industrial Workers of the World have no racist tendencies."

      "I'm not Jewish. My parents are Jewish."

      "Well, doesn't that make you Jewish?" said Crutch. "I read somewhere that the religion follows the mother's side in your culture."

      "I'm losing my religion," said Ry angrily.

      Just then, another member slinked into the room from the second door to the back, the one that led into a little storage area and then the kitchen. 

      "Come in Jack; don't be shy," said May. "Ry, this is our fifth member present."

      "Y'all sit down now, here? We have a quorum. Let's get started we're an hour and a half late already."

      "I can't stay past 4pm; I have an important meeting with a fellow barista."

      "Barista? What, do you work in a coffee shop?"

      "Dante’s," said Ry with disdain. "We are trying to start a union there."

      "That's great, Ry," exclaimed May. "How can we help?"

      "Help? You're a fucking boss is all! You can't even help your own crew," chimed in Adonis.

      Emerson saw that Ryland was looking in disbelief at this motley crew he had just joined. H e knew he was thinking the same thing Emerson thought when he joined his first IWW meeting: "This is a union?" 

      Ry Grossinger was on the way to becoming a working class star buck. His grind would be Dante’s Coffee, a franchise chain that had thousands of locations across the United States and around the world.

      Colonial Eupheus Crutch, the gentleman Wobbly who headed straight to New York City from Macon, Georgia, was the cosmonaut Bolshevik to Ry’s Astro Boy persona; he was in a catch-up race to the moon of Industrial Worker union stardom. All the underhanded insults Eupheus endured from minuscule Ryland would have made him a sympathetic cult hero down south, but there in New York, he was fair game for every yokel joke cosmopolitan sophistication could dish out. He held his head high throughout the confederate-baiting northerners’ rants. Did he not suggest the Stars and Bars were to be proud of as his state flag? So what if Crutch was? Crutch was ready to show that “tiny organizer with the big mouth” what organizing was all about. The south would rise again in New York City.

      He went looking for workers to be organized by him. The firebrand who got him moving was William Stacks, Willy the Glove. Willy, who bore a resemblance to Popeye, had that California look of sun-glassed indifference to what anyone but he had to say. He knew Ryland Grossinger’s kind; he’d dealt with them before, the bosses from the other side. Now, in his 50’s, unmarried, getting wrinkled, a drifter with a cowboy hat, Willy had more tricks than sleeves to hide. He wore a right-handed gray felt construction worker’s glove with railroad stripe wrist band like the Phantom of the Opera wore his mask; he never took it off except, maybe, to sleep.

Willy Stacks, who claimed to be Cesar Chavez’s gloved left hand in the struggle of the California grape growers United Farm Workers at Delano, was raring for a fight to bring back the glory. Colonial Crutch had his wishes fulfilled. Emerson, as the treasurer of the New York City branch had the task of raising funds depleted by the Dante Barista Union (as Ryland called his offshoot) and holding down the fort for Wobblies with other pet struggles to finance. Emerson went out with Willy and Crutch on hunches. He was Crutch’s hum-dinger; the cat’s meow. He was the only man more macho than Crutch.

      Willy the Glove had an insider’s tip that there were some workers in a processing plant in Long Island City that were pissed off about their low wages and heavy work schedule. Willy himself had worked there for a while driving a refrigerated delivery truck. The company, Farm Freshness, had a two hundred thousand square-foot warehouse with hundreds of employees, mostly immigrant workers and ex-cons that collected and boxed shopping lists of groceries for deliveries to customers. They were like a supermarket on wheels.

      “Hundreds of workers who are ready to organize; I feel it in my bones. Enough shit from their supervisors,” said Willy pointing his glove finger in the direction of the plant, three miles uptown across the East River from the IWW meeting place off Essex Street. “They’re ready to pop!” 

     “They need to meet with us somehow without letting their supervisors see,” said Crutch, the canon wheels turning. “We must let them, know we can steer them right; they can trust us.” Crutch stood, arms folded across his chest, mustache drooping down his seriously red face.

      “How many copies do you want?” questioned Emerson picking up a thread from earlier in the meeting, before Ryland and four other baristas came to make their motion and move on to their own meeting place. “You said they have how many workers?”

      “We need bilingual flyers; Spanish on one side, English on the other.”

      “Ask Ernie in Bushwich if he could do it.” Ernie Poncho was the Wobbly who worked with a Latino group from the barrio there in an organization called “Allanar El Camino,” Pave the Way.

      “Let’s get, I don’t know, two hundred printed,” said Willy, matter-of-factly.

      “That many? Okay, on thin paper. They’re going to throw them away.”

      “No. They must be top quality! Don’t let them think we’re a cheap organization.” Crutch shook his head slowly in agreement, his eyes shut under raised brows, lips enclosing down-pointed whiskers.

      “But we are cheap; we only have four hundred dollars left in the treasury,” said Emerson pleadingly.

      “We may need more,” said Willy, tapping the rim of his Mexican Stetson an inch from the left uncovered hand of the arm leaning on the radiator. “Can’t tell; the lady workers on the line have boyfriends.” Billy went on,” They need some confidence, too. We can give it to them. You know, ex-cons need a push; they’re a little shy about losing this job, one of the only places that’ll hire them.”

      In the weeks before, Willy and his de facto spokesman, Crutch, had unleashed their organizing abilities on the fine workers of Farm Freshness. They’d made a motion and had gotten three hundred dollars from the branch to reserve breakfast in a little luncheonette outside the plant; no refund. The breakfast would be “chin-wag,” as the Colonial called it, “a chinwag for the scissor-bills.” Before Crutch and Willy the Glove had set their sights on the Farm Freshness workers, he had Emerson and another Wob named Fergie visiting junk yards in Greenpoint. The barking dogs at each job site in and around painfully drab and weed wild corrugated metal fences were omens. On the dead end summer streets of industrial Greenpoint, there was no sense trying to get passed the gates, but that didn’t deter Willy the Glove or Colonial Crutch who followed close by at Willy’s new Red Wing construction-booted heels. Emerson and Fergie shied the other way. Beyond the crumpled gates backed into by trucks too many times stood two or three men in short-sleeved shirts and jeans, looking outward and scratching their heads at the four men milling around in the usually vacant street.

      Willy bravely took a chance. The other Wobblies looked as he strutted past the gate, black chained pit bulls barking madly, to speak with the workers awaiting him. No, they weren’t workers. The workers, he was told, were on their break and he’d better stay away and not bother them.

      “Yes sir, just asking,” said Willy looking skyward under his Ray-Bans, the dog pulling at its chain.

      “”They’re supervisors,” he nonchalantly said passing the other three Wobblies out of sight up the broken blazing street. “How was I to know?” said the veteran of many a California grape grower strike.

      “Let’s get out of here; this is stupid,” said Emerson, stating the obvious. “Holy shit,” chimed in Fergie. “If this wasn’t the biggest waste of time! Willy? There are no workers here to organize!”
      “I say there are!” said Willy emphatically.

      “He said there are then there most certainly are,” added Crutch confidently. “Where y’all going to now, Willy?”

      “Back to the Chinese warehouse in Bushwick.”

“Damn if I’m going there I’d rather be in bed with a bitch,” said Fergie. ”I’m heading home to Brooklyn. Where’s the ‘L’ Train?” Fergie was off and so was Emerson. They’d had enough organizing for the day. It seemed pretty disorganized to them. Who was this Willy the Glove, anyway? How did he show up at the IWW meeting and who let him in?

“Let’s go see if Ernie is at Allanar El Camino; it’s just ten minutes from here,” said Willy as he walked down the street to his battered Land Rover with Crutch and drove off dropping off Emerson and Fergie at the subway station a few blocks away.

      “They’ll need some Red Cards for sure, I do believe,” said Crutch. 

Excerpt: Bruno; The Real Star Buck

     It was nine years later that the Labor Board said the fired Dante’s Barista should get his job back. Emerson was glad Bruno was vindicated, after all this time. He'd always been a hero to him. Bruno Ascus was not a union organizer; he was told he was one by Ryland whose dirty work he did. Emerson remembered Bruno feeling his oats after Ryland dared him to stand up to the manager. Then, after he was fired, while Ryland kept his job, Ryland used Bruno as a test law case with some connections he had. Bruno didn’t even know what NLRB stood for when Ryland filed the petition on his behalf; all Bruno did was sign the paper.

In the nine years since federal authorities decided he should get his case back, Bruno washed dishes in delicatessens, took care of elderly home bound clients for an agency, and washed floors in a rehab center. “It’s disgusting,” Emerson thought, “that after all this time, his jobs were so bad that he still wanted his Dante’s Coffee Shop job back!”

 Emerson thought of calling up Bruno. He couldn’t muster the courage. To Bruno, Ryland was a hero though he lost Bruno the best job he ever had, literally. Emerson recalls how Ryland and two other Wobbly baristas wore the IWW button at work, too, but carefully didn’t say anything to management that would be considered grounds for firing; he wasn’t ready to play that card, yet. Bruno wasn’t that discreet. 

Bruno Ascus had already moved on, married and had kids when Ryland, seeing another opportunity for union fame, brought charges on his behalf to the NLRB accusing Dante’s of unfairly abusing him for union activism. The board ruled against the coffee chain. Dante’s took its case to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals the court gave the case back to the NLRB after deciding that Bruno didn’t curse the manager in front of customers; just in front of other baristas.

Two years later, the NLRB had a new decision: Bruno’s firing was illegal no matter what because Bruno’s union activism contributed to the decision to get rid of him. The NLRB pointed out that Dante’ didn’t punish other employees for cursing—including the manager—and that a memo about Bruno’s dismissal specifically said it was because Bruno supported the IWW union.

When Emerson Davinsky started feeling the need for anti-Alzheimer’s medication, he put the pen down and stopped writing his memoirs. Through all the past e-mails and flame wars, he couldn’t put on his pants without pulling up a memory.

When he saw the news on-line about Bruno Ascus, he got that feeling again. Bruno was vindicated after nine years after he was fired from Dante’s Coffee Shop in the early days of the Ry Grossinger organizing there; Grossinger had an idea, for IWW solidarity, for workers to wear buttons during work time, even though only five of the twelve workers were in the union.

Ryland had contacted the NLRB to schedule an election. Emerson and the other Wobblies in the branch felt it showed their hand without a solid majority, it got Bruno, naive as he was, into an argument with the manager and eventually fired. Before a vote could be taken to join the union, it was postponed because they knew they would lose, since Dante management packed the location with anti-union stalwarts.

The only person who benefited from the organizing was Ry Grossinger; the corporate news it generated made him slightly famous, enough to be invited to write a preface to an old IWW anthology, get hangers-on, and make use of his law credentials.

He never asked permission from the IWW GMB to start the union drive and, finally, depleted the GMB of funds by stuffing votes; only Dante workers went to vote. Ry never shared funds raised by the Dante baristas with the GMB or GHQ. He even started his own website and list-serve without approval. With the tide against Emerson and no support from friends like Jack Covert who quit the branch, he never brought Ry up on charges; he left the branch in disgust.

It was the first shot in a volley of union organizing that the New York City General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World tried to accomplish. All the organizing had ended before it took hold, like moving a broken chair before the glue had dried or trying to sit on the chair after it had been removed, so eager were Emerson’s fellow workers to outdo each other. Workers who lost their jobs because of the impatience of the advising organizers would eventually win some of their cases in court after guilt and pro-bono defense helped them get through. Colonel Crutch even donated a sum of his own money to ease his conscience and get workers their jobs back. Emerson was long gone from the branch by the time mop-up began.

Colonial Crutch moved on as Ryland moved away with his own version of the IWW. Emerson stayed true to the General Membership Branch and tried to safeguard meetings and funds for all members, not just Ryland’s gang or the Clutch-Willy faction.

In Brooklyn Crutch and Willy were joined by Fergie and Emerson and a few others at four shops that had let them help organize unions for them. Emerson was especially helpful with his Mandarin ability by ad-libbing chants outside the Chinese run businesses. For their services, all workers in two of the shops had been fired and management demanded to see proof of legal immigrant status as a way of scaring the un-fired workers into behaving.

Emerson proudly participated in the union pushes at the shops in Bushwick. One day in particular stands out in his mind as exemplary. The day began at 5:30 am in front of Great City Produce. A few workers arriving heard whistles and home-made drums. A supervisor kept the door closed an hour until the Latino manager arrived; he could speak with his own people, the Chinese bosses knew. Next, Emerson and the other Wobblies walked to the nearby Americana Market. It was there the previous year that four workers were fired for organizing. A few stayed on because they were discreet and not openly involved with the union, so the management thought.

After stopping off for breakfast, Emerson took his fellow workers in his car a few miles away to Dawn Plus Corp., formally called Rosy Supply Corp. Rosy Supply was the company that fired all its workers involved with the IWW. Wobblies from out of town in New York City at the time joined the demonstration to get the workers their back pay.

The final stop of that perfect union day was at Hung-Easy, the foodstuffs distributor that Willy the Glove and Colonial Crutch went to after one worker complained about them at Allanar El Camino. The warehouse was locked up for the holiday. Despite that, the solidarity party continued until the police came to send them away. Emerson drove his fellow workers back to the subway station and headed home fulfilled.

     Willy the Glove expressed himself satisfied with the day’s events in every way. Everyone let him believe it was his party. Emerson resented him and the way the branch was strictly divided along selfish lines of heroism by Crutch and Ryland. Despite all the hard effort, almost everyone who was being helped organizing lost their jobs. Baristas usually didn’t go to Bushwich actions and Bushwich organizers weren’t welcome at barista meetings. Only Emerson and a few other Wobblies stayed on to participate in both. Emerson knew there had to be a better way. The NYC GMB was ruining more people’s lives than they helped. Only Ryland came out smelling like Bread & Roses.

Excerpt: The Bug in the Latte

     The tedium of collective decision making was the main reason Ryland Grossinger moved his Dante's Barista Union meetings
 to another time and place, yet he still made sure to make a 
grand late entrance at the monthly General Membership 
Branch meetings to see that nothing was going on behind his 
back. 

     Occasionally, at some monthly meetings, five baristas would show up to have their vote registered. It was getting so that when Johnny Emerson, Fergie, Crutch, and Covert saw them there, they knew it was to make a motion for something the the DBU needed, something they needed a majority of barista votes for, such as when they wanted to raid the GMB treasury and print flyers or have stocking hats purchased for themselves from General Headquarters.

     With Grossinger usually making the motion, and another coffee jerk pumping up a hand to second the motion, the barista union always won a majority of votes, if only by a vote of five to four. If there was on the agenda a vote against DBU interests, Ryland alerted all his barista friends not to show up at the GMB meeting to stifle the five person quorum needed for a vote. Grossinger calculated correctly that there would be only four members without the baristas' presence. It was all very democratic, and deceitful. It became a morbid joke to Johnny and other fellow workers.

     "Hey Fergie, remember that overhead projector we were talking about getting for our outreach event film presentations?" Johnny asked. "Well, I saw one on sale for a few thousand dollars."

     "Point of order: Treasurer Davinsky, how much do we have left in the treasury?" Crutch chimed in. 

     "Three thousand eight hundred, not counting the five hundred lent to the fellow worker from Jersey to get his PETA girlfriend out of jail," Johnny Emerson replied. "Also, GHQ sent us a bill of four hundred fifty dollars for the thirty stocking hats the DBU received from them."

     "What!? When did that happen?" Jack Covert snapped to attention as he raised his head from the back corner of the zine room. 

     "At the meeting last month; you don't remember?" 

     "Why are we paying for them? Shouldn't the DBU pay themselves?" Covert demanded, his thin voice cracking.

     "I do believe the motion was for GMB to foot the bill as outreach for those who showed up at the demonstration at the Union Square shop," Crutch recalled, his hand raised accordingly to be recognized by the facilitator; himself. 

     "Your guess is as good as mine," Johnny Emerson replied as he wrote the minutes. After months of trying to persuade the baristas to refund the treasury, Johnny Emerson and GMB wrote it and the PETA girlfriend loan off as a loss. 

     "We had better buy that projector before all the funds are gone," said Fergie incredulously. 

     "We don't really need it," Johnny pointed out.

     "Damn if they really needed those stocking hats, those bitches." Fergie wiped his nose and shook his head.

      In the back of his mind, Johnny  knew that including this business in the meeting minutes was a bad move so he censored it. Even though the original vote indicated the cost of the hats should be repaid, the barista clique would just come to a GMB meeting to vote not to return the funds. 

     No one in GHQ ever learned if the DBU ever raised their own funds. Occasionally, a check would come into the P.O. box Crutch monitored at the main post office earmarked for the barista organizing drive, but there were never any funds coming the other way. Even monthly dues weren't paid by the working group as, according to IWW regulations, they could keep them for their own cause. Peter Portobello, was the only barista who admitted that though he kept himself in good standing, delegate Ryland didn't bother to collect dues from others; he would speak with Rye at one of the special meetings.

     A few months earlier, when the whole unionizing thing started percolating, Grossinger spilled the beans and told the GMB that he had filed for NLRB recognition of the DBU without consulting the others first. "The NLRB will protect us from being burned by management," he said in his defense. But it didn't prevent barista Bruno, the greenest bean of them all, from wearing his IWW pin proudly on his Dante cap, the part of the uniform above the brain, and getting into an argument with the manager in the cafe, getting fired when he refused to take the button off. Grossinger wasn't that naive. He handed management his cool mug. 

     Grossinger had his hands full convincing more baristas in his store to join the union; it became evident that, against the GMB's hind-sighted advice, only a minority had joined. Now, with the caffeine out of the brew, the Dante regional manager started packing the payroll with loyal baristas from other shops before NLRB capped the voting participants. The Dante's law firm got busy filing a motion claiming theirs were regional and one store alone couldn't be unionized. 

     When the court ruled that one store could indeed be unionized because its manager had the power to hire and fire independently, it didn't much matter because the DBU would have lost the vote, anyway. Grossinger thought it prudent, and it would make him look good, to postpone the election and claim a victory, anyway. The pro-bono defense he secured from a law firm he was hoping to get a position with would back him up. 

     When news broke in the corporate media, there was Ryland Grossinger in a captioned photo, in his Dante's uniform, looking up to the sky like a Greek hero, proudly displaying his hard fought right to wear the IWW button while on duty; a great victory. The Daily News and the Post were amused and printed it. 

     When it became evident that Grossinger would need the assistance of everyone in the GMB from that point on, freedom-riding activists joined in a meeting that was arranged at a pub ironically called The Union Bar; it was near the communal house some Wobs shared in the Bushwick neighborhood.  

     The GMB was exciting when fifteen people showed up at the meeting in the garden of the pub in the grumbling bowels of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that hummed with traffic above. Wobblies that hadn't been to meetings in months came anxious to decide on the next step. There were so many people that wanted to pay up dues so to be eligible to vote that the meeting was delayed to affix stamps in their Red Books. It was a right regular party, too, with beer and pizza paid for by the GMB. 

     The meeting was called to order, Grossinger facilitating. Crutch raised his hand first with an urgent question."Point of order: Why didn't y'all ask the branch before you went public?"

     "Does it matter now?" one barista shot back, out of order. "What's done is done." To Johnny, the urgent barista sounded like a parent who had found that his teenage daughter's pregnancy test came back positive. There would be no abortion in this right to unionize life.

    "We are organizing the first Dante's in the whole world!" foamed Grossinger to the applause and hoots of the other baristas. He then lowered his voice and addressed Crutch publicly but private-like:

     "If you are going to be negative about this, we might have to ask you to leave the meeting." All eyes followed to see Crutch's reaction.

     "I beg your pardon, fellow worker, but that is highly undemocratic," fumed Crutch. 

     "Be what it may, but we have had enough of your nay-saying," said Ryland to wagging heads around him. "We're going to have to ask you to step away from this meeting and wait outside."

     "I will most certainly not," replied Crutch jumping to his feet with indignation. 

Excerpt: The New NYC Wobblies

"Swordfish," Jack called into the intercom when someone asked who was there.

      "Swordfish?" Emerson asked. “Why not Afghanistan Banana Stand?”

      "Why not?" When the man answered their bell with a ubiquitous "who is it?" they could have said anything they wanted. It was his choice to buzz them in or not. His was the War Resisters League office in the Muste building, the 'peace' building as it was known, on Lafayette Place a few blocks down from Tower Records. Jack had looked them up on his computer and contacted them to let them know they were coming. Maybe it was a password after all, “Swordfish.” Still, if they said they were the police, Mitch Rabbinivik would have let them upstairs just the same; they had nothing to hide or flush down the toilet.

      Emerson and Jack went up the dirty flight of stairs and found the studio of W.R.L. from the wall near the intercom in the dirty dim hallway. They walked past in curiosity to see what the next office was. The last door down the hall was the largest Muste Building meeting room, Someone had handwritten I.W.W. on a scrap of blank white paper and taped it onto the wood door under an engraved commemorative metal plaque. It tweaked their interest, a dozen windows from floor to ceiling, wrapped around the building's corner. 

    They heard the door opened down the hall. The boys turned and milled back sideways past Mitch's outstretched hand and into the room, eyeing as they did the posters randomly placed on narrow office walls to the left and right, pamphlets, papers, and a large open window at its end. The War Resisters Office. The website made it seem grander than it really was. Two desks side by side, Steve’s on the left, Mitch's on the right, each against the wall but the men's backs. 

      "This is the War Resisters League?"

      "This is it."

      "Only you two?" 

      "Well, we do have some help every now and then but, basically, we are it."

      "You are the ones who send out those e-mails?"

      "That's what we do," said Steve Stacks while opening and closing a draw looking for something which he didn't locate.

      "And print that newspaper you sent us?" asked Emerson incredulously.

      "We printed it and we sent it," said Steve, proudly almost.

      "All by us," said Mitch raising a bushy black Groucho Marx eyebrow.

      "You really need some help, don’t you?"

      "Are you offering?"

      "What do you need to be done?"

      "Well there is next month's newsletter. You could start there.” Mitch reached over and grabbed an open box of a thousand white business envelopes. “If you want to help, you can take that yellow paper with this white one, fold them together like this, and put them into these envelopes; okay?"

      "Sure." Emerson and Jack took seats, actually not seats but places to sit on; cardboard boxes and an old swivel chair.

      "What are your names? You didn't say."

      Emerson spoke. "I'm Emerson Davinsky and this is Jack Covert."

      "It's a pleasure to meet you." He shook their hands. Mitch followed.

      "What brought you here?"

      "We want to help, that’s all. We heard about you at a demonstration and wanted to help."

      "That's great. What school?"

      "Norman Thomas High School, Midtown."

      "So you're both teachers?"

      "ESL."

      “Does the I.W.W. really meet here?” asked Emerson.

      “Sure when they make it,” Steve replied reaching into his shelf and handing Jack a brochure, a small piece of white paper with a gear shaft in the middle announcing the Industrial Workers of the World New York City General Membership Branch meeting for the following Saturday.

      “I thought the IWW was defunct.”

      “No, they’re still around,” replied Mitch shrugging his shoulders at the thought.

      “When I was a teen I used to love Phil Ochs and he mentioned the Industrial Workers of the World in a song called “Joe Hill” but that was about years ago.”

      “Yep, they’re still around,” replied Steve incredulously.

      On the way home Jack and Emerson discussed the IWW. They each had some homework to do.

      A few days later it was decided by each to join up together. 

     Four people were present at that first meeting Emerson joined; he and Jack made six. The leader, it seemed, was some cranky shabbily dressed schlep who went by the name Red Zinger. He was sincerely happy to meet the new members but didn’t know how to really show it. When asked what the IWW did he could only repeat what they had done in the past. Apparently they had just gone through some turmoil in the branch and someone left or was booted out.

      At that first meeting, the first agenda item was that they needed to relocate because someone in some other group in the Peace Building was too lazy to wake up Sunday morning to get there and open the door for them. It was Adonis, May, and Richard Tempo who mentioned ABC No Rio as a new spot. They had been to the communal house before. Within a few months, the NYC GMB was meeting in the Zine room of the ramshackle tenement on Rivington Street on the Lower Eastside.

      The branch mutated; there had been a split. Emerson and Jack were  in. Zinger made room for the new Fellow Workers and they worked out a general meeting procedure from some Wobbly literature they had from GHQ.

      Emerson didn't care but Zinger was happy to learn there was one woman in the group. The only females he saw at ABC No Rio were in the kitchen cooking for a group named Food Not Bombs and none came to IWW meetings. They were cute young darlings, with an air of natural womanhood and suffragette pride; real people. But there were no women in the GMB until they met Sadie, rowdy and dear Sister Worker Sadie Strumbeck.

      Not long after Sadie returned, as was clear by Zinger and Adonis’ familiarity, a new recruit came up the rickety stairs into the Zine room through the creaky off-hinged door and introduced himself formally.

      “May I introduce myself my Fellow Workers; I am Eupheus Crutch from Macon, Georgia. This is the IWW, isn’t it?” For a moment Jack and Emerson looked at each other thinking of telling him otherwise until FW Crutch took a seat, unbuckled his regal timeworn leather satchel and removed an old red book. “We are the mighty union and I am to directly do so,” he crowed. With his Southern accent, blond hair and goatee, and be speckled face with red cheeks, Emerson called him “The Colonel” and the name stuck. “Y’all call me what you may, but do not associate me with that Fascist capitalist chicken dealer, you hear?” They all heard and laughed, anyway.

By the time Skuzzy joined the general membership branch, everyone was ready for some comic relief. The older tall members knew that from Skuzzy's height and young age, he would be the embodiment of entertainment, yet Skuzzy, well aware of his diminutive height, was insulated from criticism having been that height his entire life; he knew how to deflect criticism and prejudice. He was an Industrial Worker of the World, however large or small he was, and he was there, like the others, to fight for the right to organize unions. Since he didn't have an occupation, like most of the general membership branch, the union he would organize would be someone else’s. 

      Eupheus Crutch made sure Skuzzy was put right about the procedures of a meeting and Skuzzy participated like the rest, except for Jack Covert, busy as ever, outside looking in.

The first project Skuzzy undertook was to safeguard the collection of Industrial Worker news monthlies in cardboard boxes on the lopsided shelves of the room in which they met, a room that was called a ‘zine room’ by virtue of those and other cardboard boxes, filled mostly with unbound stapled chap books, manifestos, and zines. Yes, zines was what was in the library that the Workers of the World who lived in New York would be the protector of, and Skuzzy would be the point person to safeguard those zines of Industrial Worker origin. 

      "We should take them with us," said Skuzzy, addressing the third item in the order of business, the motion behind a motion to pay Mr. Hollander yearly instead of monthly fees for use of the room; deciding at each meeting was how they would donate to him that month for using the zine room. "Maybe if we give him a fee for the year, he can do something about those radiators." Skuzzy believed.

      "Those radiators didn't work last winter either," said Red Zinger, the historian and longest member. "We asked about it last year. It doesn't help."

      "Well then maybe we should have a rent strike and refuse to pay at all; that may put some sense into him," said Colonial Crutch, seriously, but out of order by his own definition, throwing personal opinion into a factual matter.

      "The whole building is falling apart," came Jack Covert’s words from the back of the rectangular room, somewhere between boxes of assorted wires and disused hard drives." His first priority is making sure the staircase doesn't fall down."

      "Is that a fact!?"

      "You saw! I am afraid to walk up anymore."

      "Order in the room: Crutch, Covert; Skuzzy has the floor," said this month’s facilitator, The Carpenter. Emerson took notes as quickly as he could; rather easily since most of what was being said was out of order and not for the minutes to be written about.

      "Point of order: how much do we pay Hollander now?"

      "Zinger? Do you know?"

      "We’ve given him twenty dollars a month the last few months; I wasn't here before then."

      "It was $10 a month; $2.00 a person and we had ten people attending, then, the meeting size dwindled to five when Sadie Strumbeck flew off somewhere."

      "She's been working on that island near Riverhead with toxic samples."

      "Is that what she's doing?"

      "How’s that?"

      "I call the meeting to order! Skuzzy, repeat your motion?"

      "I move that we pay Mr. Hollander $100 for a year’s use of this room." 

      After it was voted down, one hand one vote; simple majority, and Skuzzy didn't get his way, he went on to the third item on the agenda which was also his; the one about adding to the zine collection of Industrial Worker newspapers. That motion did pass and Skuzzy was appointed the point person to go upstairs to Hollander's office, with Emerson, to see what could be done about adding zines and creating a new box for them.

That was easy. Mr. Hollander agreed, since it was magazines from their organization and he didn't know how they'd gotten there in the first place; that was a volunteer’s responsibility, he didn't remember which one or when it was last attended to. That was easy to find out, too. Skuzzy opened the box, the one that said 1976-1982 and found each monthly issue in proper order. He took the next box off the shelf with no label, opened it, and found issues from 1992-1995. That was in order, too. Four more boxes were opened and investigated. It was during the course of the meeting, which suited everyone just fine since it kept Skuzzy busy and mostly away from the discussion. Skuzzy had a tendency to talk more than needed, like Gabby in the Al Zukof cartoons; he wouldn't stop yapping.  

      "Sorry to interrupt, but do we have any new issues here?"

      "Skuzzy, can that wait for later? We're finishing up."

      "Yeah. Sure. Later."

      The Industrial Worker magazines never did leave the zine room at ABC No Rio - half of the third agenda item's motion, but at least it could stay there and have issues added to it, putting it up to date. Maynard Carpenter would provide a box "that may not match the others" but that was okay and no one minded.   

Eupheus Crutch excused himself and had to leave early. It was okay; the votes were in and a quorum was no longer needed, then everyone realized that Jack Covert was still there, the fifth man, and they could still vote if they wanted to, but it wouldn’t be fair to Crutch and he’d be annoyed. The meeting was ended. Emerson read back the notes. Crutch stayed until he was finished, just in case Emerson left out some important points. Satisfied, the minutes were to be written, typed up, and put on the e-mail list-serve for approval before sending out to every member in the branch, whether they had been to the meeting or not, whether anyone even knew who they were or not, but Red Zinger knew who was who and they should all get a copy. The meeting was adjourned. Skuzzy was welcomed again, and didn't miss another meeting after that.

The positive vibrations and possibilities kept mounting as Emerson and the others were reshaping the New York City General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World. The group hadn’t been this strong in years, since the 70’s in fact, when it caught the upsurge from the anti-Vietnam War movement and environmentalists. Judy Bari, one of the organizers of the “Earth First!” Campaigns against logging redwood forests in Northern California was a Wobbly hero in the ‘80’s who had survived a pipe bombing attack but had just passed away from breast cancer. But in New York City, the IWW lingered until Emerson, Zinger, Jack, Sadie, Adonis, May, and Red brought it back to life with Skuzzy and Colonel Crutch in tow.

“Rusty’s Rules,” a simplified version of Roberts’ Rules was borrowed from the Portland, OR GMB and employed to define and focus the NYC GMB meetings; Colonel Crutch made sure of that. Communication between the Wobbly branches around the United States, Great Britain, and Australia were social and personable thanks to the advent of the World Wide Web.

Emerson was proud to be part of a labor union that had done more to ignite the spirit of American workers than any other union in the history of the nation. The IWW was to American Workers what the Russian October Revolution and the Chinese May 4^th Movements were to workers there. Never had there been so much focus and attention put into fighting the class war against the bosses in the Industrial Revolution. Even after the United States government clampdown on revolutionary unionism with the Palmer Raids of 1919 took its toll, the IWW managed to live on and helped organize loggers in the Northwest and longshoremen on the East Coast.

If the IWW had not be decimated by the time the Great Depression hit the capitalist world in 1929, the industrial union would have been there, ripe and ready, to create the new world out of the shell of the old instead of Franklin Roosevelt hijacking the socialist agenda to create the WSA to rescue the ruling class of a sorely needed redistribution of wealth. Hell, if the workers were stronger when Wilson forced them to be slaughters with Europeans in the ‘war to end all wars,’ World War I would never have happened and six hundred thousand workers wouldn’t have been slaughtered to fight the rich men’s war.

There would have been a strong resentment to the scapegoating and red-baiting of Franco in Spain, Adolph Hitler and the other Fascist states. World War II might not have happened if the workers were united in strength.

      Emerson was sure that as the United States slipped further into anti-worker neo-liberalism in the 1990’s, the workers livelihoods could be saved before it was too late. Emerson in the Industrial Workers of the World of the 21^st century were just beginning to flex their muscles and organize workers into unions. There was a way to go before a critical mass needed for non-violent revolution was reached but he and the other Wobbly activists believed that with agitation, education, and organization, the ultimate goal of abolishing the wage system could become reality. There would be nothing that wouldn’t neutralize the government-corporate media propaganda machine. There was a feeling of beginning in the right direction, the way it should go to help down-sized workers wrestle themselves from the exploitative designs of the ruling class.