On how many workers does your lifestyle — even your survival — depend?

The food you eat today — how many workers helped to plant it, to tend it, to pick it, to process it, to ship it, and to sell it to you?

The clothing you wear — how many workers helped to grow or to synthesize the fibers, to design the style, to manufacture the garments, to market it in stores, and so on?

The buildings you inhabit — how many workers helped to mine, to fell, and to synthesize the raw materials, to refine them, to bring them to market, to study the engineering physics, to plan the area, and to raise and to furnish the structures?

For that matter, how many workers helped to design and to build the infrastructure that enabled it all to happen — the equipment, the transportation systems, the communications systems, the power systems, water systems, etc.? And how many workers helped to feed, to clothe, and to shelter them?

Even just by examining the supply chains of these most basic of industrial activities, we stumble upon an astonishingly vast network of millions of workers laboring in numerous industries around the world, interdependent on each others’ activities. And yet they are disorganized!

Zoom in for a closer look to see that workers in all of these industries squabble amongst each other over every conceivable point of division: race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and so on. Even rival trade unions vie for work and scab against each other. Meanwhile, an owning class of bosses and their agents claim ownership of the workers’ products and make all of the key decisions about the ways in which industrial civilization will progress. This is no good! Workers’ priorities are misplaced.

Greater efficiency, lower environmental impact, greater responsibility, more dignity, and indeed less work for everyone are possible when this waste is eliminated. The workers of the world are the only ones who can unionize to realize this goal, and the IWW has a program to accomplish it: uniting all workers by industry into the same union and using the resulting leverage (as exercised, for instance, in a general strike) to force the 1% who own and rule the world to do productive work like everyone else. We call this revolutionary industrial unionism.

As a worker, you probably feel like you’re too worn down, exhausted, and you have too many neglected dreams to be able step up and do something about it. But deep down, you know it’s not just important but vital that this shift happen. No more lakes can be polluted, no more houses foreclosed, no more lives wasted. Something has to give.

How long do we have? We have until the next Fukushima disaster, the next water supply destroyed by fracking, the next eviction that culminates in a drug-induced suicide. It doesn’t have to be this way. The wage system must be abolished, and workers must take charge of industry, operating it at cost to meet human need, not for profit. Join the IWW today to take a step toward achieving this.