Industrial unionism is a trade union organising method through which all workers in the same industry are organized into the same union, regardless of skill or trade, thus giving workers in one industry, or in all industries, more leverage in bargaining and in strike situations. De Leon believed that militarized Industrial unions would be the vehicle of class struggle.
Industrial unionism contrasts with craft unionism, which organizes workers along lines of their specific trades.
History in the United States
Early history
In 1893, the American Railway Union (ARU) was formed in the United States, by Eugene Debs and other railway union leaders, as an industrial union in response to the perceived limitations of craft unions. Debs himself gave an example of the inadequacies that his fellows at the time felt towards organising by craft. He recounts, that in 1888, a strike was called by train drivers and railway firemen on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railways, but other employees, particularly conductors, who were organised into a different unions did not join that strike, with strikebreakers brought on to help their employers.
In June 1894, the ARU voted to join in solidarity with the ongoing Pullman Strike, and within hours of the union lending support to the boycott, traffic from the Pullman Company traffic ceased to move from Chicago to the Western United States. The sympathy strike then spread to the Southern and later the Eastern United States. A statement was issued by the chairman of the General Managers Association, which represented railway companies that were mainly situated around Chicago, admitted:
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We can handle the railway brotherhoods, but we cannot handle the A.R.U.... We cannot handle Debs. We have got to wipe him out.
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The General Managers Association turned to the United States government, which immediately sent the United States Army and the United States Marshals to force an end to the strike.
Popularisation and radicalism
thumb|280px|A cartoon from the May 1919 IWW periodical One Big Union, published in Revolutionary Radicalism, shows a worker choosing between the AFL and IWW slogans.In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was formed in Chicago at the First Annual Convention of the IWW, six weeks after the formation of the Asiatic Exclusion League. It was created as a rejection of the craft unionism philosophy that the American Federation of Labor endorsed, and from its inception, the IWW would organize without regard to sex, skills, race, creed, or national origin unlike the Federation. It argued for a mass-oriented labour movement, the One Big Union, and declared that "the working class and the employing class have nothing in common."
The critiques of the Federation included the strikebreaking that member unions participated in against each other, jurisdictional squabbling, autocratic leadership, and a strong relationship between union and business leaders in the National Civic Federation.
After Debs' six month imprisonment after the ARU's dissolution, he, along with Ed Boyce, Bill Haywood and others, were instrumental in launching the Western Labor Union, soon renamed the American Labor Union, which was the precursor to the IWW. The new organisation was militant in its operations and housed revolutionary socialist and radical ideals, with Boyce proclaiming that labour must "abolish the wage system which is more destructive of human rights and liberty than any other slave system devised." The preamble of the IWW's constitution further emphasised that "There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on...."
Persecution
In the United States, IWW executive board officer Frank Little was lynched from a railway trestle. Seventeen Wobblies in Tulsa were beaten by a mob and driven out of town. In the third quarter of 1917, the New York Times ran sixty articles attacking the IWW. The Justice Department launched raids on IWW headquarters across the country. The New-York Tribune suggested that the IWW was a German front, responsible for acts of sabotage throughout the nation.
Writing in 1919, Paul Brissenden quoted an IWW publication in Sydney, Australia:
<blockquote>All the machinery of the capitalist state has been turned against us. Our hall has been raided periodically as a matter of principle, our literature, our papers, pictures, and press have all been confiscated; our members and speakers have been arrested and charged with almost every crime on the calendar; the authorities are making unscrupulous, bitter and frantic attempts to stifle the propaganda of the I.W.W.</blockquote>
Brissenden also recorded that:
<blockquote>...several laws have been enacted which have been more or less directly aimed at the Industrial Workers of the World. Australia led off with the "Unlawful Associations Act" passed by the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth in December, 1916... Within three months of the passage of the Australian Act, the American States of Minnesota and Idaho passed laws "defining criminal syndicalism and prohibiting the advocacy thereof." In February, 1918, the Montana legislature met in extraordinary session and enacted a similar statute.</blockquote>
While Brissenden notes that IWW coal miners in Australia successfully used direct action to free imprisoned strike leaders and to win other demands, Wobbly opposition to conscription during World War I "became so obnoxious" to the Australian government that laws were passed which "practically made it a criminal offense to be a member of the I.W.W."
One Big Union
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Historically, industrial unionism has frequently been associated with the concept of One Big Union. On July 12, 1919, The New England Worker published "The Principle of Industrial Union":