BRITAIN, GLASCOW, VICTORIOUS IWW CAMPAIGN:

News of the IWW's most recent successful organizing campaign, the struggle to 'Save the Crichton Campus' in Scotland has started to appear across the internet. In this case the IWW didn't act just in a workplace but as the facilitator and initiator of a much wider community campaign that was a matter of concern for a wide spectrum of people in one area of Scotland. To quote from the article by Nick Durie, a Central Scotland Organizer in the IWW,

"The victorious campaign to save the Crichton Campus has been one of BIROC's biggest campaigns to date and easily the biggest campaign fought by the IWW Clydeside GMB and the new Glasgow University job branch, and has involved civic groups, local neighbourhood bodies, trade unions and political organizations from across Scotland....

It is, however, intended as a contribution to the debate within the IWW, and the role of the organization in the wider class struggle. i believe that this campaign shows that a small radical union can have a big catalyzing effect, and that this effect is most felt when it is used with other organizations to bring together industrial and community based organizational capacity which would otherwise have been fractured.....

The aim of this short contribution is to demonstrate that the IWW will grow at the fastest rate and have the most positive effect on the wider class struggle where it works with the mainstream trade unions, using their organizational capacity, acting as a rank and file network or base union within them and providing the kind of catalytic effects required or making the interlocutions necessary to utilize and link up with the mass organizations of our local communities and neighbourhoods to aid workplace struggles....."

To read the entire article with the complete history of the struggle go to the A-Infos article by Nick Durie.