Timeline of the IWW

A timeline of the Industrial Workers of the World from its formation in 1905 to the present day.

1900s

• 1905: The IWW is founded at a socialist congress in Chicago, USA by 200 anarchist, socialist and communist activists. Big Bill Haywood, James Connolly, Daniel De Leon, Eugene V. Debs, Thomas Hagerty, Lucy Parsons, Mother Jones, Frank Bohn, William Trautmann, Vincent Saint John, Ralph Chaplin, and many others.
• 1906: IWW affiliated miners with the WFM work together to strike in Goldfield, Nevada, USA over wages, resulting in a conflict between the unions and US soldiers.

1990s

• 1995: San Francisco and Santa Cruz IWW members establish the iww.org server and website. The IWW is only the second labor union in the world (the first was an Israeli teacher's union local) with a website and the first international union to have one.
• 1997: 3,240 gold miners in Sierra Leone work with the IWW, but the civil war forced many to flee to neighbouring Guinea, where plans were made to organize metal workers, the current state of these workers is unknown.

2000s

• 2006: The German Language Membership Regional Organizing Committee (GLAMROC) is founded in Cologne, Germany to organize workers in Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Austria.

2010s

• 2012: The Ugandan Regional Organizing Committee (ROC) is formed to organize workers across Uganda, but was eventually dissolved after it violated its own constitution by allowing employers to join.
• 2014: The Incarcerated Workers' Organizing Committee (IWOC) is formed to fight US prison-industrial complex.
• 2015: The Iceland Regional Organizing Committee (IceROC) is the first branch of the IWW to form in Iceland and mainly focus on organizing sex workers for protection against repression by the police.
• 2018: The IWOC organizes a second general strike across US prisons, demanding an end to prison slavery, massive expansion of prisoner rights and welfare, an end to racism in US prisons and the granting of voting rights to prisoners.