One Big Union (concept)

The One Big Union was an idea in the late 19th and early 20th centuries amongst trade unionists to unite the interests of workers and offer solutions to all labour problems.

Unions initially organised as craft or trade unions. Workers were organised by their skill: carpenters, plumbers, bricklayers, each into their respective unions. Capitalists could often divide craft and trade unionists along these lines in demarcation disputes. As capitalist enterprises and state bureaucracies became more centralised and larger, some workers felt that their institutions needed to become similarly large. A simultaneous disenchantment with the perceived weakness of craft unions caused many unions to organise along industrial lines.

As envisioned by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – which for many years prior to 1919 had been associated with the concept – One Big Union was not just the idea that all workers should be organised into one big union. In the 1911 pamphlet "One Big Union", IWW supporters Father Thomas J. Hagerty and William Trautmann enumerated two goals: One Big Union needed to "combine the wage-workers in such a way that it can most successfully fight the battles and protect the interests of the workers of today in their struggles for fewer hours of toil, more wages and better conditions," and it also "must offer a final solution of the labor problem—an emancipation from strikes, injunctions, bull-pens, and scabbing of one against the other."

One Big Union was the notional organisational concept, while the IWW's revolutionary industrial unionism was the organizing method by which that concept could be realised. "Organizing the One Big Union of all workers the world over" was meant to achieve "working class control." But the One Big Union organisations were resisted by government and industry, and subverted by existing trade unions. By 1925, only the slogan of One Big Union remained.

The Industrial Workers of the World adopted and promoted the concept of the One Big Union after the publication of the "One Big Union" pamphlet in 1911; the IWW continues to use the phrase. Members of the IWW historically, and currently, signed and sign letters (and other communications) with the closing, "Yours for the O.B.U." Many commentators regard One Big Union as synonymous with the Industrial Workers of the World. One of the popular IWW publications was called One Big Union Monthly.

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