Industrial Workers of the World

You truckers and boggers listen.

Wake up.

You are scabbing on the unemployed by working so hard and by allowing the boss to speed you up. Don't do it boys.

It is a scabby old game.

Many of you are discontented. Of course you are. Now let us make that discontent intelligent. How?

By reading and studying the propoganda of the Industrial Workers of the World..

It is roumoured that the boggers are thinking of forming another craft union, and of breaking away from the Miners' Federation.

What ? Another craft union ?

Why you have got thirty already on and about the fields, and now some of you want another, with another ignorant and well paid official for the workers to keep and another scabby old Arbetration Award to bind the workers in abject poverty and servitude.

No, join the Industrial Workers of the World, a union with a punch, a union that uses industrial union methods to get better conditions for the working class.

No fooling about for months in the Arbetration Court, or waiting three years for next election, but by using Direct Action on the job down in the mines.

You are in the majority

But you are what the bosses and the snobs of Labor please to term the unskilled. You are the hardest worked, the lowest paid, and the most despised.

Is it not so?

And untill you kick back you ought to be despised. You cowards!

Wake up and show the mine owners the power of the unskilled worker, by striking on the job. Your award is up early next year, 1916.

What are you going to do about it ?

Are you going to allow the Miners Federation to fool you this time?

Will you allow ignorant and spineless union chiefs like MacLeod and Glance to trick and betray you this time.

Twopence a day rise, what a tradgedy! What a manifestation of working class ignorance, disorganisation and glaring incompetance of the paid officials of the Miners' Federation.

Fellow Workers, as man to man, as one fellow worker to another, "What have we to offer our children in the future ?" What have we to offer them except wageslavery; but a living hell deep down in the lung-destroying mines, a tin shack to live in, and all the horrors, the pinching and the starving of a living wage.

Now brother, think of that son of yours at home, just about to leave school, what inheritance can you leave him ?

Your shovel and truck when the "miners complaint" has finished you off or you lie crushed under a fall of ground, or you just die, like all the workers die, early from overwork.

If the boggers, if the working class, love their wives and children, why don't they demand the same conditions to live under as the mine owners, good houses, good clothes, more leisure and education ?

No, it is true what Fellow Worker MacMillon says:

"You live in a shack that shames you.
You starve with your wife and kids.
You stifle the germs of manhood.
And do as your master bids."

And so you do.

Now, you boggers, join the I.W.W. and learn to kick.

Strike on the job.

Go to work, but go very slow.

If the "tally" is ten trucks only put out five. Don't leave the shovels and trucks for scabs to use. Don't let the engine drivers haul scabs up and down the shaft.

Stop on the job and go slow.

The best way to picket a strike is to stop on the job, go slow, and make the boss pay the strike pay.

I know the conditions under which you work. I have "bogged" with you on five different mines. The trucks in the Percy, Australia and Lake View, in fact in all the mines, are too big.

Well, go a bit slower.

Never mind what the machine men do, let them work their hearts out on their scabby old contracts, if they are foolish enough to do so, but mind you don't.

Anyhow, the boggers hold the power. You are the real proletariat, the propertyless, the homeless, and often jobless to whome the I.W.W. makes their appeal.

The boggers are the "bottom dogs" of the mining industry, noboddy can go faster than the boggers will allow them. And the boggers can play hell with dividends.

There is nothing to stop the boggers on these fields, demanding and getting the same rate of pay for all the workers on the mines, and all day shift and a six hour day at that.

Just at present the mine owners graciously grant prominant union officials all day shift jobs.

In the future, the I.W.W. hopes, not to ask, but to take all day shift jobs for all workers. If the master class want more gold let them put on more men.

Absorb the unemployed.

Now, boggers, will you join the I.W.W. It is up to you.

Come Britisher!

Come Slav!

Come Italian!

Come working class of the world. Boggers join and kick with the mining department of the One Big Union.

M. Sawtell Direct Action 15 August 1915