William Trautmann

William E. Trautmann (also William Trautmann, and William Ernst Trautmann, born July 1, 1869 in Grahamstow, New Zealand, † unknown), who lived most of his life in New Zealand, Germany, Poland, but in the United States. He was a brewery worker, trade unionist, newspaper editor, author, speaker and leading member of the Industrial Workers of the World ( IWW).

The industrial labor union

Trautmann can be considered as an important source of ideas of the American trade union movement. It spread through numerous brochures, speeches and through his organizational activities, the idea of industrial labor union (Industrial Union) in the U.S. (as opposed to the prevailing form of organization by occupation and professional guilds, the Trade Unions ) and combined them with the Industrial Workers of the World with a revolutionary program. After extensive disappearance of the IWW in the 1930s the idea of ​​the Industrial Union of the Congress of Industrial Organisations ( CIO) was pursued.

Background of the propagated by Trautmann militant labor union of the entire working class (One big union) was the shattering experience that important strikes were lost because various craft unions within a company existed, so that the workers in case of conflict, both from regional union bosses as well as employer side against each other could be played. The industrial union (Industrial Union) follows the logic of " An operation, a union "; they do not share the work ends by profession, but instead by sectors, for which they work. So would a locksmith who works in a mine, in the miners' union. And the driver of a brewery would be in the brewing trade union, not in the drivers' union.

Family, Childhood and Youth

Trautmann's father Edmund was a German gold digger who had participated in 1849 in California at the great gold rush and there married an American woman. Together, they moved on to New Zealand, where William Ernest 1869 came the New Zealand North Island in the gold mining town Grahamstow to the world. After his father died in a mining accident in May 1874, the mother traveled with her now four children to relatives of the man to Germany. There, William was left as an elder in an orphanage, mother and siblings moved to New York.

At the age of 14 years Trautmann went to the brewery of a distant relative in teaching. Here was stirring his trade union and social revolutionary consciousness. As a journeyman in Dresden, he was conspicuous because he railed against child labor in the bottling. As brewers journeyman he stripped from now through Eastern Europe and came to Odessa.

From the brewery union for IWW

In 1891 he was expelled on the basis of Bismarck's anti-socialist laws as a dangerous radical from Germany and landed in Springfield / Massachusetts ( USA), where the U.S. brewery union joined the " United Brewery Workers' Union ". This was established in 1886 with a spectacular strike in the Jackson Brewery in Cincinnati / Ohio and communicated by the year 1903 almost exclusively in German.

Trautmann worked from 1900 to 1905 as an editor for the Milwaukee -based German -language " Brauer -Zeitung " of his union.

On 27 June 1905 he was elected secretary of the inaugural meeting of the IWW; in 1904 he had one of the six persons who operated secretly planning and preparations for the establishment of the IWW.

Trautmann toured as the organizer of the IWW in the following years, especially the industrial centers of the U.S. East Coast. He has appeared as IWW organizer and speaker at two labor disputes in appearance, taking in the history of class struggles in the United States a unique position: the strike of the Pressed Steel Car Company ( U.S. Steel ) in Mc Kees Rocks ( near Pittsburgh / Pennsylvania) in 1909 and the strike of textile workers in Lawrence / Massachusetts in 1912, which gained as " Bread and Roses Strike " international celebrity.

From Trautmann's spring came in 1912, the first version of the Manifesto One Big Union, which until now valid and published ( in extended and supplemented form ) declaration of principles of the IWW, as well as a model for the industrial classification and organization of the working population has become known as Trautmann 's Wheel.

In 1913 he joined a spin-off of the IWW, which was led by the Socialists Daniel De Leon and their headquarters in Detroit, had been therefore called "Detroit IWW ". This organization named in 1915 in Workers ' International Industrial Union around and broke up in 1925. Trautmann traveled in the years 1914 to 1916 for this group as an organizer by the United States. After that lost its track.

In 1922 he published his novel " Riot " (also known under the title " Hammer of Hell " ), which has the happenings at the McKees Rocks Strike 1909 on the topic. In 1938 he wrote his autobiography, Fifty Years War, which remained unknown, however, because they could not find a publisher.

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