International Woodworkers of America

INTERNATIONAL WOODWORKERS OF AMERICA. An affiliate of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the International Woodworkers of America (IWA) was founded on 20 July 1937 following a secession movement within the American Federation of Labor’s United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. Many workers active in that movement had been members of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Communist Party’s Trade Union Unity League affiliate, the National Lumber Workers Union. The IWA was a significant battleground between the left and the right in the CIO and became a pioneer of environmentalism within the labor movement.

The first president of the IWA was Harold Pritchett, the only Canadian ever to head a CIO-affiliated union. Like most of the union’s executive board members, Pritchett was a member of the Communist Party. Between 1937 and 1941 the IWA’s Communist leaders were annually reelected to office by rank-and-file referendum elections. During those years the IWA was prominent in coalition organizations such as the Oregon and Washington Commonwealth Federations.

The support for the Communists came primarily from unskilled, immigrant workers in the mill towns and logging camps in which the Communist worked and resided. Opposition to the Communists arose from the ranks of the more skilled and native-born workers and was supported by the CIO national office. Early in 1940, CIO president John L. Lewis put Adolph Germer in charge of the IWA’s organizing activities. Germer, an experienced unionist and decidedly anticommunist Socialist Party factionalist, was able to shift the balance of power within the IWA through his staff choices and by identifying pockets of conservative workers to be brought in the union as new members.

Following several years of lobbying by business interests and investigation by the Dies Committee, Harold Pritchett was refused entry from Canada on 22 August 1940. Other Canadian Communists were denied entry during the 1940s. Combined with the effects of the Taft-Hartley Act, these events precipitated an attempt by the Canadians to disaffiliate and form the Woodworkers Industrial Union of Canada (WIUC) in 1948.

In the late 1930s and 1940s, the IWA also engaged in a pioneering union environmental program. Taking its lead from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s critique of the wastefulness of forest practices, beginning in 1938 the IWA made sustainable forestry and sustainable jobs central to its politics. In 1945, the union hired a professional forester named Ellery Foster as its first research director. For the next three years, Foster developed an IWA forestry program around selective cutting of timber and what he called “dirt forestry” that placed power in the hands of small operators over large corporations. With CIO support, Foster attacked the timber industry at forestry conferences and had a bill introduced into Congress to enact the program. However, it floundered in the conservative backlash following the 1946 midterm elections and the Taft-Hartley Act. Foster left the union in 1948.

Even without a forester on staff, the IWA remained dedicated to promoting sustainable management of the forest. By 1960, union leadership testified before Congress in favor of what became the Wilderness Act of 1964, justifying the loss of harvestable timber through protecting recreational land for its members newly empowered to leisure time due to the contracts it negotiated. The IWA entered into a second round of sustained environmentalism in the 1970s under the leadership of its president, Keith Johnson, and its new research director, Denny Scott. A labor economist, Scott led IWA environmentalism on two fronts. First, it sought middle ground between the timber industry and environmentalists over protecting old growth forests and the northern spotted owl, maintaining support for reasonable forest protection well into the 1980s. Second, Scott promoted what he called “the total work environment,” connecting environmentalism to workplace safety and training members to use Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations as a tool of resistance to chemical and noise exposure on the job.

A raiding campaign by the International defeated the WIUC and the Canadians remained part of the IWA until 1987, when they attained independent status. That same year, a renegade faction of members angry over the union’s decline in the face of automation, log export policy, and the overcutting of the resource, as well as leadership’s sympathy with environmentalism, elected new leadership that moved toward supporting industry in its battles against protecting the northern spotted owl. In 1994, the IWA merged with the International Association of Machinists, where its remnant locals still exist.

Abella, Irving. Nationalism, Communism, and Canadian Labour. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1973.

Caiy, Lorin. “Adolph Germer: From Labor Agitator to Labor Professional.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1968.

Lembcke, Jerry, and William Tattam. One Union in Wood. New York: International Publishers, 1984.

Loomis, Erik. Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

International Woodworkers of America records, 1936-1987. Labor Archives. University of Washington Libraries. Special Collections. Archives West. Orbis Cascade Alliance.