The Wobblies at Sea – SEDI Hosts Jon Bekken on the Marine Transport Workers Union

On September 28, 2025, the Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute (SEDI) hosted historian Jon Bekken for a far-reaching talk on the Marine Transport Workers Union (MTWU) of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) — one of the most militant and transnational labor formations of the early twentieth century.

Drawing on decades of archival research and his own publications on the IWW, Bekken reconstructed the MTWU’s rise from Spanish-immigrant firemen working the Atlantic coast’s coal-fired ships to a globe-spanning network of syndicalist seafarers linking Boston, Buenos Aires, Philadelphia, Hamburg, and Sydney. He challenged the familiar myth that the Wobblies were merely an itinerant “strike-and-disappear” movement, instead revealing how maritime workers built durable ship-board committees, job-branch autonomy, and international solidarity capable of enforcing better food, shorter hours, and direct control over conditions at sea.

Bekken also traced how the MTWU confronted racism within the mainstream seamen’s unions, created alternative hiring systems to bypass employer blacklists, and maintained cross-border communication through clandestine presses from Chile to Sweden. The result is a vivid portrait of working-class internationalism that redefines what industrial unionism could mean when the workplace itself was the ocean.

Jon Bekken is a labor historian, editor, and anarchist writer whose work explores the communication, organization, and radical culture of the working class. He is a co-editor of Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, a contributor to Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW, and author of numerous essays on IWW organizing, the press, and the struggle for workers’ self-management.

This event is part of SEDI’s ongoing speaker series, bringing together radical historians, writers, and organizers to deepen our understanding of the past and sharpen our interventions in the present.

PDF for this episode:
https://cyberdandy.org/MTW%20International%20Revolutionary%20Industrial%20Unionism.pdf

The Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute (SEDI):
https://www.dolgoffinstitute.com/

Explore Jon Bekken’s work:
Faculty page – https://www.albright.edu/faculty-detail/jon-bekken/

The Anarchist Library texts –https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/jon-bekken

Anarcho-Syndicalist Review – https://syndicalist.us/

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