By Transcona Slim, The Winnipeg Wobbly
The IWW’s Organizer Training 101 (OT101) is fundamentally different from any of the union trainings I’ve ever participated in with my business union. In 2010, I went to the United Food and Commercial Workers’ (UFCW) Prairies Youth Activist Retreat. It was five days long and held in a smaller vacation town in Manitoba. We spent the first two days learning the UFCW version of labor history and why we needed to vote for the New Democratic Party (NDP). We had a provincial NDP functionary (the Minister of Justice) come and speak to us about “our” issues. Incidentally, he side-stepped my question about why the NDP cancelled the university tuition freeze. We were told that, because of elections in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, we might be expected to act as volunteers for the NDP’s electoral campaigns and that the skills we learned were going to be put into that project. (Read more)