Talk:One Big Union (concept)

Federations as a substitute for OBU?

The article includes this:

Later, in the mid-twentieth century, many trade and craft unions emulated the earlier attempts to form One Big Union by federating or conferring.

This statement is false. The American Federation of Labor had already existed six decades prior to the mid-twentieth century. Federating is not the same as belonging to the same union. In fact, the One Big Union movement came in opposition to the American Federation of Labor, which both the Western Federation of Miners and the IWW referred to as the American Separation of Labor. Richard Myers (talk) 18:23, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Here is the text that i have removed:

Later, in the mid-twentieth century, many trade and craft unions emulated the earlier attempts to form One Big Union by federating or conferring. Examples include the AFL-CIO in America, and the TUC in the United Kingdom. Perhaps the earliest example of an alliance of trade unions exists in the ACTU (Australia).

In Poland, the Independent Self-governing Trade Union federation Solidarność gained political momentum during the 1980s.

Richard Myers (talk) 18:27, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Much of the text that i had deleted has been re-inserted, here:

[1]

The information in question is unsourced. Some of it duplicates existing content. It re-institutes errors which have not been discussed, explained, nor corrected.

The information appears to violate WP:NOR. The material was deleted for the reasons given above. But perhaps a more complete explanation of the errors will help:

"Perhaps the earliest example of an alliance of trade unions exists in the ACTU (Australia), in the few years after 1918..." The National Labor Union was founded in 1868. That is half a century earlier than 1918. Perhaps re-wording could fix this. But i don't have the sources to do that. As it stands, it is just plain wrong. Richard Myers (talk) 15:09, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

"Later, in the mid-twentieth century, many trade and craft unions emulated the earlier attempts to form One Big Union by federating or conferring. Examples include the AFL-CIO in America..." The CIO previously split off from the AFL. In what sense, then, did the CIO re-joining the AFL create something new? Indeed, the IWW was formed in opposition to the AFL. The AFL-CIO in no way emulated the concept of One Big Union as envisioned by organizations such as the IWW. The AFL-CIO is still predominantly a federation of craft unions, which ignore not only the industrial unionism principle of One Big Union, but also the idea that the purpose of One Big Union is not to balance labor and capital, but actually to win.

Here's an example of how absurd is the claim that the AFL-CIO is an example of One Big Union. [2]

The whole structure of the "One Big Union" was figuratively demolished by Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, with a sweep of the hand... "The One Big Union idea is a piece of idiocy," said the labor leader. It is designed primarily, according to Mr. Gompers, to put the American Federation of Labor out of business...

Now — why would the AFL adopt a concept that sought to destroy its very existence?

"In Canada there was a union simply called 'One Big Union.'" This is already in the article, why add it again? Richard Myers (talk) 15:09, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

One Big Union organizations

Just a quick observation, the efforts to create an OBU organization in Australia appear to have started well before the effort in Canada. For that reason and others, a separate article for the Australia OBU organization is probably justified. Richard Myers (talk) 20:03, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

No consensus to move. bd2412 T 20:19, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

• One Big Union (concept) → One Big Union
• One Big Union → One Big Union (disambiguation)

– While this article on the concept of "One Big Union" got approximately three times as many views as One Big Union (Canada), the only other article by this name on the dab page, the numbers were sufficiently low that I thought I'd bring it to discussion. Still, this seems to be a classic WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, describing a usage from which the other entries, red and blue, on the dab are derived; most results in Google, including Books and Scholar, are about the idea of a united labo(u)r union. --Relisted. -- tariqabjotu 03:40, 21 September 2013 (UTC) --BDD (talk) 20:24, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

• Support. It makes sense to me. Anarcham (talk) 20:45, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose- In the last 90 days this article is not even getting twice as many views as the other one.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 17:00, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

True, but it had 664 views last month compared to 280 for the Canadian union. Looking at the last 90 days may not be the most accurate count, since this RM may increase traffic to both of them. --BDD (talk) 18:00, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Abbreviation and hashtag

The abbreviation 1U and the hashtag #1U are both used by labor organizers and organizations, at least online and on social media. A cursory search on Twitter or Facebook will reveal this. I felt this might be worth mentioning in the article somewhere (maybe a passing mention in the lead?) but I'm not sure where would be best to put it. Also, I'm having trouble finding good citations. I know that 1U is definitely used because I've seen it being used for years, and I've asked people who use it what it means, but I can't find any good secondary sources to cite. The only source I found was this entry on hashtags.org that was submitted in either 2014 or 2015: https://www.hashtags.org/definition/1u/

I've gone ahead and added an entry to the 1U disambiguation page redirecting to this article, but until a better source has been found, I thought it might be better to just mention this on the talk page before adding it to the main article here. Delvethedragon (talk) 19:04, 24 January 2024 (UTC)