Cirrus@Austlit

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), members of which are commonly termed 'Wobblies,' is an international labor union founded in Chicago (USA) in 1905. The organisation, which has as its core philosophy the concept of revolutionary industrial unionism, had a small presence in Sydney and Melbourne during the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1970s the numbers gradually increased, including members from New Zealand, which led to the founding of the Australian and New Zealand General organising Committee (ANZGOG). This was reorganised in 1981 as the Australian General Organising Committee, with its operations based out of the Jura Books Collective in Sydney. The following year the committee began publishing Rebel Worker. Initially describing itself as the 'paper of the Australian IWW, the masthead was changed in 1983 to the 'anarcho-syndicalist paper' to reflect the takeover by the Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation (later the Anarcho-Syndicalist Network).