Chicago hosted the 1905 founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World.
The convention met on June 27, 1905, at Brand’s Hall in Chicago. Delegates and supporters gathered to create a union based on industrial organization and to challenge the limitations of craft-based labor unions.
Chicago was a major center of American labor activism and radical politics. Its history included the 1886 Haymarket affair, which helped make the city internationally associated with the struggle for shorter working hours and workers’ rights.
The IWW’s founders included Big Bill Haywood, Eugene V. Debs, Mother Jones, and other labor activists. The organization sought to unite all workers into one industrial union. Its founding city is sometimes confused with Pittsburgh, where the American Federation of Labor’s predecessor had been founded in 1881.