The Shingle Weavers' Mobile Union Strategy
When the workers couldn't come to the union meeting, the union decided to bring the meeting to the woods.
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Perhaps no other trade union has a membership harder to keep track of nor so widely scattered as the shingle weavers. With the weavers, it is far different. Many of the boys who follow that trade work in the woods, far from the meeting place of their union. The locals concluded that if 'Mahomet could not come to the mountain, the mountain would go to Mahomet.' The result was a division of the state into districts and the placing of organizers in the field to regularly visit all the mills in each district, collecting dues and initiating new members. After a six months' trial, the members are agreed that it was one of the wisest moves they ever made. Snohomish County, the first to be organized, recently held a convention in Everett to discuss expanding the district to include Skagit and Whatcom counties, with C. N. Clifford as president.
“If Mahomet could not come to the mountain, the mountain would go to Mahomet.”
In an era of remote work and atomized gig labor, the Shingle Weavers' 1909 model of the 'roving organizer' remains a relevant strategy for unionizing dispersed workers who don't have a centralized shop floor.
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