John Beale, Post-Gazette
	Matt Clayton, of Lancaster, views information on display at the Pump House in Munhall where the Industrialized Workers of the World labor union was holding an event to celebrate its 100th anniversary.

While most things have changed in the past century, the core philosophy of the IWW has not.

Several dozen members of the Pittsburgh branch of the Industrial Workers of the World and their supporters gathered yesterday at the Pump House in Munhall to mark the 100th anniversary of one of the nation's longest-running and most radical labor organizations.

The Pump House, where the IWW held its centenary celebration, is one of the few buildings remaining from the giant Homestead Steel Works, which was the site of a bloody confrontation between striking workers and Pinkerton detectives in 1892.

Yesterday's daylong program featured artists displaying pro-labor drawings, speakers reading poems from atop a wooden soapbox and singers leading tunes like the "Wobbly Doxology."

"Praise boss when morning workbells chime," its lyrics say. " ... Praise him, fat leech and parasite." It's an IWW tradition, member Kenneth Miller said in his opening remarks, "to take religious songs and turn them into radical songs."

While the mainstream American labor movement has emphasized collective bargaining, backed by the threat of a strike, as the way to increase wages, strengthen job security and improve working conditions, the Wobblies, as they call themselves, maintained a more ambitious agenda.

Just as it did in 1905, the preamble of the labor organization's constitution calls for doing away with capitalism and abolishing the wage system.

Because it concentrates power among the wealthy, capitalism is fundamentally anti-democratic, said Matt Clayton, 24, a member of the IWW's Lancaster branch. Employee control of factories and businesses, however, would "harness worker initiative in a democratic rather than an authoritarian spirit."

Neither traditional unions nor Soviet Communism reflect those democratic ideals, Mr. Clayton said. With direction coming from the top down and little accountability to members, most unions tend to be run like factories, he said. As for the former USSR, it was more an example of state capitalism, where party bureaucrats took the place of managers, than of economic democracy, he said.

At 92, Jennie Cedervall of Cleveland has lived her whole life amid union activities. The daughter of Romanian immigrants who were members of the IWW, she "grew up in the union."

She recalled attending a summer camp for "Junior Wobblies" outside Detroit in the 1920s, and she met her future husband, Frank Cedervall, at a workers' picnic.

Before his death at 92 in 1996, Frank Cedervall was known as "the last [of Cleveland's] soapbox orators," according to his daughter, Pat Lewis.

Mrs. Cedervall said she had not been so interested in the IWW's over-arching goals, but with the organization's efforts to improve the lives of workers. "Everyone should be able to get justice, to have a home and to have a job," she said.

No one in the IWW is predicting the imminent downfall of capitalism, said IWW member Kevin Farkas, of Blawnox. Current efforts are geared toward education, trying to assure that workers and students learn at least the basics of labor history, he said.

Mr. Farkas's father, Paul Farkas, a retired steel worker and supervisor, shared the story of his successful sit-down strike in the summer of 1941. A 10-year-old strawberry picker, Paul Farkas decided one afternoon that he deserved 5 cents a quart rather than 3 cents for his labor. He stopped picking until the farmer who employed him agreed to the higher wage.

"I'll bet all the other workers took note of that 2-cent raise," said IWW member Evan Wolfson.

While IWW's long-term goals still appear well out of reach, the group's tactics have influenced mainstream unions, according to Howard Scott, an organizer with the United Steelworkers of America.

Many early unions were organized along craft lines or included only skilled workers, he said. From its earliest days, the IWW sought a single union for all workers. By having workers at all skill levels speak with one voice, unions like the United Mine Workers and United Steelworkers gained great success when bargaining with powerful corporations, Mr. Scott said.

While the Pittsburgh membership branch of the IWW was founded just three years ago, connections between the IWW and Southwestern Pennsylvania are long-standing, he said.

Labor activists Eugene V. Debs and Mary Harris "Mother" Jones lent their support to an IWW-led strike in 1909 of 8,000 workers at the Pressed Steel Car Plant in McKees Rocks. The IWW also sought to organize the region's cigar makers and Westinghouse Electric workers in East Pittsburgh.

When the Congress of Industrial Organizations had its founding convention in Pittsburgh in 1938, it was building on the ideas of the Wobblies. "One big union organizing a factory from wall to wall." Mr. Scott said.