Sabotage

This little book became part of the creed of the Industrial Workers of the World, could be found in reading rooms of IWW halls. Written by Èmile Pouget, the words were translated from the French by Arturo Giovannitti in 1912 while he was in jail in Lawrence, Massachusetts – a frame up for his part as a Wobbly leader during the textile-workers’ strike. For Pouget, Giovannitti, and the IWW, sabotage came to mean any withdrawal of efficiency — including the slowdown, the strike, and before a strike, the creative bungling of equipment for the scabs.