Anyone who works for a living knows how degrading and alienating it is to be yelled at for doing your job, maybe just because your boss is having a bad day. The daily grind devours our time, exhausts our energies, and reduces our lives to a treadmill of survival. Work is imposed on us.

Ultimately, we need to create a society in which working people make all the decisions about the production and distribution of goods and services. In the meantime, we need to develop strategies that both increase the power of working people over our own lives and counteract the day-to-day drudgery of wage slavery.

We believe that direct action in the workplace is the key to achieving both these goals. But what do we mean by direct action?

This pamphlet, first published in 1968 under the title “A Workers’ Guide to Direct Action” and updated by the IWW’s Literature Committee in 2022, explores some of the most popular forms of direct action that workers have used to get what they wanted, such as:

  • Slowdown
  • Work to Rule
  • Good Work Strike
  • Demand Letters and the “March on the Boss”
  • Sick-In
  • Change the Balance of Power or Ignoring the Boss
  • Inefficiency, or the “Broken” Tool
  • Sitdown and Selective Strikes
  • Solidarity

How to Fire Your Boss is available in PDF form.

It’s also available in print at the IWW store.