Chicago Union Furry Fetish Art

Submission 23,106

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About

Chicago Union Furry Fetish Art refers to a Facebook post made by the Greater Chicago Industrial Workers of the World of Furry fanart featuring an over-sized skunk labeled with the Industrial Workers of the World logo squishing a rich hamster with the caption "squash the boss!" and "unite your workplace!" The post spread to Twitter in January 2020 with the assumption that the chapter was unaware of the art's furry affiliation.

Origin

On January 27th, 2020, Facebook^[3] account Greater Chicago IWW posted the "Squash the Boss" image with the caption, "The best cure for a case of the Monday’s is One Big Union" (shown below). The post was taken from Facebook^[2] user Brian Schildwachter and posted to the chapter facebook by Kelsey Tanabe Walker.

Spread

On January 28th, 2020, Twitter user @spacedrugs^[4] reposted a screenshot of the Facebook post with the caption, "is someone going to tell them?" (shown below, left). The tweet gained over 1,300 likes and 270 retweets in a day. That day, The Daily Dot^[1] wrote that "Jay, who commissioned the art and requested to use a pseudonym for this article, said it was a response to far-right politics they’ve observed in the furry fandom." The official Twitter^[6] account for Industrial Workers of the World shared the Daily Dot article "Labor Union Unknowingly Posted Furry Fetish Art to Facebook" with the caption, "'unknowingly' 😉" (shown below, right). The tweet gained over 680 likes in a day. On January 29th, the Daily Dot article was posted to r/stupidpol^[5] by Redditor shitpost953. In a direct message correspondence with Know Your Meme, Kelsey Tanabe Walker, the person responsible for the Greater Chicago IWW post revealed that although the organization had no "official affiliation with the furry community," furries are welcomed into the union as if they were "any other worker":

As the IWW is also known as the One Big Union, and we believe that when workers come together as a unit, they can overpower their bosses, we originally took the meaning of the image to be in reference to this principle. While we have no official affiliation with the furry community, we appreciate that furry workers hold these same values of worker power, and welcome them in our union the same as any other worker.