What Organized Labor Movements Today Need to Learn from the Cold War Era’s Failures

In the late 1940s, the onset of the Cold War and the accompanying Red Scare in the United States significantly constrained the labor movement. After several years of dynamic growth and unprecedented success during the New Deal and World War II, US labor was forced back onto the defensive in the more conservative political climate resulting from the Cold War—especially after passage of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act in 1947.

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But it is important to remember that the Cold War did not simply “happen” to organized labor. AFL officials like George Meany were relentlessly demonizing communists and trying to provoke a standoff with the Soviets even before World War II was over, while CIO leaders like Walter Reuther embraced Cold War logic, calculating that it would be most expedient to raid and purge communist-led unions and renounce class struggle in favor of anticommunism and class collaboration.

What’s more, labor leaders had already wagered that the best path forward for their unions was one of servility toward the state rather than militant shop floor struggle.

With the World Federation of Trade Unions, communist and noncommunist labor organizations attempted to build the kind of international unity that might have served as a powerful rebuke to the Cold War, but the AFL and CIO sabotaged this vision. Disagreements over the Marshall Plan between Soviet and Western trade unionists might have doomed international labor unity regardless, but it must be noted that the AFL was already determined to split the WFTU years before the Marshall Plan had ever been conceived.

Meanwhile, through the machinations of AFL international agents like Jay Lovestone, Irving Brown, and Serafino Romualdi, labor movements across Western Europe, Latin America, and Asia were intentionally divided along the new Cold War battle lines in the late 1940s and 1950s, in full partnership with the State Department and CIA.

As with the WFTU, some of these splits might well have occurred even without U.S. labor’s meddling due to internal political dynamics within nations and regions, but the AFL and its government partners propped up otherwise small and insignificant splinter labor organizations like France’s Force Ouvrière or Guatemala’s Union of Free Workers, ensuring that divisions would continue and grow more bitter.

Rather than being a hapless victim of Cold War politics, then, American labor encouraged and exacerbated the Cold War. Wanting to see the success of the emerging, US-managed international capitalist order because they believed it would economically benefit their members, AFL and CIO officials essentially made the labor movement an appendage of Washington’s foreign policy apparatus.

Meany, who became president of the newly merged AFL-CIO in 1955, was so enthusiastic about this arrangement that he valued partnering with the US government far more than he did partnering with the world’s other anticommunist labor movements in the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.

In the 1960s, the AFL-CIO further cemented its foreign policy alliance with Washington by creating three USAID-funded “institutes” to bring anticommunism to the labor movements of the Third World. The first, largest, and most consequential of these institutes—AIFLD— trained hundreds of thousands of Latin American unionists in the ways of conservative business unionism, winning their loyalty through development projects like the construction of low-cost worker housing.

Under officials like Romualdi and Bill Doherty, AIFLD and its trainees became important instruments of US imperialism in the region, helping see to it that progressive, democratic leaders like Guyana’s Cheddi Jagan, Brazil’s João Goulart, and the Dominican Republic’s Juan Bosch were pushed out and kept out of power.

In Africa, the AFL-CIO’s Maida Springer offered a different model of international labor solidarity—one that prioritized anticolonialism above defeating leftists at any cost. But the determined anticommunism of her bosses like Meany and Lovestone, along with the paternalistic racism of the ICFTU’s European affiliates, made sure the African labor movement was also divided and thus weakened.

The US war in Vietnam was a crucial turning point in the Cold War. Fought in the name of containing communism and modernizing South Vietnam, the war revealed to much of the American public the brutal and imperial nature of US foreign policy.

The war opened new political space to challenge anticommunist orthodoxy in the United States, but Meany and his inner circle would have none of this. Instead of using its economic muscle or close relationship with Washington to call for a swift end to the conflict, the AFL-CIO enthusiastically supported the war, even indirectly participating in it through its aid to South Vietnam’s anticommunist labor leader, Tran Quoc Buu.

The formal support of what was then one of the country’s largest mass membership organizations gave Presidents Johnson and Nixon political cover and helped allow the slaughter in Southeast Asia to continue, even as domestic divisions over the war became ever more intense.

Walter Reuther gradually adopted an antiwar position, breaking with Meany and pulling his United Auto Workers, then the AFL-CIO’s largest union, out of the Federation. The AFL-CIO was falling victim to the same type of Cold War fracture it had repeatedly engineered in other countries’ labor movements—and just when global economic forces were shift ing out of favor for U.S. industrial workers.

In the wake of the Vietnam War, as more and more details about organized labor’s partnership with the US foreign policy apparatus came to light, the AFL-CIO plowed ahead with its international intrigues, most notoriously in Chile. This only further alienated a younger generation of more progressive rank-and-file union members who already felt that labor leaders were out of touch, undemocratic, and unwilling to fight the growing power of multinational corporations.

Meanwhile, amid increasing foreign competition, technological change, and upheavals in international finance, Corporate America moved to protect its profits in the 1970s by outsourcing jobs and off shoring production, accelerating a process of deindustrialization that would gut much of the AFL-CIO’s membership in the proceeding decades.

As new figures like Lane Kirkland and Tom Kahn succeeded Meany and Lovestone, the Federation’s major focus in this period was not organizing new workers or listening to younger members, but joining with neoconservatives in reigniting superpower tensions in the face of détente. The AFL-CIO repeatedly demonstrated that it was an instrument for waging the Cold War first, and a vehicle to advance the lot of the working class second.

Partnering with Ronald Reagan—the most anti-labor US president since before the New Deal—the Federation escalated its anticommunist crusade in the 1980s. With additional government funding through the newly created National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Kirkland and Kahn intervened inside the communist world itself by financially supporting Solidarność in Poland. But when AFL-CIO officials went along with Reagan’s violent counterinsurgency policy in Central America, dozens of US union presidents and tens of thousands of rank-and-file members loudly protested.

These union dissidents were driven not only by a concern for the human rights of people in countries like El Salvador and Nicaragua, but also by a fear that Reagan’s efforts to crush progressive movements in Central America would only make it easier for US corporations to move production there. Indeed, by the end of the decade, Cold War anticommunism had given way to neoliberalism’s “race to the bottom,” with multinationals emboldened to move operations to wherever they found workers most exploitable. Celebrating the collapse of world communism, AFL-CIO leadership had no real plan for how to respond to this new geopolitical and economic reality.

For decades, American labor officials had been close partners of the US government in waging the Cold War around the world. While Washington’s foreign policy goals were often realized thanks to this arrangement, U.S. workers ultimately did not benefit. The same federal government that generously gave the AFL-CIO hundreds of millions of dollars to interfere in foreign labor movements—supposedly in the name of “free” trade unionism—did little to promote union freedom at home.

The anti-union Taft-Hartley Act was not repealed, labor law was not reformed to make it easier for workers to join unions, the right to strike was not protected, and union jobs were not safeguarded from elimination. Instead, by the Cold War’s conclusion, Washington only made it easier for corporations to exploit workers both at home and abroad by facilitating free trade agreements like NAFTA.

With the creation of the Solidarity Center in place of AIFLD and the other anticommunist foreign institutes in 1997, it appeared to some that the AFL-CIO had finally turned a corner and would now base its international affairs on building genuine working-class unity across the globe. But as political scientist Nelson Bass has pointed out, the idea of combining AIFLD and the other institutes into a single entity seems to have originated not with the AFL-CIO’s “New Voice” leadership, but rather with USAID officials for reasons of bureaucratic efficiency.

A 1996 report from the General Accounting Office explained that in response to post-Cold War budget cuts to foreign assistance, “USAID is encouraging the AFL-CIO to consolidate its regional institutes into a new single global institute and to set strategic objectives globally and within specific regions,” which would “conform to USAID’s own efforts to improve oversight of labor programs as well as to manage and allocate in line with agency priorities.” A year later, the Solidarity Center was born.

Three decades later, the Solidarity Center continues to be the AFL-CIO’s face overseas. Active in over sixty countries, the center does commendable work like promoting enforceable safety standards in Bangladeshi garment factories, amplifying the voices of South African domestic workers at the International Labor Organization, bringing together hotel housekeepers from the United States and Cambodia to share stories and strategies, and supporting Mexican auto workers challenging the stranglehold of corrupt union bureaucracies.

But like its predecessor institutes, the Solidarity Center is primarily funded by Washington. Of its nearly $42 million in total support and revenue in 2020, $38.8 million came from federal grants, including $22.6 million from the NED and $14.9 million from USAID. Just $300,000 came from the AFL-CIO itself.

It remains one of only four of the NED’s core grantees, alongside the respective international wings of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Democratic Party, and Republican Party. Funding for the Solidarity Center’s programs has tended to mirror U.S. foreign policy priorities.

For example, when President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, the Solidarity Center simultaneously received $860,000 from the NED for its Middle East programs, up from $292,000 the year before. Or when the socialist Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1999 much to the concern of Washington, the NED’s annual funding for the Solidarity Center’s programs in that country suddenly jumped from $54,289 to $242,926.

At a Washington meeting of union officials to discuss labor internationalism in the late 1990s, AFL-CIO international affairs director Barbara Shailor was confronted by Chris Townsend, political action director of the independent United Electrical Workers (UE). Townsend questioned whether the Solidarity Center was really so different from AIFLD and the other old institutes, given its near total reliance on State Department and NED funds and that its employees are required to pass a national security background check by the U.S. government.

“She wasn’t going to argue with a UE guy very long,” Townsend recalled,

so in a huff she told me that, ‘The State Department controls the [Solidarity Center’s] work in the countries that have either oil resources or Islamic insurgencies, and we can have the rest.’ This of course was to assert that the work she was doing was legitimate and that I should somehow recognize that and give her a pass.

Townsend said the AFL-CIO later stopped inviting him to such meetings.

The Solidarity Center’s activities in Venezuela have been particularly disturbing. When Chávez was temporarily ousted in a right-wing coup in April 2002, only to quickly return to power after millions took to the streets, journalists and activists uncovered evidence that implicated the Solidarity Center and its Venezuelan client—the CTV (Venezuelan Workers Confederation)—in the attempted overthrow.

Representing the more privileged, professional strata of Venezuelan labor, the CTV partnered with business leaders from the Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce to destabilize the Chávez government, particularly by calling a general strike during the coup and, aft er the coup failed, an oil industry lockout.

The Solidarity Center gave NED funds to the CTV in the run-up to the coup, but it disavowed the attempted overthrow and claimed the money had gone only to progressive elements within the CTV. AFL-CIO officials said at the time that although they still took funds from the State Department and NED for foreign labor programs, the money came with “no strings or political attachments” and that the Solidarity Center thus operated independently. In the years after the coup attempt, the center continued supporting anti-Chávez groups with money from the NED.

Given the history related in this book, U.S. unionists today should, at the very least, take an active interest in the Solidarity Center’s activities, its dependence on government funding, and its close association with the controversial NED. But there is virtually no current discussion about this within the AFL-CIO or its affiliates. That is not especially surprising, considering that the Federation has yet to formally acknowledge or apologize for the significant role it played during the Cold War in dividing labor movements abroad, undermining foreign democracies, and endorsing militarism.

In 2004, however, delegates at the California Labor Federation’s convention—representing two million members—passed the “Build Unity and Trust Among Workers Worldwide” resolution. Spearheaded by Fred Hirsch, the unionist who, in the 1970s, had helped expose AIFLD’s role in the Chilean coup, the resolution was the result of a rank-and-file effort calling on the AFL-CIO to fully account for its record of hostile overseas interventions and to formally renounce its CIA ties.

After passing in California, the resolution was supposed to head to the 2005 national AFL-CIO convention in Chicago, but it was effectively killed by the Resolutions Committee before the convention even began.

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Organized labor around the world should be striving toward the creation of a truly unified working-class movement, dependent on its own collective strength, and dedicated to replacing capitalism with socialism and militarism with peace. While this may seem obvious, it historically has not been the official approach of the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions, which, at their worst, have assisted the US government around the world in dividing workers, suppressing democracy, waging unjust wars, and foiling progressive movements.

Hope for global labor unity ultimately lies in the ability of trade unionists everywhere to put class solidarity above national allegiance, and to act with their fellow workers, whoever and wherever they may be, for their collective liberation and mutual survival. With the US working class now more “international” than it has ever been— composed of people of a multitude of nationalities, ethnicities, races, religions, languages, and cultures—identifying exactly how to achieve and maintain this kind of class unity, and translate it into effective action, can perhaps begin at home.

If they are to be serious vehicles for strengthening and protecting the working class both at home and abroad in this era of overlapping crises, today’s AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions must adopt the kind of principled labor internationalism that would inevitably bring them into conflict with US foreign policy instead of reflexively serving it. But a labor movement that places class struggle and anti-imperialism ahead of deference to Washington’s international designs will not come into being unless workers, both within and outside the AFL-CIO, build it themselves.

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Blue-Collar Empire by Jeff Schuhrke is available via Verso.