What was the relationship between the AFL-CIO and US interventionism over the course of the twentieth century?

The American Federation of Labor (AFL) began waging the Cold War before the Cold War even began, when the US government still considered the Soviet Union an ally during World War II. In 1944, they created the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC), which tried to create divisions between noncommunists and communists in Western Europe’s labor movements.

When the Cold War came into focus and the CIA was created, some interventionists in the government recognized the work that the AFL had already been doing in Europe. They realized that if the CIA wanted to influence foreign labor movements, it would be hard for them to do it themselves. But if they could go through the AFL — if they had union leaders from the United States participating in the interventions — they would have more success, because workers in other countries would be more likely to trust fellow union members.

By 1949, the CIA and the Free Trade Union Committee had formed a secret partnership: the CIA funded the FTUC to carry out interventions designed to split labor movements into rival camps along Cold War battle lines. The Free Trade Union Committee was also to keep the CIA and the State Department informed about who the different unions and labor leaders were in foreign countries: who could be more reliable as a pro-US, pro-capitalist ally and who was more left-wing or pro-Soviet. Using CIA funding, they were able to expand from Europe to Asia.

At the same time, there was already a pre–Cold War history of the AFL intervening in the labor movements of Latin America, especially during the Mexican Revolution. That continued to develop in the early Cold War period as well, on a different track from what the Free Trade Union Committee was doing in Europe and Asia, but with the same basic idea: dividing the Confederation of Latin American Workers, which was a left-wing, Latin America–wide labor body.

The Free Trade Union Committee was shut down in 1958 after the AFL-CIO merged. Going into the 1960s and ’70s, development in the Third World became a major focus of US foreign policy. The AFL-CIO adapted, and they partnered with USAID (the US Agency for International Development), taking on the idea of using unions to “modernize” countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. They administered training programs designed to turn union leaders in foreign countries from striking rabble-rousers into bureaucrats who could temper the demands of the working classes in their countries, so that the governments of those countries could build up their economies without acquiescing to workers’ demands.

This was during the robust Third World movement of the 1960s and early ’70s, when a lot of anti-colonial, anti-imperial political leaders in the Global South were trying to assert their economic and political independence. In this period, the AFL-CIO often tried to undermine left-wing political movements in Latin America.

Coming out of the Vietnam War, some of the Cold War interventionism was tempered. But in the 1980s and early ’90s, near the end of the Cold War, a new generation of rabidly anti-communist officials took over the AFL-CIO.

Now that the global political economy was starting to shift, with economic restructuring and offshoring, US union membership was going into decline. Yet AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland and other officials wanted to revive the Cold War. Ironically, even as they fought Ronald Reagan’s administration on domestic issues, they partnered with it to wage aggressive counterinsurgency wars in Central America in the name of anti-communism.

They worked with the Reagan administration and right-wing politicians to create the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which took up what the CIA had been doing before the Vietnam War, where they had been funding a lot of unions and other civil society organizations overseas. But instead of doing it covertly, the NED did it overtly, saying, “This is in the name of promoting democracy and freedom.” The AFL-CIO played a big role in creating the NED and was a core beneficiary of the money allocated from Congress to these programs. They were very active in Poland with Solidarity, the anti-communist trade union that was eventually responsible, in many ways, for bringing an end to communist rule in Eastern Europe.

You write that organized labor in the United States, specifically the AFL-CIO, actively encouraged the Cold War. Why were labor leaders willing to partner so closely with the government?

It goes back to World War I, World War II, and the New Deal. In both World War I and World War II, AFL leadership struck a deal with the US government, promising not to disrupt industrial production by striking during the war. In exchange for not going on strike, the AFL achieved a level of legitimacy in the eyes of the government and won some real gains, like shorter workdays, better benefits, and the growth of union membership. This experience really affected top labor officials in the AFL, who learned that when you go along with US government foreign policy, you can win gains, legitimacy, and protection.

Another aspect is the fact that the AFL was traditionally a more conservative labor federation, opposed to radicalism and leftists. By the time the Cold War started, many AFL leaders already had a long history of fighting communists within their own union ranks and keeping them out of leadership positions. They came to see themselves as the real experts on how to fight communists, even more so than a lot of officials in the US foreign policy apparatus.

The CIO also benefited greatly from partnering with the government during the New Deal and World War II. Leaders in the CIO, like Walter Reuther, dreamed of becoming equal partners in economic planning in a corporatist state. Similar to the AFL, they felt that if they were demonstrating their loyalty to the government and their patriotism, that would give them a seat at the table. By the late 1940s, amid McCarthyism and the changing politics of the early Cold War, the CIO also turned anti-communist.

It was the AFL that was initially encouraging the Cold War, because it never tolerated communists or wanted to have a coalition with left-wing trade unionists, unlike the CIO, which did for many years welcome — or at least tolerate — communists in its own ranks. The CIO was willing to join the World Federation of Trade Unions along with the Soviet trade unions. The AFL never went along with that. AFL leaders like George Meany were always eager to push for a confrontation with the Soviets, because of their own history of anti-communist ideology and fighting communists within their own union ranks.

You write that the Cold War directly contributed to US labor’s decline, with union membership dropping from 35 percent in 1947 to 11 percent in 1991. How did the AFL-CIO’s international activities affect the labor movement?

One factor was how much attention, resources, and energy the AFL-CIO spent on waging this anti-communist crusade around the world, as opposed to organizing the unorganized here in the United States or pushing for more social welfare policies, less military spending, and more investment in education, health care, and infrastructure — the kinds of things that create jobs. In 1966, more than a fifth of the AFL-CIO’s budget was being spent on these foreign programs. That doesn’t even include the millions of dollars it was taking from the US government.

From the 1970s onward, the global political economy was changing: manufacturing was moving first into nonunion areas in the United States, the South and Southwest, then into Latin America and the Caribbean, and eventually into Asia. The AFL-CIO was not doing much to fight this, other than promoting “Buy American” or “Look for the Union Label” marketing campaigns. Instead, it was focusing on how to fight the communists and undermine left-wing movements in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Anti-communism here doesn’t just mean opposition to actual communists or actual communist parties: it’s opposition to any left-of-center, class-conscious movement for economic independence in the Global South.

Because of this anti-communist global crusade, a lot of the more militant, class-conscious labor movements in the Global South, which could have actually challenged the power of transnational capital, were weakened and divided. More conservative, pro-capitalist splinter unions were created and got a lot of funding from the US government, funneled through the AFL-CIO.

Even though this was all supposedly in the name of free trade unionism, a lot of the unions and union federations that the AFL-CIO was supporting around the world were often very closely controlled by the governments of those countries, especially if they were anti-communist, authoritarian governments. The only unions that these governments would tolerate were supported by the AFL-CIO.

As trade liberalization and offshoring of US manufacturing jobs increased, the labor movements of those countries might have been good allies for the US labor movement to combat the race to the bottom and push for higher standards everywhere so that capital would have nowhere to go. That didn’t happen, because those labor movements had already been weakened and were now closely controlled by their respective governments because of what the AFL-CIO was doing. In that sense, the AFL-CIO leaders shot themselves in the foot.

This was all done in partnership with the US government. Yet the US government was, especially by the later Cold War period in the 1980s and ’90s, facilitating all of this offshoring and trade liberalization and passing NAFTA — the actions that caused deindustrialization and caused unions in the US to lose a lot of their members. The same entity that the AFL-CIO was partnering with for all these decades and helping to win the Cold War was screwing American workers at the same time. Not only were they harming workers around the world, but in the end, they were also harming workers in the United States.

Could you give specific examples of American labor suppressing left political action or organizing in the Global South that stand out to you?

In the early 1960s, Guyana was led by Cheddi Jagan, a socialist who wanted to nationalize the sugar industry and lead the country through a planned transition to full independence from Britain. Some unions were on his side, and some were on the side of his political rivals. With the assistance of the CIA, the AFL-CIO helped fund opposition trade unions and lead a long general strike that lasted for about two months to weaken the Jagan government and eventually push him out of office before the transition to independence.

The US government didn’t like that Jagan was a Marxist — it thought he would be another Fidel Castro, and it wanted to stop him at any cost. Usually folks in the left-labor movement think of general strikes as a positive thing, but in this case, a general strike secretly funded by the CIA, with US unions distributing the funds, undermined a left-wing government.

Similarly, in early-’70s Chile, Salvador Allende was in power. He was a Marxist, democratically elected, and believed in creating socialism through democracy — so he was seen as especially dangerous to anti-communists in the United States and in Latin America, because they relied on the trope that all communists were authoritarian dictators. The [Richard] Nixon administration wanted to create economic chaos in Chile, and part of that was achieved through a series of big strikes in industries including copper mining and trucking. These strikes also received funding, support, and training from the AFL-CIO, with many of the resources originating with the CIA. Those strikes were used as a pretext for the Chilean military under Augusto Pinochet to stage a coup in 1973 and overthrow Allende.

The American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), which was the AFL-CIO’s main instrument in Latin America from the 1960s to the ’90s, gave a lot of trainings that on the surface might seem very benign, but were often about how to fight leftist influence in your unions. The AIFLD trained over thirty Brazilian trade unions a year before the 1964 military coup in that country. When the coup happened, some of the Brazilian graduates of AIFLD’s training program were used by the incoming dictatorship to purge Brazilian unions of leftists.

One other example: not only did the AFL-CIO rhetorically support the Vietnam War, but they were also active on the ground in South Vietnam, providing funding and resources to the anti-communist Vietnamese Confederation of Labor, who were trying to undercut the influence of the communist National Liberation Front.

How did rank-and-file AFL-CIO members react if and when they learned about these anti-communist actions by their union leadership?

Prior to the Vietnam War, the rank-and-file members didn’t know about a lot of this. They weren’t being consulted. None of these international policies were democratic; they were decided behind closed doors, often by unelected officials or staffers.

It wasn’t until the late ’60s, with the antiwar movement, that local labor leaders and mid-level staffers began to speak out. There started to be mass meetings and publications of letters and newspapers from union members at the rank-and-file level who were speaking out against the Vietnam War and getting into direct conflict with George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO, who was in total support of the war.

In the late ’60s, there was also a series of journalistic exposés that revealed some of the ties between the CIA and US unions that had existed since the 1940s. With this knowledge out in the open, there started to be more rank-and-file protests against what the top labor leadership was doing. After the coup in Chile, a rank-and-file plumber from California named Fred Hirsch wrote a booklet exposing the AFL-CIO’s ties to the CIA in supporting the Chilean coup, which was distributed to thousands of union members.

In the ’80s, there was an unprecedented movement of rank-and-file union members and even union presidents within the AFL-CIO who were trying to support the more leftist, militant unions and worker movements in Central America. There was also the National Labor Committee, which was founded in the 1980s by a group of union presidents who opposed this intervention in Central America. This group precipitated open debates about foreign policy at the AFL-CIO convention for the first time, which shows just how undemocratic these policy decisions had been.

What lessons should the labor movement today take from this history?

In a simple sentence: don’t reflexively support everything Washington does when it comes to foreign policy. Yet this is basically still the position of the AFL-CIO leadership today.

In the last several months, we’ve seen many unions come out in favor of a cease-fire in Gaza, which is significant because it goes against the policy of the Biden administration. Even more significant, seven major unions recently called on Joe Biden to stop sending military aid to Israel to force a cease-fire. It’s a positive development that unions have been making all these statements, but there still hasn’t been much in the way of real action on the national level.

The labor left today has to look at our struggles in workplaces here in the United States with an international lens. The message from Donald Trump is often about how the foreign workers are our enemy. But we’ve already seen through the history of the Cold War that economic nationalism is ultimately not helpful for workers in the US. There needs to be a willingness to be much more vocally critical of US foreign policy.

What is your intended impact with the book?

In the United States over the last several years, as people have been getting more active in the labor movement, this is one area of labor history that’s often been ignored, because a lot of the movement has been uncomfortable talking about it. The idea of this book was to be an introduction to the topic and to combine a lot of the scholarship that’s already out there. I hope it helps people who are relatively new to the labor movement to understand that while it’s crucial to organize and build union density, we also have to talk about what kind of labor movement we want to have — not just that we want a big one.

What are our movement’s principles? What does it stand for? What kind of politics does it have when it comes to foreign policy? Understanding this history can hopefully give folks a sense of why it’s important to have an internationalist, anti-imperialist outlook when it comes to rebuilding the labor movement.