How the “AFL-CIA” Undermined Labor Movements Abroad
For much of its history, the AFL-CIO has enthusiastically backed US foreign policy. During the Cold War, that included actively participating in efforts to suppress left-wing labor movements abroad.
President Richard Nixon gestures toward labor leader George Meany during a speech at the 1971 AFL-CIO convention. (Wally McNamee / Corbis via Getty Images)
In February, the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) called for a negotiated cease-fire to stop the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Although this statement fell short of demanding an immediate cease-fire, as statements by other labor organizations and unions have, it still represented a break with many of the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy commitments.
For much of its sixty-eight-year history, the AFL-CIO — the largest federation of unions in the United States, representing 12.5 million workers — has moved in lockstep with US foreign policy. It has even, in many cases over the course of the last century, actively participated in anti-leftist US interventions abroad.
In his forthcoming book, Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade, historian Jeff Schuhrke traces the AFL-CIO’s relationship with US foreign policy from the beginnings of the Cold War through the 1990s. He reveals how, in partnership with the CIA and other US government bodies, the AFL-CIO suppressed left-wing labor movements in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Sara Van Horn and Cal Turner spoke to Schuhrke for Jacobin about the harm the AFL-CIO’s interventions caused in places like Guyana, Chile, and Brazil, the ways suppressing labor organizing abroad hurt American workers, and what the labor movement can learn from its complicated history.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.