Well, I’m a historian, so what’s relevant to right now isn’t necessarily my number one priority — I’m interested in history for its own sake. But part of it has to do with my own life and career trajectory of being for a long time interested and involved in the world of international development and international affairs, then becoming more and more involved in the labor movement and working with unions, then studying labor history. In several books about the history of the US labor movement, you come across these brief references to how, during the Cold War, the AFL-CIO was working with the CIA and was complicit in some of these notorious coups in Latin America, in places like Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, and elsewhere. Those books mention that, then move on to the next thing. And when I would read those, my mind was blown. I’d be like, wait, what? Because the labor movement is supposed to be the good guys, the progressive forces. They’re supposed to be fighting against imperialism and militarism and all these awful things that the US government does overseas and at home. So I just really wanted to learn more about that. And as I did my PhD in history, this is what I focused on.

As I was doing that research, I found that there’s been a lot of other scholarship on this subject in bits and pieces — some books and articles that focus on specific countries or areas, such as the Vietnam War or US labor in Africa in the 1950s and ’60s. I thought it would be worthwhile for there to be a book that brings it all together.

It is relevant right now because in the last several years, there’s been growing enthusiasm and energy in the labor movement, especially from younger generations. Unions are so popular. Workers are going out and organizing themselves, often without established unions leading the way. At the same time, we have this host of global crises from climate change to the globalization of the economy to increasing militarism. All of these global international crises overlap with each other and directly impact the working class here at home. Where is our tax money going or not going? Who suffers from all these injustices that happen around the world? What does it mean for immigrants and refugees who come to this country?

So I thought, yes, this is a good time for a book that kind of combines these two histories of the labor movement in the United States and US foreign policy, and how they interacted with each other, and how that interaction was often pretty ugly. The hope is that, if we are going to rebuild the labor movement, it’s important to talk about what kind of labor movement it is going to be and what its positions on foreign policy questions will be.

There has always been a divide in the US labor movement between two general strands of unionism: one much more radical, wanting to dramatically transform or overthrow capitalism and replace it with a more humane, just economy that works for the working class; the other strand more willing to accommodate capitalism, more class-collaborationist as opposed to oriented to class struggle. There are anarchists in the 1880s, involved in the Haymarket Affair in Chicago, as well as various strands of socialist unionists tied to the Socialist Party. And then in the early 1900s, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had a syndicalist approach to organized labor. The class-collaborationist and conservative wing is best represented by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and its first president, Samuel Gompers. From the late 1800s and early 1900s, there was constant conflict between these two strands.

By the 1920s, after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the Socialist Party of America was ripped apart, with the left wing becoming the Communist Party USA. The Communists in the 1920s and ’30s were very dedicated trade unionists and focused, at least in the ’20s, on changing the AFL from within — a strategy called “boring from within” existing unions rather than forming parallel, separate unions like the IWW, to try to turn the established AFL unions into class-struggle unions.

That meant making them much more democratic and responsive to the rank and file. It also meant prioritizing inclusion of racial minorities, immigrants, unskilled workers, women workers. That was what a lot of the communist trade unionists in the 1920s and ’30s were trying to do. These were a lot of young, idealistic radicals. The negative connotation is that they were just puppets of Moscow and following the orders of Joseph Stalin. But that wasn’t really the case when it came to trade unionism. They were more interested in making unions far better at winning real gains for the working class and bringing the working class together through industrial unionism, merging the AFL’s craft unions into industrial unions. The communists were part of the larger organizing push during the 1930s that became the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which broke away from the AFL to organize one big union for the auto industry, one big union for the needle trades industry, one big union for the steel industry, and so on, and to do so under the banner of the CIO.

The CIO was made up of many nonradical leaders — people like John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, who was definitely not a leftist but was very strategic and militant. Other important labor leaders who had been part of the AFL broke away to form the CIO to embrace this industrial unionism approach. They welcomed in many communist trade unionists who had been shunned and pushed out of the AFL. So the mid-1930s to mid-1940s was the heyday of the CIO. You had communists or communist fellow travelers helping to organize and build militant, class-conscious, industrial unions. They were a big part of the birth and growth of unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the United Electrical Workers.

Absolutely. In all these different unions — the Farm Equipment Workers, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the International Fur and Leather Workers — they were promoting and achieving a rank-and-file-led, democratic unionism. The union officers were accountable to the membership and inclusive toward noncommunists: socialists or other progressives, liberals, and people who were apolitical. And they were focused on organizing racial minorities, women, immigrants, “unskilled” workers, building industrial unions, and winning. They were actually winning great contracts, pushing the bosses to make more and more concessions, getting more control over their work. They made a major contribution to the labor movement.

After World War II, when the Cold War begins, and you have anti-communist hysteria, the Second Red Scare, McCarthyism. The noncommunist leaders in the CIO decided that it was politically expedient in that environment to get rid of the communists within their ranks.

Between 1949 and 1950, eleven of these communist-led, leftist unions within the CIO were expelled. That meant the CIO lost around a million of its own members. Some of the remaining CIO unions started raiding the communist-led unions, which led to a loss of this more militant, progressive, class-conscious, inclusive trade unionism that would take many decades to start to come back (and never fully has).

The labor movement was on the march in the 1930s and ’40s, thanks in large part to communists. That forward momentum was violently halted by the Cold War and McCarthyism.

After the 1932 election, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt won, Democrats had big majorities in Congress and were in charge of the White House for the next decade and a half. This is when the New Deal, Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, National Labor Relations Act, regulations on corporations and Wall Street, and more were passed. Then World War II started. In the 1946 midterm elections, Republicans retook control of Congress for the first time since FDR had been elected. By this point, FDR was dead, and the country shifted in a more right-wing direction.

The Republicans elected to Congress in 1946 included people like Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy. They had seen how organized labor was getting more and more powerful in these preceding years, especially 1945–1946. There was this huge strike wave after World War II with workers fighting back against wartime inflation, wanting to keep some of the gains they had won during the war like security of union membership. These Republicans came in with a mission to stop this growth that the labor movement had been seeing.

At the same time, the fragile wartime alliance between the United States and Soviet Union was breaking down. There had always been strong anti-Soviet, anti-communist sentiment in the United States, and so the Republicans and corporate America were really eager to use this emerging Cold War, anti-Soviet animus against organized labor, and to paint the labor movement in the US as nothing more than a communist conspiracy aiming to destroy the American way of life.

So in 1947, they passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which was a series of amendments to the 1935 National Labor Relations Act that explicitly wanted to rein in the kinds of powerful, militant union tactics like secondary strikes and secondary boycotts; to allow states to pass “right-to-work” laws, which are designed to defund and bankrupt unions; and to weaken the law around who could be in a union via a number of other provisions. Harry Truman vetoed the Taft-Hartley act. But Republicans were able to override his veto, and it was passed anyway.

This was 1947. Ever since then, repealing Taft-Hartley has been the number one political and legislative agenda of the labor movement; it still hasn’t been repealed, despite numerous Democratic administrations and Democratic congresses coming in since 1947.

An important component of the Taft-Hartley Act was a provision that union officers would have to sign an affidavit swearing they were not members of the Communist Party. They didn’t have to sign affidavits saying that they had never been involved in any kind of fascist organization, or that they were not part of any other political party or political movement. It was only the Communist Party. A lot of these CIO unions were led by communists, and they would be perjuring themselves if they signed this. And that was kind of beside the point, because it was more of a matter of principle. Why should anyone have to announce what their political affiliations were as a condition of being a union official?

But the AFL’s leadership had always been conservative and anti-communist. They were jumping all over this saying, “see, this is why it’s such a bad idea to allow communists into the labor movement — it’s just going to lead to the destruction of unions.” And some of the noncommunist CIO leaders, like Philip Murray, the president of the CIO at the time, and especially Walter Reuther, the up-and-coming, just elected president of the UAW, agreed. Taft-Hartley helped to give more justification to the CIO for a purge of communist-led unions. And Taft-Hartley really did kneecap organized labor. You could see union density growing between the late 1930s and the mid-1940s, right up until Taft-Hartley was passed. Ever since then, union density has been in decline.

Yes. We could also talk about Operation Dixie. The CIO had this plan in the late 1940s to organize the South, because the South was (and still mostly is) very nonunion. A lot of that has to do with the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy. The communists had always been at the forefront in the ’20s and ’30s of racial justice politics, trying to make the labor movement more inclusive and unite the working class across racial lines, organizing agricultural workers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers in the South — largely African American but also white as well — and organizing Latino agricultural workers in the Southwest. And expelling the communists with their brand of anti-racist politics helped doom Operation Dixie, which meant the South remained nonunion, and a lot of manufacturing — textile in particular in the North, and the unionized sectors of the North and Midwest — was able to move to the South and later the Southwest, which also remained nonunion. That weakened the labor movement, causing union density to go down. Eventually, manufacturing would more and more move overseas.

Which brings us to the role of the AFL-CIO in foreign policy and interventions in foreign labor movements, doing the same thing that happened in the United States: kicking leftists out. That same process was replicated in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere, with US corporations moving production abroad.

Another thing to say about the communist-led unions: they were very democratic. They were winning good contracts. They were pushing back against this idea of management rights — that there are certain things that your union can’t negotiate over, decisions about staffing or production.

Yes. And that’s hugely important, because now every union contract in the United States includes a management rights clause. They’re terrible. But the unionists who actually were fighting against such clauses were pushed out. Another thing that union contracts include today is a no-strike clause during the life of the contract. But a lot of the communist unions struck over grievances. If a worker was unfairly disciplined, or fired, or management or a foreman on the shop floor did something they disagreed with, they could file a grievance about it, but then they would have to wait through a long, drawn-out bureaucratic process. So workers would actually say, “We’re going to shut down production for the day or longer and force management to deal with this right away.” That kind of culture of militant shop-floor action was lost and replaced by more bureaucratic procedures that play into the boss’s hands.

These issues were tied up in the Treaty of Detroit in 1950 between the UAW and General Motors, which became the model for collective bargaining for decades to come. It included a management rights clause and a clause prohibiting strikes during the life of the contract and served to make unions much more class-collaborationist and bureaucratic, in ways that have been detrimental to the working class.

Right. And this even goes back to the 1920s, prior to the Cold War and before the CIO, when AFL leaders were pushing out communist unionists using undemocratic, ham-fisted methods while accusing communists of being undemocratic “totalitarians.” I think that also matters for the story of my book about US Cold War foreign policy being in the name of freedom but often supporting dictatorships using unfree, undemocratic methods to suppress leftists.

It reminds me of that famous quote from the US soldier in Vietnam: “We had to burn the village to save it.” This was the mantra of anti-communism, again, beyond the labor movement: that in the name of freedom and democracy, we must have horrible dictatorships and war and mass murder.

Yes, you’re absolutely right that the CIA and State Department recognized the power of organized labor around the world to disrupt their plans for spreading capitalism and US imperialism. They were terrified of the potential power of a class-conscious, militant, organized labor movement in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America. Who better to halt working-class radicalism than union leaders saying, “I’m a worker. I’m a union leader. Trust me: capitalism is better. It’s worked out really great for us in the United States”?

And to some extent, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, for the more privileged strata of the working class in the United States, there was truth to that. The US capitalist economy at that moment was delivering for them. Their standard of living was going up. They could afford to buy a house and live in the suburbs and send their kids to college. That was in large part because they had good, strong unions. That was another part of the motivating factor for some of these US unionists. Of course, that wouldn’t last very long.

I’d start with the AFL, because even at the time of McCarthyism and Taft-Hartley, the AFL was already totally anti-communist and didn’t have any communist-led unions within its ranks. It was the CIO that was more tolerant of communists and had some communist-led unions. So even before the Cold War really set in, and even before these purges had happened from the CIO, the AFL had had these experiences in the 1920s of fighting the Left within their ranks. A lot of these AFL officials — people like George Meany, for example, who’s a significant figure in the book, was the AFL’s secretary-treasurer in the mid-1940s, then by 1951 became the AFL president; or Matthew Woll, another high-ranking AFL official, a rabid anti-communist; or David Dubinsky, a former socialist, the more liberal but also strongly anti-communist leader of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. They considered themselves experts in how to combat the Left and how to combat communism.

In late 1944, the AFL created the Free Trade Union Committee, which would be an international arm for the AFL to send representatives to other countries. At this moment, they were especially focused on Western Europe, because there were strong communist parties in countries like Italy and France, especially because communists in those countries had been at the forefront of anti-fascist resistance during the war. Among the working class of many Western European countries, communists were popular, and they had a lot of sway in the national labor movements. This deeply troubled AFL leaders like Meany and Wool and Dubinsky, so they created the Free Trade Union Committee.

They hired this fascinating and unsavory character named Jay Lovestone to run it. Lovestone had been a leader of the Communist Party USA in the 1920s, but had been kicked out of the party by Stalin over doctrinal differences and had then created his own Communist opposition party. He was a bit of a cult leader. He had a group of loyalists called Lovestoneites following him.

Totally. By the time of World War II, Lovestone had fully renounced communism altogether and had sworn revenge against his former comrades. He still had his loyalists, the Lovestoneites, many of them in various staff positions in different unions. Some of them had connections to the US foreign policy apparatus. They had worked in embassies and consulates. Lovestone knew a lot about the world of radical politics, and he could speak the language of it. He had contacts across the world. So the AFL tapped him to run the Free Trade Union Committee. He sent one of his most trusted loyalists, Irving Brown, to France immediately after the war ended to divide the General Confederation of Labor, the French trade union confederation which was then led by communists.

At the same time, the AFL also sent a representative to Latin America, Serafino Romualdi, who was born in Italy and was a former socialist turned anti-communist who had a lot of contacts in South America and Central America, because during World War II, he had gone there on behalf of the US government to sway working-class Italian immigrant communities in South America to be on the side of the Allies and against Benito Mussolini.

This is before the US government had fully committed to the Cold War — the fragile alliance with the Soviet Union was still in place. The CIO at this point was still trying to forge diplomatic ties with Soviet trade unions and communist trade unions in Eastern Europe through a new entity, the World Federation of Trade Unions, created in 1945 to be a kind of United Nations for organized labor. But the AFL wanted nothing to do with any of that. They were already waging the Cold War. The CIA didn’t exist yet. There was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) from World War II that later became the CIA, but there was no official CIA yet. There was not yet government funding for what the AFL was doing. They were just doing this on their own. That’s how rabidly anti-communist they were. And they were troubled by the fact that the CIO, their rival, was making these connections with communist unions overseas. The AFL wanted to push back against that.

When you get to Taft-Hartley and McCarthyism in full swing, and the CIO eventually purges its communist-led unions, that was about the time that the CIA, which was now in operation, saw what the AFL had been doing and that they were really good at this anti-communism stuff. It was a weird alliance, because a lot of the CIA officials were these Ivy League educated, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who knew nothing about the world of the working class or the labor movement, while these AFL guys were Jewish and Irish Catholic plumbers and whatnot. They were working together. It was sometimes a strained relationship. But basically the CIA was giving the Free Trade Union Committee a lot of money to spread around, and to have Irving Brown, the Lovestoneite who was in France, travel around Europe with suitcases full of money and buy off trade union officials in other countries — often to create splinter unions to break away from whatever the mainstream or established union federation was if it was led by communists, and to create new anti-communist unions.

The CIO was slow to catch up to a lot of this. By 1955, the AFL and CIO merged to become the AFL-CIO, and the CIO was under the leadership of Walter Reuther, who was a more liberal anti-communist who hated Jay Lovestone. They had a history from when Lovestone had tried to infiltrate the UAW in the 1930s. It’s a long story, but the Free Trade Union Committee was shut down after the AFL-CIO merger, because Reuther wanted the AFL-CIO to conduct its foreign policy through a multilateral organization called the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), which was set up in 1949 to be a rival to the communist-led World Federation of Trade Unions that had been created a few years earlier. The CIO had originally been part of the World Federation of Trade Unions but pulled out of it in 1949, at the same time that it began expelling its own communist-led unions. That’s the early phase in the ’50s.

Yeah, exactly. And it got worse. First there was the Free Trade Union Committee under the AFL, which lasted until just after the merger with the CIO in 1955. Shortly after that, four years later, the Cuban Revolution happened, and anti-communist Cold Warriors in the United States now became fixated on Latin America, worrying that Latin America was going to “go communist.” So the AFL-CIO now created a new international arm to focus specifically on workers in Latin America, to do stuff that was similar to what the Free Trade Union Committee had done in Western Europe. They created, in 1960–61, the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). Right from its founding, AIFLD was receiving millions of dollars from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to be part of John F. Kennedy’s hearts-and-minds Cold War campaign, the Alliance for Progress program in Latin America. AIFLD would continue to exist until 1997, so it lasted for well over thirty years and became the biggest and most notorious of the AFL-CIO’s international arms; it received millions of dollars from USAID, but it was also known to partner with the CIA.

To back up a little bit: in the 1950s, before the merger and before AIFLD was created, the AFL’s international representative for Latin America, Serafino Romualdi, was complicit in the coup against democratically elected, left-leaning president Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Romualdi wrote a letter to other officials in the AFL a few months before the coup, and you could tell he knew all about it. He was in on the plot. He was saying, “There’s reason to believe that the final word hasn’t been written on Guatemala, and extraordinary events are going to be happening very soon there.” Árbenz was a progressive nationalist who was trying to implement agrarian reform and take land away from multinational corporations like the United Fruit Company and give it to campesinos. For that reason, he was labeled a “communist” and targeted for overthrow by the CIA. That’s a story that people probably know. But the AFL was part of that. There were anti-Árbenz union groups or labor front groups that were being financed by the CIA and supported by the AFL.

To return to the 1960s with AIFLD: it was implicated in the 1964 coup in Brazil against João Goulart, another populist, left-leaning president who was labeled a communist even though he wasn’t and was overthrown by the Brazilian military with support from the US government, including the CIA. One of the key things AIFLD was doing was labor education, union training, getting Latin American workers into these training programs where the focus was how to be more like a business unionist. Some courses focused on collective bargaining and union administration, but they would also focus on how to combat leftists and communists or anti-imperialists within your own union ranks, and how to make sure Latin American unions would remain pro–United States and pro-capitalist. Latin American trade unionists received a lot of this training in Washington, DC, and then AIFLD eventually had a whole complex in Front Royal, Virginia. It was sort of like the School of the Americas but for labor.

Right. I’m not saying that’s what they were learning at the AIFLD training school. But it was the similar idea of bringing Latin Americans up to the United States and training them in how to fight leftists back home, in this case in their unions.

A year before the Brazilian coup, there was an all-Brazilian class of AIFLD trainees. They had hours and hours of training on how to combat leftists in their own unions. When the coup happened, the military regime that took over immediately set about taking control over Brazil’s trade unions and purging them of leftists and Goulart sympathizers. Some of the people the coup regime put in charge of these unions were AIFLD graduates. And one of AIFLD’s top leaders, Bill Doherty, who eventually became the head of AIFLD for many years, was on a radio program shortly after the coup, where he was actually openly bragging that some AIFLD graduates participated in what he called “the revolution.” He even said they were involved in some of the “covert activities” that led to the coup.

AIFLD was also implicated in the notorious coup in Chile in 1973. There are many other stories about this that are all in the book. But AIFLD was, for all intents and purposes, an appendage of the US government in waging the Cold War in Latin America for well over thirty years.

Argentina is an important example, and there are others as well. It’s ultimately about US hegemony and imperialism; communism would often be the convenient label that they could give to any kind of nationalist or anti-imperialist political movement around the world. They couldn’t label Juan Perón a communist. Instead, they labeled him as a fascist (and he was an admirer of Mussolini, so there is that). But Peronism, at least in this period of the 1950s when Juan Perón was president of Argentina, was not about to become subservient to the US economically. He wanted to promote import-substitution industrialization — to let Argentina’s economy modernize and industrialize on its own — by keeping out manufactured goods being dumped by the United States and also grow his own alliances within Latin America. He wasn’t asking for Washington’s permission.

Because Peron was very beloved by Argentina’s working class — he had been a minister of labor before he became president, and he promoted social welfare policies and unionism — the Argentine General Confederation of Labor (CGT) was in a close alliance with Peron and his government.

In the same way that the AFL was sending out international representatives to spread its style of business unionism, Peron and the Argentine CGT were sending out their own representatives, actual rank-and-file workers, to other Latin American countries as diplomats to explain Peronism and promote economic sovereignty for Latin Americans — not dependence on the United States.

This really frightened and upset folks at the State Department. During World War II, when FDR was president, the United States operated under the “Good Neighbor Policy” of not interfering in Latin America’s affairs as it had done before the 1930s (and would do again after World War II). But as the Cold War began, folks in the State Department really wanted to abandon the Good Neighbor Policy and once again make Latin America economically subservient to the United States as a provider of raw materials and importer of US-manufactured goods. Peron wasn’t going to go along with that. Having a fairly state-controlled labor movement, but a strong labor movement, did deliver for much of the working class of Argentina. This is what the US government and AFL-CIO did not like. Peron wasn’t at all a communist, but the United States still wanted to undermine him and fight back against him, because he was an obstacle to US hegemony.

Much of the Chilean labor movement was pro-Allende. The Workers’ United Center of Chile (CUT), the main trade union federation, was led by communists and socialists. AIFLD really couldn’t do anything about that. So it ended up partnering not with traditional working-class organizations, trade unions, but instead working with associations of middle-class professionals called gremios: associations of physicians and engineers and truck owner-operators, shopkeepers. Through AIFLD, the gremios received a lot of financial support, technical support, and training — and ultimately, as would be revealed after the coup, money from the CIA to launch very crippling strikes.

In the months leading up to the 1973 coup, there was a strike in the copper mines. It wasn’t so much by the rank-and-file copper miners but more by the supervisors and engineers. There were at least a couple of major strikes of the trucking gremio that shut down distribution of food and fuel and other essential products. Shopkeepers closed down their stores and doctors and other professionals staged strikes, all to protest Allende and his socialist government.

That served, to use the phrase from Richard Nixon, to make the economy scream. The US government was also withholding aid, canceling loans, messing with Chile’s economy in all different types of ways. Having these gremio work stoppages was one of those ways. And AIFLD, on behalf of the AFL-CIO, was helping coordinate a lot of this stuff.

When we on the Left hear about a bunch of workers striking, when there’s a general strike and or thousands of people are in the streets, our gut reaction is to cheer them. But these strikes in Chile, and the similar example in British Guyana that I write about in the book, were meant to undermine a democratically elected leftist government and were being secretly bankrolled by the CIA, by the US government. These strikes harmed the Chilean economy and served as a pretext for the Chilean military and Augusto Pinochet to stage the coup on September 11, 1973.

A lot of credit here goes to a historian named Edmund Wehrle, who wrote a whole book about the AFL-CIO in Vietnam called Between a River and a Mountain. I draw heavily from that.

In addition to AIFLD in Latin America, the AFL-CIO ended up creating international arms for Africa and for Asia in the 1960s. The one in Asia was called the Asian American Free Labor Institute (AAFLI). Through AAFLI, and even before, the AFL-CIO was partnering with the Vietnamese Confederation of Labor (CVT), which was South Vietnam’s anti-communist trade union center. It was led by a guy named Trần Quốc Bửu, who was a nationalist but anti-communist, and a major client of the AFL-CIO. The idea there was to organize the working class and the peasants of South Vietnam, to try to deliver material benefits for them so that they would not go along with the National Liberation Front and North Vietnam’s government. Irving Brown, whom I mentioned earlier, the AFL’s early representative in France in the 1940s, was also visiting Vietnam a lot in the 1950s and 1960s. He thought the CVT could train Vietnamese workers to be like paramilitaries and fight back against the Communist guerrillas with the NLF.

The AFL-CIO through the CVT promoted a land reform program, trying to undercut the potential appeal of communism to peasants in South Vietnam. At the same time, the AFL-CIO leadership through its president George Meany was very vocally supportive of the war, even as the antiwar movement at home started to grow.

The Vietnam War is when the early Cold War anti-communist consensus was shattered as the realities of US foreign policy were laid bare to much of the public. And you had splits happening within the labor movement, especially, especially with the UAW under Walter Reuther, who had disagreements with Meany over the war. Reuther himself was supportive of the war early on, when Lyndon Johnson, his friend and ally, was still president. But within the UAW, among the rank and file and among some of the leaders and staff, they were protesting to Reuther, saying, “You need to speak out against this war. You’re one of the most well-known, most beloved labor leaders in the country, certainly more popular than George Meany.” And he didn’t want to speak out against the war until after Johnson announced he wasn’t going to run for reelection in 1968. Eventually, because of some of these foreign policy disagreements as well as personal disagreements, Reuther pulled the UAW out of the AFL-CIO. The UAW would go back into the AFL-CIO later, but some of the same kind of splits that the AFL-CIO had engineered in foreign labor movements were now coming home.

There were unions like 1199, which today is part of Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Back then, it was still an independent union of black and Latino hospital workers in New York. As early as 1964, it was protesting against the US military buildup in Vietnam that turned into the full-scale war. And unions like United Electrical Workers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union had been leftist-led unions that had been expelled from the CIO back in the late 1940s; they were protesting against the war early on.

But a lot of the mainstream labor leaders like Meany were very pro-war. And then there was the notorious 1970 Hard Hat Riot in New York, where construction workers with the New York building trades unions violently attacked a group of student antiwar protesters in lower Manhattan. That got a lot of news headlines. So the memory became “all the working class is reactionary, pro-war, part of the establishment,” even though the reality was more complicated. But this served especially for the New Left that emerged out of the antiwar movement, or at least grew through the antiwar movement. Much of the New Left came to see the AFL-CIO and the labor movement, labor officialdom, as part of the enemy and hopeless and not worth engaging with. It was politically detrimental to the image of the labor movement to not be part of all the broader social justice movements of the time that were all overlapping with the antiwar movement.

George Meany and the AFL-CIO’s high-profile support for the Vietnam War, even as the war was becoming more unpopular, put a spotlight on the AFL’s foreign policy. And mainstream journalists from the New York Times and Washington Post started looking into the AFL-CIO’s connections to the foreign policy apparatus. Starting around 1966–67, there was a series of exposés showing how the CIA was bankrolling various AFL-CIO-affiliated unions through these shadowy foundations, some of them real foundations, some of them just dummy foundations that only existed on paper.

When this got out, it caused a big outcry. And then the fact that the Vietnam War itself shattered the anti-communist consensus in the country made a lot more people dubious about what the United States was doing overseas. In addition, this is when there were a series of rank-and-file rebellions within the AFL-CIO-affiliated unions, because a lot of the leaders of these unions were really old and were not fighting against corporations. And you had this younger generation of workers and rank-and-file union members who were more militant, more diverse.

So all of this came together, and you started to have rank-and-file movements questioning the AFL-CIO’s connections with the CIA and the State Department, questioning AIFLD. Then, when the Chilean coup happened in 1973, American leftists were very appalled by the coup and the role of the United States in it. And they were able to make connections with how AIFLD had been supporting these anti-Allende gremios.

There was a plumber in California named Fred Hirsch who wrote a pamphlet about the AFL-CIO’s connections with the CIA in Chile that was circulated to thousands of rank-and-file union members in the mid-1970s. The Cold War itself had really been discredited in large part by the failure of the US empire in Vietnam. And then you had the beginning of détente and US political leaders trying to have a different kind of relationship with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. George Meany protesting Nixon going to China really looked like an out-of-touch dinosaur. So all of that was important in slowing down or at least discrediting the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy, which would then come into play much more prominently in the 1980s.

Yeah. This was especially the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) created in 1983 by Congress, with Reagan leading the way. The AFL-CIO played a big role in pushing for the creation of NED. The AFL-CIO president by this point was Lane Kirkland, Meany’s successor and another rabid anti-communist.

Yeah. He had been in the merchant marine in World War II. But then after the war, he was a student at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, where a lot of diplomats go to get their education.

Right. And one of Lane Kirkland’s closest personal friends was none other than Henry Kissinger. They spent their Thanksgivings together. Kissinger eulogized him when he died. So this is who was the president of the AFL-CIO in the 1980s. He promoted this idea of creating NED, which was channeling money to the AFL-CIO and other institutions to carry out these interventions overseas but now doing it out in the open by saying, “Hey, this is about democracy and freedom.”

At the same time, the AFL-CIO was still receiving millions of dollars from USAID, as it had been since the 1960s. And with Poland and Solidarity, the underground anti-communist trade union in Poland, the AFL-CIO wasn’t just supporting containment. It was supporting rollback. It was actually going into the communist world and trying to topple a communist government. Sometimes Kirkland and the AFL-CIO were pushing harder on that than even Reagan.

Right. One of the top aides for Orrin Hatch, a notoriously anti-labor Republican senator, told a reporter that the AFL-CIO has foreign policy positions to the right of the Reagan administration. Reagan was trying to shake off the defeat in Vietnam. So the 1980s were a comeback for the anti-communists in the AFL-CIO and beyond. They were actually partnering with Reagan on rejuvenating Cold War tensions — including, importantly, in Central America, in El Salvador and Nicaragua. AFL-CIO leaders like Lane Kirkland were on board with Reagan’s policy of violent counterinsurgency. And AIFLD, again, was on the ground in El Salvador supporting a lot of this, trying to dampen the Salvadoran left by propping up nonradical, politically moderate, conservative unions and peasant organizations getting lots of money from the State Department, from USAID, and so on. This is at the same time that Reagan is declaring war on the working class at home, firing the air traffic controllers in the PATCO strike, cutting social spending, opening the doors to this new wave of union busting.

The rank and file within the US labor movement was protesting and speaking out against Reagan’s foreign policy, especially in Central America but also in South Africa, because Reagan had the “constructive engagement” policy with the apartheid regime: to go easy on the apartheid regime and hope that eventually they’ll get rid of apartheid. A lot of rank-and-file workers in the labor movement were pushing back against this. But what was unique and important in the 1980s is that many union presidents within the AFL-CIO also started pushing back against this foreign policy, specifically against the AFL-CIO’s own foreign policy and partnership with Reagan. The Vietnam War was still fresh in their memories. It had only ended roughly fifteen or twenty years earlier. They had seen how unpopular the labor movement became because of George Meany’s support for the Vietnam War. They didn’t want that to happen again. They thought El Salvador might turn into another Vietnam — maybe Reagan would send ground troops, and it would become another disaster with millions of people killed. As it was, there was plenty of disaster, with roughly 75,000 people killed, largely because of the role of the United States in sending weapons and money to the Salvadoran regime, Salvadoran military, and death squads.

These death squads were targeting trade unionists in El Salvador. So many union presidents — including Jack Sheinkman from the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, William Winpisinger, president of the International Association of Machinists, and Owen Bieber, president of the UAW — formed a group called the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador, or the National Labor Committee for short. And they got other AFL-CIO-affiliated union presidents on board to directly challenge, for the first time, the foreign policy of the AFL-CIO itself — to challenge AIFLD and Kirkland to be in solidarity with these leftist trade unions in El Salvador and Nicaragua and call on Congress to halt military aid, to have an arms embargo on El Salvador and the Contras in Nicaragua. This was an important break. And there were, for the first time, at the AFL-CIO convention in the mid-1980s, actual open debates about Cold War foreign policy.

Right. Once you have some of these more progressive labor leaders backed up by the rank and file challenging the AFL-CIO’s top officials like Kirkland in the 1980s, that paves the way for Kirkland’s ouster in the 1990s. NAFTA was passed in 1993, and then right after that, Republicans took control of Congress in the 1994 election, and a lot of these same union presidents who had been behind the National Labor Committee in the 1980s challenging Reagan’s foreign policy and challenging Lane Kirkland’s foreign policy were able to challenge the actual leadership of Kirkland and the other old hard-line anti-communists who had been in control of the AFL-CIO for decades. In 1995, that led to the formation of the New Voice slate, led by John Sweeney of SEIU and Richard Trumka of the United Mine Workers. Sweeney had been part of the National Labor Committee, and Trumka was also a major force in the anti-apartheid movement and pushing the AFL-CIO itself to take a better position on combating apartheid.

So this newer, younger generation that was not all obsessed with the Cold War and anti-communism came into power in the AFL-CIO in 1995. But the Cold War was over at this point. Anti-communism was outdated. And New Voice wasn’t exactly a democratic, rank-and-file-led movement. Some have described it as more like a palace coup. But it was significant that there were “new voices” coming in. And it did lead to the AFL-CIO shutting down AIFLD and its other foreign institutes, but reconstituting them into something else: the Solidarity Center. The AFL-CIO continues to be involved in the labor movements of other countries, ostensibly more from a place of actual solidarity, but still almost completely financed by the State Department, USAID, and NED.

Since the late ’90s, the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy has been conducted through the Solidarity Center, which often hires actual union organizers to go overseas. It’s been active in over sixty countries fighting against sweatshop conditions, pushing for health and safety standards in sweatshops, trying to bring the more marginalized sections of foreign labor movements — women and domestic workers in places like South Africa and hotel workers in Cambodia — into contact with US workers. It’s almost NGO-type work, which isn’t class-struggle unionism, but it can still be beneficial to workers.

But also, the Solidarity Center has been implicated in trying to aid the US government’s attempts to overthrow Hugo Chávez in Venezuela as recently as 2014, for example, and it stepped up involvement in the Middle East after George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. So sometimes the Solidarity Center’s priorities have seemed to mirror or follow the US government’s foreign policy priorities. And again, Solidarity Center is not funded or controlled by workers. It’s funded by the State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy, and USAID. Right now, Trump and Elon Musk have been dismembering USAID and also putting a stop on the funds that go through NED.

What I’ve heard recently is that Solidarity Center is laying off lots of its staff, furloughing people — basically all but shutting down and maintaining a skeleton crew in its DC headquarters. So what does this mean for the AFL-CIO? The AFL-CIO has been speaking out against a lot of what Musk has been doing to the federal workforce. But it hasn’t been protesting about how this is affecting the Solidarity Center. The fact that Solidarity Center has to basically shut down because of Musk’s attacks on the federal government shows that the Solidarity Center is an arm of the federal government, more so than of the labor movement.

USAID has always been an instrument of soft imperialism — same with NED. Now, USAID does provide lifesaving medicines and other important humanitarian assistance to people — that’s also being gutted. I’m all for dismantling instruments of US imperialism. But they’re only dismantling the soft power part, not so much the hard power part: the military. They’re not reining in multinational corporations that go into these countries and exploit the workforce and exploit the environment.

The reason USAID and programs like the Solidarity Center exist is to try to contain the potential disruptive potential of the working class and the poor in other countries, to basically say that the US empire can do all these awful things but then make sure we’ll have these programs to try to try to smooth things over — sort of like how the wealthy exploit people and make a fortune, then throw some crumbs back in philanthropy and charity. But what’s happening now is they’re getting rid of the philanthropy but still exploiting everybody.

I think what it means is that Trump and Musk don’t see much threat from the working class abroad. They don’t see much threat from foreign unions. They’re not like the CIA was after World War II, afraid of the global working class’s potential. Trump and Musk don’t seem to be afraid. They seem to think, well, we can get rid of this stuff and there’s not going to be any consequences. There’s not going to be any kind of blowback. There’s not going to be any mass movements to fight against US empire. So we don’t need these sorts of soft power to smooth things over.

For one thing, it reiterates the necessity of rank-and-file democracy in our unions. As union members, we need to know what the top officials of our unions are up to, not only here at home but also overseas. Also, my argument in the book is not that the US labor movement should be isolationist. It cannot be. It just doesn’t make any sense for it to be an arm of the US government, serving US foreign policy interests. If we want to have genuine working-class internationalism, it has to be anti-imperialist. It has to challenge US foreign policy. I think many union members and some union presidents are already understanding this from the experience of the last year and a half, with Palestine and the US-funded genocide in Gaza. Many unions early on were coming out in support first of a cease-fire and then an arms embargo — and also talking about the need to divest their own money, their pension funds, from Israel and companies that do business with it, to be part of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. There’s historical precedent of this, with the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and unions in the United States playing a big role in solidarity with other workers and unions in other countries.

We should also be more curious about unions and labor movements abroad and how they do things. We often talk in the United States about a general strike as a kind of utopian, impossible thing, but very diverse countries, from Brazil to Greece to India to South Korea and others, regularly have general strikes. Can we learn anything about that?