Cal Turner
What was the relationship between the AFL-CIO and US interventionism over the course of the twentieth century?
Jeff Schuhrke
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.