The National Labor Committee

The AIFLD’s many intrigues in El Salvador did not escape the notice of US labor leaders and union members. Like much of the public, US trade unionists feared that Reagan’s aggressive interventionism in Central America might escalate into another Vietnam-style quagmire. Many US labor activists questioned why the AFL-CIO was working so closely with the blatantly anti-union Reagan on foreign policy issues, especially in El Salvador.

Moreover, left-leaning US unionists were still wounded from the AFL-CIO’s staunch support for the Vietnam War and did not want to see that mistake repeated. After the AIFLD murders in January 1981, several cross-union committees were formed in cities like New York, Boston, San Jose, and Seattle with the goal of getting the wider labor movement to oppose Reagan’s Central America policy. By July, over one hundred union locals had passed resolutions opposing further US military aid to El Salvador.

The launching of the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador (NLC) in 1981 would prove to be one of the most significant developments for US labor internationalism since the start of the Cold War. By 1983, twelve national unions belonged to the NLC through their top officials. In June 1983, the NLC sent a delegation of seven union leaders to El Salvador on a factfinding mission.

After meeting with US Embassy officials who mistakenly assumed they were there on behalf of AIFLD, visiting imprisoned Salvadoran trade unionists whom the AFL-CIO had abandoned due to their left-wing politics, and getting a grim picture of the overall violence and repression facing union activists in the country, the NLC delegation published their findings in a report widely circulated within US labor circles.

The report charged that there was “no trade union freedom in El Salvador” and that Salvadoran unionists were “workers who have organized to fight for dignity and decency,” which made them supposed “subversives” according to “the twisted logic of politics in El Salvador.” The report further asserted that the AIFLD-supported agrarian reform was “not working” and was even “structured not to work” because rightists in the Salvadoran government were blocking its full implementation.