“A House United”: The American Federation of Labor's Fight against Forced Labor at the United Nations

When the United Nations Commission on Human Rights first convened, national governments were not the only ones in the room. Behind the scenes, lobbyists representing various religious and civic organizations argued for their causes. In contrast to these quiet efforts, Tony Sender, representing the American Federation of Labor, was a vocal advocate for labor and human rights.  Sender had come to make sure that the rights of workers were safeguarded as ideas about international “human rights” were developed. 

Her role quickly extended beyond that of labor watchdog, however. Sender, with the financial help and institutional encouragement of both the AFL and the socialist Jewish Labor Committee, became an advocate for the rights of workers behind the Iron Curtain, spending much of her time raising awareness about the Soviet practices of forced labor. It was this campaign that eventually led her and the AFL national leadership to form an alliance with the U.S. Department of State to fight against slave labor.  While starting with a fairly basic understanding of the relationship between workers’ rights and human rights, over the course of the 1950s, Sender and the AFL were forced to develop their ideas into a cohesive argument linking the right to the fruit of one’s labor to the overarching goals of freedom and democracy. The path they followed to reach this understanding was littered with questions about the threats that Communism posed to American labor, the role of the government in assuring the rights of labor, and the very meaning of “workers’ rights.”  This paper will explore the AFL’s developing conception of labor’s rights and human rights, and argue that it was only through the lens of the forced labor controversy that the nascent concept of worker’s human rights, present since the early 20^th century, was finally able to be articulated.