The Labor of Defense: Workers’ Rights, Wartime Construction, and the Courtroom in Latin America, 1940–49

In the late 1930s and early 40s, after a decade of pitching a Good Neighbor policy in Latin America that was predicated on an end to military intervention in the region, U.S. officials elaborated plans for hemisphere defense that called, problematically, for both the erection of a network of U.S. airbases across the Americas and the continued cultivation of goodwill among the Latin American populace.  The objective of advancing a spirit of pan-Americanism while simultaneously seeking to expand the presence of the U.S. military on Latin American soil was a thorny one and it became still more problematic when U.S. defense contractors building bases with the labor of tens of thousands of Latin American workers regularly violated the recently enacted labor legislation developed in many countries in the wake of the Depression. This paper will examine the efforts of workers at defense construction sites in Cuba and Brazil to hold U.S. contractors accountable to national labor law in this purportedly new era of inter-American relations.  Local struggles to uphold labor legislation became delicate issues for nationalist leaders who enjoyed the support of the labor sector but also sought to advance nation-building agendas through the massive infrastructure development that the U.S. government was prepared to fund in the name of hemisphere defense.  Local labor courts and administrative bodies regularly upheld the law in favor of workers.  But as the war progressed and claims against U.S. contractors mounted, at the prodding of U.S. embassies, federal agencies intervened to nullify local labor court decisions and preclude future claims.  Towards the end of the war and into the post-war period, some base construction labor struggles that were suppressed nationally pushed their claims beyond the nation through innovative attempts to hold U.S. contractors accountable in U.S. courts and in the arena of international opinion.