Session Abstract

This roundtable will be made up of contributors to the recently published American Labor's Global Ambassadors: The International History of the AFL-CIO during the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan), edited by Robert Waters and Geert van Goethem. Under the questioning of diplomatic historian Jason Parker, the panelists will discuss U.S. labor’s foreign policy from its anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist roots to its Cold War shift to anti-communism and anti-colonialism. The panelists’ work fills significant lacunae in U.S. diplomatic history and U.S. labor history, particularly the Cold War. Unless audience members have read the book or are familiar with Hugh Wilford’s The Mighty Wurlitzer or Ted Morgan’s biography of AFL-CIO international affairs guru Jay Lovestone, A Covert Life, they would know almost nothing about the important and often controversial role U.S. organized labor played across the world.

That scholars have managed to overlook the AFL-CIO role is puzzling. It is a story filled with intrigue, fascinating characters, and drama. International affairs chief Lovestone was the defrocked leader of the Communist Party of the United States turned anti-Communist of such intensity that he alienated the CIA officers who provided assistance to AFL-CIO projects. His union intervened in France and Italy by working to split Communist-led unions and breaking strikes that threatened to bring down both countries’ economies and governments. Later in the Cold War, the AFL-CIO’s support for Poland’s Solidarity trade union played a crucial role in its survival and thus the ultimate collapse of Polish communism. The AFL-CIO immersed itself, often controversially, in Latin America, where it assisted anti-Communist trade unions in support of “bread-and-butter” unionism, and actively opposed Leftist governments. In Africa, it worked with trade unions to end colonialism and in support of modernization. For women workers, the AFL-CIO’s record was much worse, as the union almost completely ignored the possibility of organizing women workers, and sought to hinder if not thwart international efforts to focus on their problems.

If our roundtable is selected, panelists will provide an overview of the field of Cold War international labor organizing, and will discuss their own research in the field of labor history and its relationship to Cold War diplomatic history. Specific topics the panel will cover include the union’s relationship with the CIA, the AFL’s effort to expose Soviet slave labor camps, the AFL-CIO’s intervention in Latin America including the creation of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), its Latin American partnership with business and the U.S. government, the union’s effort to thwart international labor’s attempts to address the problems of women workers, its opposition to French colonialism in Algeria and support for the FLN, the role it played in organizing sub-Saharan African labor and moderating its hardline anti-Communist stance against neutralism, and its role in pressuring the Reagan administration in support of Solidarity while providing massive material assistance to the Polish union.