US Labor Intervention in Latin America: The Politics of Class Harmony and the American Institute for Free Labor Development

This paper examines US labor intervention in Latin America during the first half of the Cold War and historicizes a primary institutional vehicle of said intervention: the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). Through US labor ambassadors’ and union officials’ teaching of “free trade unionism,”—a more “developed” form of unionism that stressed a politics of class harmony between workers and management—AIFLD teachers and administrators imagined themselves as Cold War protectors of democracy in a region of rising communist sympathies. Although publicized as strictly a worker-to-worker educational exchange program, the AIFLD was funded and intimately tied to the US State Department. AIFLD leadership in Washington and station chiefs in several Latin American countries surveilled working-class enclaves, gathering economic and political information to share with US embassies and the AFL-CIO International Affairs Department. I argue, the AIFLD exemplified a unique form of US intervention in Latin America with the goal of splitting left labor movements and thereby thwarting the growing threat of independent economic and social programs in the region, often portrayed by US foreign policy officials as communist inspired and directed. By analyzing the educational curricula of AIFLD classes, correspondence, memoranda, and the public rhetoric of its officials, one can reveal the internal logic of free trade unionism as a form of anti-communist containment as well as its incorporation into the US hegemonic project of postwar modernization in the global south. The Chilean case study included in this paper demonstrates the precise mechanisms of intervention and its relative success.