The Managed Liberalization Project: US Labor Unions’ Postwar International Trade Program

This paper argues that union leaders became disillusioned with the process of globalization by the 1970s and 1980s because their postwar project for what I term “managed liberalization” failed. Influenced by the work of institutional economists and union leaders’ transnational interactions, postwar industrial union leaders advocated for gradual tariff reductions coupled with domestic programs to assist workers struggling with job losses. In this, labor leaders sought to entrust government experts with the task of managing a technocratic, internationally-coordinated liberalization program. Over the ensuing decades, however, labor leaders lost faith in trade liberalization as their proposed programs met with resistance from business leaders, foreign trade unionists, and political leaders from across the United States, Western Europe, and the Global South. By the 1990s, US union activism on trade policy bore few signs of postwar union leaders’ technocratic visions. The managed liberalization project was dead.