The Sordid History of Organized Labor's Foreign Policy Sins
An interview with Jeff Schuhrke about "Blue Collar Empire."
If you have ever heard the derisive term “AFL-CIA,” you will want to read Jeff Schuhrke’s new book. In “Blue Collar Empire,” Schuhrke, a long time labor journalist and scholar, lays out the entire disturbing history of the American labor movement’s decades of close involvement in anticommunist crusades around the world. The reality of the AFL-CIO’s ties with the Cold War, the CIA, and America’s bloody foreign policy is, I assure you, much more astounding than you might think.
As the labor movement of today struggles to revive its power in the workplace, bring in new members, and act as a political force for peace in Gaza and elsewhere, the history that Schuhrke’s book covers burns with continued relevance. I spoke to him about the AFL-CIO’s sins of the past, what today’s union members should know, and how to make the labor movement less evil. Our interview is below.
How Things Work: Your book has a ton of great stories in it, but one that really drives home the point is the one about the discovery of the CIA office inside of AFSCME's headquarters. Can you just briefly retell that one?
Jeff Schuhrke: In 1964, Jerry Wurf was elected AFSCME president, narrowly beating the incumbent president, Arnold Zander. Wurf was a democratic socialist and civil rights ally from New York City. After winning the AFSCME presidency, he moves to DC and is getting settled into his new office in the union’s headquarters. He comes across an office in the building housing the “International Relations Department,” which he had never hear of, where group of mysterious men with no clear ties to AFSCME are hanging out and speaking Spanish.
He quickly learns that these guys are CIA operatives, and that his predecessor, Zander, had forged a covert partnership with the spy agency dating back to the 1950s to bolster “pro-American” and anticommunist unions in Latin America and the Caribbean. Horrified by this discovery, Wurf fires these guys and says he wants no part of the CIA. But then he starts getting calls from the White House, and he’s taken to a private residence in Maryland where top CIA officials are telling him to reconsider. Wurf doesn’t back down, but he agrees to never publicly divulge any specific names or details about any of this—and he’s true to his word on that.
But a couple years later, in 1966, investigative reporters with the New York Times, Washington Post, and other publications ended up exposing the by-now defunct AFSCME-CIA connection. In particular, these exposés showed how AFSCME helped funnel CIA money to the South American nation of Guyana in the early 1960s, before Wurf became the union’s president, to sabotage its progressive, democratically elected government by bankrolling a nearly three month-long general strike led by the political opposition, which I explain more in the book.
To what extent did WW2 and the dawning of the Cold War shift the labor movement's vision of foreign policy? Was there a stronger "workers of the world unite" sentiment prior to WW2, or is that just a sentimental illusion?
Schuhrke: Since the late nineteenth century, the US labor movement was divided between those who really did have a “workers of the world unite” sentiment and those who had more of an “I’ve got mine, Jack” attitude. The former was represented by the Knights of Labor, Industrial Workers of the World, and various radicals like anarchists, socialists, and communists, who saw unions as vehicles for waging class struggle and bringing about fundamental social and economic reforms, if not revolution.
The latter was represented by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which was unions of hard-to-replace, skilled craftsmen who were almost exclusively of Northern European descent. The AFL saw unions as a way to benefit and protect their own members, and sometimes to advocate for workers within the proper channels of the established order, but not to push for any kind of radicalism or revolutionary change. In the interwar years, the AFL became very isolationist. European socialists founded the International Federation of Trade Unions in 1919 to try bringing the workers of the world together, but the AFL refused to join because its leaders didn’t want to associate with socialists.
The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which was formed as a breakaway from the AFL in 1935 and generally tolerated the presence of communists and other leftists in its ranks, definitely had an internationalist outlook and early on developed fraternal ties with left-leaning unions in Latin America and Europe. During World War II, the CIO continued this “labor diplomacy” by building relationships with the union federations of the other Allied countries, including the Soviet Union. Shortly after the war ended in 1945, the CIO and the labor federations of the Allied countries formed a kind of United Nations for labor called the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). It was similar to the UN in that it brought communists and non-communists together in the name of international cooperation and anti-fascism. But the AFL’s vehemently anticommunist leaders refused to join the WFTU because they wanted nothing to do with the Soviet Union. This would be like if the United States refused to join the UN to protest its inclusion of communist countries.
It was this Popular Front-style labor internationalism, and the fact that the CIO was starting to eclipse the AFL on the world stage, that finally brought the AFL out of its isolationism. Just as they had driven leftists from their own ranks, AFL officials were determined to push communists out of foreign labor movements and kill the WFTU in its infancy. The AFL started pushing for a Cold War confrontation between the US and USSR even before World War II was over and the two countries were still allies. As soon as the war ended, they sent representatives abroad to begin splitting foreign labor federations between communists and anticommunists, eventually helping provoke a schism in the WFTU. With the Red Scare that began in the late 1940s, which was in many ways encouraged by the AFL, the CIO broke from the WFTU and expelled its own communist-led affiliates. This anticommunist crusade became the basis of the AFL and later AFL-CIO’s foreign policy agenda for the next several decades, as I describe in the book.
George Meany and Lane Kirkland, the two men who led the AFL-CIO from 1955-1995, were staunch anticommunists. You quote a congressional aide in the 1980s saying that "The AFL-CIO in general has foreign policy positions to the right of Ronald Reagan." Setting aside the immorality of things that these men supported, was there any real strategic gain for union members as a result of all those decades of the AFL-CIO aligning itself with the Cold War's mission? Or was it all just a reflection of those men's genuine anticommunist views?
Schuhrke: One of my main arguments of the book, which I hope lands with trade unionists and labor advocates today, is that the AFL-CIO’s participation in the Cold War overseas wasn’t just immoral (which it was), but was also enormously detrimental to the U.S. labor movement itself. As I show in the book, the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions poured huge amounts of resources and energy into this global anticommunist crusade—more than I think a lot of folks realize—and yet what was the ultimate result? Ever declining union density, employment precarity, and a world dominated by multinational corporations and ravaged by war and climate chaos.
But I don’t say that people like Meany and Kirkland were just plain stupid. An argument can be made that between the 1940s and late 1960s, the Cold War was beneficial to white, male workers in manufacturing, whose industrial unions were the backbone of the U.S. labor movement in that time. This was the period when the United States was the main exporter to the non-communist world and really dominated the global economy. As long as foreign countries remained integrated (and subservient) in this U.S.-managed economic order and didn’t “go communist,” unionized industrial workers in the United States ostensibly stood to benefit with secure jobs and good wages. The same can be said for labor’s stake in the military-industrial complex that first took root in those early Cold War decades.
Of course, millions of U.S. workers didn’t fit into this calculation. Workers of color, women, farmworkers, public sector workers, healthcare workers, other service sector workers weren’t particularly benefiting from the Cold War. And the fact that the left-led unions were being shunned and raided as a result of anticommunist hysteria only made things worse because they were the same unions that were the most dedicated to organizing these more marginalized groups of workers.
By the 1970s, as the global political economy began falling out of favor for American industrial workers and U.S. corporations increasingly looked to automation and outsourcing, it becomes harder to see how the Cold War was doing much to benefit even the relatively more privileged strata of union members. But most of labor officialdom was too complacent, too chummy with the establishment, and didn’t fully understand the urgency of the moment. Many of these guys thought they could carry on with business as usual, including continuing to blindly back the Cold War. That’s partly why in this period you start to see rank-and-file rebellions break out in unions like the UAW, United Steelworkers, and Teamsters. The younger generation of unionists saw the writing on the wall and were trying to get top officials to switch gears, to be more militant, and this included pointed criticisms of labor’s anticommunist foreign intrigues.
And yet in this period, the AFL-CIO only doubled down on its anticommunism. This gets to another way that high-ranking officials like Meany and Kirkland believed supporting the Cold War was good for their members. After decades of state repression against unions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and after winning limited gains by pledging not to strike during the two world wars, many union officials came to believe that the best path forward for organized labor was to demonstrate patriotism, loyalty, and animosity toward foreign enemies. A lot of AFL-CIO leaders were convinced that one of the most important things they could do was show off their jingoism. And I think many of them internalized this, which is why it continued amid global economic restructuring and deindustrialization from the 1970s onward.
Interestingly enough, we just saw an example of this last week with the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) strike. On the first day of the work stoppage, the union issued a public statement promising that military shipments would not be affected, which meant that despite the strike, ILA members would continue loading weapons presumably bound for Israel to be used for slaughtering civilians. The statement bragged that ILA also stands for “I Love America.” A lot of folks, myself included, were horrified and disappointed by this despite supporting the strike. But it demonstrates what I’m talking about. If the ILA had also struck military cargo, whether for moral reasons or just as part of their broader strike of commercial goods, it would have almost certainly invited the wrath of the federal government. President Biden resisted pressure to break the strike through a Taft-Hartley injunction, but I highly doubt he would’ve been so lenient if the union had decided to impede arms shipments. I’m not trying to defend the ILA’s decision here—I desperately want a labor movement that is both strong enough and principled enough to always do what’s right—but that’s sadly not the kind of labor movement we have in the U.S.
Instead of simply writing off the labor movement as a lost cause, which a lot of anti-war, anti-racist activists did during the Vietnam War era (another example of how supporting the Cold War served to hurt organized labor, in that case by alienating other social movements and becoming politically isolated), I believe we need to change the labor movement for the better. Just like we urgently need to unionize millions of unorganized workers and do a lot of other ambitious things, but it’s obviously hard work that requires confronting and challenging labor officials, in addition to organizing and educating workers.
In its many years of helping the CIA funnel money to various pro-capitalist groups overseas, the AFL-CIO found itself on the dark side of a lot of foreign policy questions. Apart from its support of the Vietnam War, which hangs over it to this day, is there one truly abominable episode of the AFL-CIO's history that you think union members should know about?
Schuhrke: There are actually so many, which are laid out in the book, that it’s hard to name just one. Particularly shocking to me was how, in 1950, the AFL and CIA partnered to send literal spies, saboteurs, and terrorists from Taiwan into mainland China—which had “gone communist” the previous year—to blow up fuel supplies and stir up worker unrest in factories. This was through a CIA-funded front called the “Free China Labor League,” which was ostensibly an AFL-led educational campaign alerting the world to the “slave labor” practices in the People’s Republic of China. But the members of this group, who were Chinese workers affiliated with the anticommunist Kuomintang, were actually being trained and equipped to carry out what a secret memo I found described as “subversive activities” on the mainland. So much for “pure and simple” trade unionism.
Similarly, the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), which was the AFL-CIO’s government-funded education project in Latin America from the 1960s to 1990s, taught trainees how to combat left-wing influence within their unions and then funded their anticommunist activities. As I describe in the book, AIFLD and its graduates were implicated in some of the most notorious military coups in the region during this period, including Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973, which led to thousands of Latin American trade unionists being imprisoned, tortured, and murdered if they were part of left-wing, class-conscious unions.
All of labor's anticommunism only earned us the prize of neoliberalism, which hollowed out unions in America. You write that, "For the AFL-CIO's internationalists, protecting US jobs by safeguarding basic labor standards around the world--in direct response to globalization--became the central focus." After 30 years of neoliberal economic policies, how successful do you think the AFL-CIO was in that project?
Schuhrke: While the AFL-CIO’s anticommunist leaders were taking a victory lap over the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991, unions here at home were being decimated by deindustrialization and ruthless corporate attacks. Kirkland, the AFL-CIO’s president, was a graduate of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and a pal of Henry Kissinger’s. He was really good at fighting commies overseas, but now that he’d won that battle, he was faced with the challenge of being an actual labor leader. He didn’t do so great. The AFL-CIO under his leadership tried to stop passage of NAFTA, partly by going all out for Bill Clinton in the 1992 election, but Clinton just pushed NAFTA through anyway. After this, as you know, some of the younger union leaders like the SEIU’s John Sweeney and United Mine Workers’ Rich Trumka pushed Kirkland out and took control of the AFL-CIO in a sort of palace coup in 1995. Their goal was to try to reverse the ongoing decline in union density, and a big part of that meant fighting back against the neoliberal “race to the bottom.”
In the 30 years since, the AFL-CIO has done a decent job of improving its image abroad, especially in Latin America. Under Sweeney, Trumka, and now Liz Shuler, the AFL-CIO has been a strong ally of Brazil’s left-wing leader Lula. And after the 2019 military coup in Bolivia ousted socialist president Evo Morales, Trumka publicly condemned it while praising Morales for reducing poverty in the country. Such things would’ve been unthinkable under the AFL-CIO’s ancien regime. But I definitely don’t want to overstate it, as the AFL-CIO has still been implicated in a lot of U.S. meddling in Venezuela and elsewhere. There’s a tremendous amount that still needs to change in the AFL-CIO.
While building better somewhat better international relations, I think the U.S. labor movement clearly has not been able to meaningfully reverse the impacts of neoliberalism on workers both at home and abroad, in part because its main strategy for doing so has been to hope that the Democrats will make things right. I think this is partly why we’ve seen the rise of so many fascist movements around the globe, including here in the U.S. with Trumpism. Trump regularly exploits working-class alienation around neoliberalism to his advantage. The AFL-CIO has been far weaker in the past 30 years than it was in the Cold War period—and that’s in many ways because of its Cold War adventurism—so its ability to effect international issues has also been much weaker.
The AFL-CIO's various foreign policy arms, which all earned tainted reputations, were eventually rolled into the Solidarity Center 1997. You note that the Solidarity Center (which I know, as a labor journalist, gets very little public attention) is still almost totally funded by, and presumably influenced by, the US government. What should union members know about the Solidarity Center's activities today, and should they be concerned about its connection to the government?
Schuhrke: The Solidarity Center is active in over sixty countries around the world, serving as the international face of the AFL-CIO. It’s essentially an NGO that provides funding, training, and technical consultation to unions and worker organizations in other countries, especially the Global South. Many of its staffers come from the labor movement, and it ostensibly does benign work to support worker empowerment.
But at the same time, we should recognize that the Solidarity Center is effectively an appendage of the U.S. government. It is funded almost exclusively by the U.S. foreign policy apparatus to the tune of tens of millions of dollars every year, namely the National Endowment for Democracy and U.S. Agency for International Development—the same CIA-linked entities that funded the AFL-CIO’s anticommunist foreign activities in the Cold War. The Solidarity Center has been implicated in U.S. interventions in Venezuela trying to overthrow Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, and in the efforts to pull Ukraine toward the West and away from Russian influence long before Putin’s invasion.
I can’t say I know a whole lot about the Solidarity Center beyond that, though I write a little about it in the book’s conclusion. My own view is that while the U.S. labor movement should definitely have an internationalist orientation and maintain relationships and alliances with foreign unions, that type of work should not be financially dependent on the American government. That would likely mean a lot less funding and a more limited reach, but I’d rather see the U.S. labor movement have an independent foreign policy—making it more likely to oppose Washington’s international agenda when necessary.
In any case, it’s not up to me. What I think is needed first and foremost is more information, discussion, and debate about the Solidarity Center within the labor movement, which is virtually non-existent right now. But that might also require the AFL-CIO to officially acknowledge the role it played in dividing and undermining progressive workers’ movements around the world in partnership with the CIA during the Cold War, which it still has never done.
Israel's war in Gaza has generated a good deal of opposition from the US labor movement today--though our opposition has not had much noticeable impact. Are there any particular historic parallels to today's challenges that jump out to you? What should today's labor activists learn from history?
Schuhrke: Two big parallels jump out, both from the 1980s: the South African anti-apartheid movement and the Central American peace and solidarity movement. As explained in the book, organized labor played an important role in both movements, often despite the AFL-CIO’s top officials. Unions were not only passing resolutions and making statements, but they were also actively divesting their own pension funds from companies doing business with South Africa and calling on members to boycott such companies, like Shell Oil. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), the West Coast dockworkers, famously boycotted ships carrying South African cargo on a few occasions—even though this was a hugely risky move. Unions also tirelessly lobbied Congress against Reagan’s arming of the Nicaraguan Contras and Salvadoran military, also holding mass rallies in Washington with tens of thousands of union members. They pressured the State Department and foreign governments to protect South African and Central American trade unionists facing violent persecution, helping get some of them released from jail and hosting them as they toured North America and spoke at union halls. They sent delegations of U.S. labor leaders to these countries and reported back what they witnessed.
All of this had an impact on U.S. foreign policy, and also helped educate rank-and-file union members about the importance of international solidarity. So I think the same types of organizing and activism can and should be happening today within the labor movement around Palestine. A lot of it already is happening, but some of the more meaningful and material types of actions, like boycotts and divestments, are strongly opposed by many top union officials. This is partly because the U.S. labor movement’s relationship with Israel is historically rather unique—with a much, much stronger bond than with any other foreign country, except maybe Canada. So trying to get American unions to be even be vocally critical of Israel is a herculean task, let alone trying to get them to break financial ties. This is actually what my next book, which I’ve been working on for a while now, will be about.
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Previously, in How Things Work interviews: Shawn Fain; Sara Nelson; Gwen Mills; Tom Scocca; A Worker on Strike for 500 Days.
You can order Jeff Schuhrke’s book here, and you should. Jeff has also been a longtime contributor to the very fine magazine In These Times, which you should be reading if you care about the labor movement. After you purchase and read all of Jeff’s work, you can also pick up my own book about the labor movement, “The Hammer.” Labor books! A booming field!
I really like doing interviews with authors. They expose new books to a wider audience, and they are almost always interesting, because authors have such a depth of knowledge on the topics they write about. In an ideal world I would publish an interview on How Things Work every week, or at least every other week. There are actually have a number of books sitting on my shelf right now that I got for the express purpose of reading and then interviewing the author. The limiting factor in this whole operation is: It takes time to read books. The key to publishing more interviews on this site, therefore, is for me to be able to focus on it more exclusively, as a full time job. And the best way for you to help make that possible is to become a paid subscriber today. I do not have a paywall on this site. I just ask that if you read it and you like it and you are not broke, you take a moment to become a paid subscriber. Together we can make this place awesome in the long term. Thank you.
The joke about Joe McCarthy's 'hundreds of communists' in the CIA was that in fact, there probly WERE hundreds of CIA operatives in the CPUSA, working undercover to neutralize the party.
And leave us not forget the large number of US journalists who sent 'insights' to the agency over the decades...
I love the idea of more author interviews. The book culture has suffered so greatly in recent decades, with the vanishing of newspapers and their book columns, etc., that this would be striking a blow in the right direction. Go for it!