Review: Blue Collar Empire:The Untold Story of US Labor’s GlobaL Anti-Communist Crusade by Jeff Schurhke. Reviewed by Ruth Needleman, professor emerita, Indiana University Labor Studies.
With Blue Collar Empire, Jeff Schurhke has provided a clearly written, comprehensive and meticulously documented account of the AFL-CIO’s decades of subversive actions aimed at dividing, replacing or just destroying labor federations and movements throughout the world. The attacks were always undertaken in the name of fighting communism and building free trade unionism. By free trade unionism the AFL meant not government controlled. Yet, in reality the AFL closely aligned itself to U.S. foreign policy. In fact, Schurhke argues that the AFL “made the labor movement an appendage of Washington’s foreign policy apparatus.” (284).
To a large degree, the AFL tied itself to U.S. policy out of agreement not necessity, although the funding for its overseas operations came almost exclusively from the U.S> government. however, went after any labor organization that in any way challenged US government and corporate interests.
The story is not exactly “untold.” Scores of journalists, activist scholars and historians have exposed the underhanded practices of the AFL-CIO for over half a century. I did extensive research in the 1970s, for example, on the AFL-CIO in Chile, interviewing high-ranking officials in the AFL, the State Department and in the International Trade Secretariats. This book, however, does provide a fuller global story, covering virtually all of the AFL’s campaigns and brings them into the present, discussing the current day Solidarity Center and its continuing ties to subversion and anticommunism.
Schurhke’s work is extremely important, because it is impossible to understand the decline of US labor union power over the past 75 years without taking into account the ways in which the AFL-CIO adhered to US foreign policy objectives, which led the federation to oppose major labor movements in other countries.
Schurhke also points out that the AFL worked in a similar fashion at home as it did internationally. Its domestic anti-communist campaigns undermined US labor unions and labor’s power by expelling whole unions and tens of thousands of members, raiding progressive unions, setting up alternative organizations and, then, with the Taft-Hartley, putting anti-communist clauses into their constitutions. In the name of cooperating with management, the AFL squashed militant voices and actions at home. From a high of 35%, US organized labor went into steep decline, representing 10% of the work force today.
The Story
The central story of the book began in the 19th century, although Schurhke focuses on the post-WWII period. He organizes the chapters chronologically into three parts. Part I: Free Trade Unionism 1945-1960; Part II: Free Labor Development 1960-1973; and Part III, Free Market Revolution 1973-1995. The conclusion tackles the Solidarity Center’s current practices.
Early on the Federation became a devotee of trilateralism: government, big business and big labor working together. Class collaboration, not class struggle, according to Schurhke, drove the AFL’s work. The central international agents of the AFL included Jay Lovestone, Irving Brown and, in Latin America, Serafino Romualdi. They developed the AFL’s strategy for fighting communists in post- World War II Europe and then Latin America. Enter the main labor federations to identify and buy the loyalty of pro-American unionists; then encourage and aid them to take over the unions. Failing that—and they always did fail at that—set up an alternate organization, to be funded by the US government through the Agency for International Development (AID) and also through the CIA, using as conduits phony foundations and the European-based International Trade Secretariats (ITS). In France, for example, Schurhke explains how the AFL made no headway in the Communist-led General Workers’ Confederation (CGT), so they created Force Ouvriere which never attracted significant membership.
All the key players had dual loyalties (and often employment ties) to both labor and intelligence agencies. Romualdi, for example, worked for the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor to the CIA) during World War II.
The high point of this AFL crusade, carried out in Central and South America and the Caribbean, came with the founding of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) in 1961-62 in support of the Alliance for Progress. Propelled into action by the success of Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, notes Schurhke, labor’s cold warriors intensified their work through AIFLD, an institute allegedly dedicated to education. AIFLD held thousands of in-country seminars and classes, brought the most “talented” (read pro-American) workers to their US-based education center at Front Royal, VA, and paid them as interns afterwards in exchange for regular informational reports on their countries’ political situation.
As Schurhke notes the classes focused on collective bargaining, US labor history and economics, but were oriented toward fighting the communists. Bill Doherty, who inherited the directorship of AIFLD from Serafino Romualdi, bragged in a 1996 interview: “We’re no longer training in terms of how to organize and collective bargaining and form a union. We train then in how we had to expel the communists from our unions back in the days of the CIO and early AF of L.” (James Shea and Don Kienzle) AIFLD Education Director Bill Douglas told me in 1974, “We went out of our way to work with independent unions; practically we went out to create unions we could work with.”
AIFLD established a Social Projects Department with the purpose of providing housing and credit unions for workers. They heralded this work as a great benefit to labor in the Third World. Schurhke, too, characterizes the projects as beneficial. But according to Joseph Palisi, who worked for AIFLD in 1964-65 charged with establishing a food for peace program, the housing projects were “the most scandalous” initiatives sponsored by AIFLD. “You wouldn’t have believed the questionnnaires they sent out,” he emphasized to me. They had two pages of questions about the local union and each individual worker, political affiliations and organizational ties. The head of the housing projects for AIFLD, according to Palisi, was a military captain. “A retired Air Force Colonel was in charge of personnel […] The most striking thing [about AIFLD] was the participation of high-ranking retired miliary personnel.” He went to say, “there were even more important crossovers with military intelligence work.”Schurhrke does a good job explaining the close ties between AFL-CIO and CIA intelligence, but does not mention the role of military intelligence.
These projects enabled AIFLD to gather the names of pro- and anti-US workers which they shared with rightwing forces in the countries, usually leading up to a military coup and the establishment of a brutal dictatorship. Perhaps the most documented case was Chile, where the AFL-CIO not only worked directly with coup forces but helped to create organizations to undermine the government through strikes in mining and transport, as Schurhke indicates.
The facts suggest that AIFLD’s work was more nefarious than even Schurhke maintains. He pointed out how tens of thousands of workers were killed and incarcerated after the dictatorships and coups that the AFL-CIO had backed in one country after another: Brazil, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Uruguay and Bolivia. The collusion with rightwing forces was operational more than educational. The core work of the AFL-CIO’s international cold warriors was intelligence-gathering, identifying potential collaborators and the names of “enemies,’’ through local classes, social projects and US-based institutes.
On the heels of AIFLD, the AFL-CIO set up institutes in Africa and Asia: the African American Labor Center and the Asian American Institute for Free Labor, with similar programs and objectives.
A majority of union members in the US never knew—and still do not know—what was done in their name. When they did learn, however, workers and unions protested. Schurhke focuses on the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador (NLC) (255-62) in the early ‘80s. Although he explores a number of other efforts to lift the veil, this campaign, in particular, drew in union presidents and sparked confrontations at national AFL events. At a national convention, union President Ken Blaylock (AFGE) criticized the Federation: “…I look at Iran, I look at Nicaragua, I look at El Salvador, Guatemala, I would like for one time my government to be on the side of the people.” He then pointed to the AFL and said, Congress acted, so “the American labor movements ought to hear that message too.” (260) TV personality and Screen Actors Guild president, Ed Asner, stressed that “labor support of brutally repressive regimes is unforgiveable.” (261)
The worldwide struggle against Apartheid in South Africa was a touchstone for labor solidarity. It drew support from millions of workers and union members around the world and in the US. West coast Longshoremen refused to unload South African cargo. Emil Mazey, Secretary-Treasurer of the United Auto Workers Union “spoke at some of the earliest anti-war rallies in Detroit and at teach-ins at the University of Michigan,” according to Schurhke. The AFL-CIO, however. refused to support a boycott and divestment movement, bowing to its corporate allies. The Federation spoke in favor of “constructive engagement,” and it was not until 1986 that the Federation changed its position. (248)
What, then, happened to these Institutes and campaigns? Following the relentless exposure of AFL and CIA cooperation, the murderous outcomes of AFL work in the Third World, growing criticism in Congress and the state department, the AFL-CIO conceded to a facelift. The change came with the ascension of New Voices to the leadership of the AFL-CIO; the AFL buried the three institutes and consolidated them into one new one the American Center of Labor Solidarity in 1996. But the initiative itself for change did not even come from within the AFL. Schurhke cites Nelson Bass’ study of the Solidarity Center: “USAID is encouraging the AFL-CIO to consolidate its regional institutes into a new single global institute and to set strategic objectives globally and within specific regions which would ‘conform to USAID’s own efforts to improve oversight of labor programs as well as manage and allocate in line with agency priorities.’” (287) (my emphasis)
Given Neoliberalism’s ruthless destruction of workers’ rights and jobs around the world, the AFL has attempted to shift more of its outward focus to human rights. International Affairs director for the AFL-CIO, Barbara Shailor, however, told the Political Director of the United Electrical Workers’ Union, Chris Townsend, that “the State Department controls the [Solidarity Center’s] work in the countries that have either oil resources or Islamic insurgencies, and we can have the rest.” (288) So much for the AFL’s independence from government, its allegedly “free trade unionism.”
To this day, the AFL-CIO has not acknowledged nor apologized for what it has done to labor unions and workers across the globe and within the US. Nor has it broken its ties with US foreign policy priorities. Its international work, as Schurhke documents, is still funded mainly through the US government AID and channeled through the National Endowment for Democracy, the latest CIA front.
“Ostensibly the voice of American workers,” concludes Schurhke, “the Federation was also the country’s most staunchly anticommunist institutions. Instead of uncompromisingly confronting corporate power, organizing against militarism and war, and encouraging genuine union democracy at home and abroad, top labor officials maintained an unwholesome alliance with Washington’s foreign policy apparatus—and occasionally with corporate America as well—to undermine class-conscious, militant workers’ movements around the world.”
It is incumbent upon those who teach labor history to incorporate this story of the AFL-CIO’s subversive practices into their classes.
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