Introduction

excerpted from the book

Workers of the World Undermined

American Labor's role in U.S. foreign policy

by Beth Sims

South End Press, 1992, paper

p1
... Joe Gunn, president of the Texas AFL-CIO, described the dilemma:,

The "big picture" is this: wealthy capitalists are international in scope and run a global system; workers don't have a global system to protect themselves from such exploitation. The labor movement simply hasn't achieved the global | organization necessary to defend workers everywhere.

Yet Gunn's comment tells only part of the picture. Since the end of World War II, organized labor in the United States has aggressively developed ties to the international labor community through the AFL-CIO and its four international arms-the Free Trade Union Institute, American Institute for Free Labor Development [AIFLD], AfricanAmerican Labor Center, and Asian-American Free Labor Institute-the U.S. labor community has reached across the globe to join hands with foreign counterparts. Along with the AFL-CIO's Department of International Affairs and the federation's European office, these institutes have sponsored numerous projects designed to strengthen their overseas allies. They have funded foreign unions, provided education and training, supplied technical assistance, developed agrarian unions, sponsored social service projects, conducted informational activities and visitor exchanges, and supported political action programs.

Although many of the individual programs sponsored by the AFL-CIO have helped foreign labor and even been sought by it, the overall foreign policy which is carried out by the AFL-CIO and its institutes often harms workers both in this country and overseas. Derived from the ideological biases of a select group of top labor bureaucrats-many of whom lack actual trade union experience-the resulting policies have stressed anticommunism at the expense of worker militancy. Simultaneously, these policies have affirmed the right of the United States to intervene in the affairs of other countries, whether through governmental or private actors.

In the process, foreign labor movements have been shaped to fit the needs of the United States government and business sector. Their capacity to develop independently of foreign intervention has been curtailed. Their most vigorous spokespeople have been undercut and co-opted. Left in the wake of AFL-CIO intervention are a collection of don't-rock-the-boat unions which often prove to be inadequate representatives of their own country's workers. They also serve as feeble allies for workers in developed countries hoping to unite in powerful global solidarity movements against corporate exploitation. Instead of advancing the cause of international worker solidarity, the AFL-CIO has undermined it. It has damaged the capacity of the world's workers to counter effectively the "harmonization downward" that is both hitting workers hard in the United States and sustaining the fierce oppression of workers in underdeveloped and developing countries.

p4
... the "free" trade unions supported by the AFL-CIO are those that are most receptive to U.S. economic and political influence in their countries and to the notions of "business unionism." This fact stems from the philosophy that drives both domestic and foreign policy in the labor federation ... an acceptance of capitalism and the relationships between workers, owners, and government that it produces. Labor and business along with government, are seen not as inevitable opponents, but as potential partners in political and economic development. The prospect of this potential alliance inspires the conservative concept of business unionism. Described by one labor analyst as a "tacit alliance between the captains of industry and their labor lieutenants," it is this concept of unionism that the AFL-CIO exports to its international allies.

Samuel Gompers, the first president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) described this type of unionism as "trade unionism pure and simple." In this form of unionism, workers fight for the wages and benefits that the market will bear, and organizing takes place at the level of the factory, industrial sector, or confederations among sectors. But business unionism excludes the notion that workers form a class with widely shared characteristics. By emphasizing narrow, sectoral interests, business unionism tends to isolate groups of workers from one another. It likewise hampers the creation of coalitions with other sectors in society, such as environmental activists, or the homeless and unemployed.

Because workers and capitalists are idealized as partners in progress, there is no analysis of the fundamental relationships of capitalism that, by their nature, limit the advancement of most workers over the long run. Briefly, these relationships have two central features. Workers compete with other workers to sell their labor, and owners exploit those workers by undervaluing the true worth of their labor in order to make a profit. Business unionism does not recognize the existence of this fundamental exploitatave relationship as the necessary motor of capitalist profit-making. Instead, it treats workers as members of sectoral interest groups that can be individually strengthened in order to press demands against individual employers. But true worker solidarity would overcome this emphasis on individual labor sectors and employers. Genuine efforts at solidarity would attempt to bridge sectoral, regional, and ideological differences to link all workers together in a common effort to understand and change the society-wide socioeconomic and political structures that permit employers to dominate and exploit them.

p6
... The notion of class struggle is inconsistent with the cooperative labor-business relations advocated by the AFL-CIO. This promotion of a so-called apolitical trade unionism, however, is a political choice with political outcomes. Refusing to question the underlying assumptions and relationships of capitalism, the U.S. federation has demonized radical responses to capitalist exploitation and failed to come to grips with the fact that "misery breeds militancy." In so doing, the AFL-CIO has, intentionally or not, supported the global economic and political status quo.

The federation has given U.S. labor's official stamp of approval to political and economic systems that reflect U.S.-style concepts of free-market capitalism and minimal political participation. In the process, it has undermined movements for workplace control and democracy and rejected attempts to analyze and restructure fundamental relationships among owners, workers, and governments. When, as in Brazil (1964), the Dominican Republic (1965), and Chile (1973), it has found that radical movements were too strong, it has rejected even minimal electoral democracy and supported military coups. It has placed itself on the side of governments and elites that prop up the global dominance of the United States and the economic dominance of owners over workers.

p6
Organized labor, business, and the governing elite in the United States have traditionally seen the third world as a source of raw materials useful in U.S. enterprises and as a market for goods produced by U.S. workers. Overseas investments were also considered necessary to absorb the excess capital produced by businesses in the United States.

p9
While western transnational corporations (TNCs) have prospered, both U.S. and foreign workers have suffered as capital has become less tied to a given country and more transnational in nature. ( In search of maximum profits, TNCs hop country to country, hoping to lower their wage bill while keeping productivity high. Cash-starved third world governments support this effort. The need for hard currency and jobs has prompted poor governments to compete globally for foreign investment by holding down wage rates and repressing labor. A. Sivanandan, the director of London's Institute of Race Relations eloquently described this process and the damage it does to workers overseas:

The governments of the [underdeveloped countries] desperate not for development as such but the end to the unemployment that threatens their regimes, enter into a Dutch auction with each other, offering the multinational corporations cheaper and cheaper labour, de-unionized labour, captive labour, female labour and child labour-by removing whatever labour laws, whatever trade union rights have been gained in the past from at least that part of the country, the [export-processing zone], which foreign capital chooses for its own.

In the global economy, tragedies such as these do not stay neatly tucked away in distant, destitute, and isolated pockets of the third world. As the Watsonville experience demonstrates, what happens to workers in the underdeveloped world boomerangs back to hurt workers in industrialized countries as well. Runaway shops spur job insecurity, downward pressure on wage levels, and assaults on worker rights in developed countries like the United States. As the economy becomes more global, the trend has been toward the equalization of conditions for labor in both developed and underdeveloped countries, but that trend has been downward-toward the levels characteristic in the third world. And the AFL-CIO's traditional support for the U.S. government's foreign policy has only aggravated that trend. Whereas building militant, united, global labor movements is needed to reverse this course of events, the AFL-CIO's overseas programs-as in Poland-have often encouraged workers to abandon militancy and shun radicals in pursuit of narrow, sectoral goals.

Labor and Business: Hand in Hand

In its overseas activities, the AFL-CIO has been an ally in the expansion of U.S. business around the world and in the consequent exploitation of foreign workers. In some cases, it has actively joined with business in the pursuit of foreign economic and political objectives. In other cases, U.S. corporations have benefited as a by-product of the type of unionism promoted by the labor federation. As AIFLD official William Doherty told Congress, "Our collaboration [with business] takes the form of trying to make the investment climate more attractive and more inviting." Peter Grace, head of the W.R. Grace conglomerate and then-chairman of AIFLD's board of trustees, explained bluntly that the institute "teaches workers to increase their company's business."

Such attitudes have a long history. Organized labor's cooperative relationship with big business in the United States dates back to the turn of the century, but the postwar version of that collaboration was formalized by Nelson Rockefeller, head of the State Department's Office of Inter-American Affairs during World War I. He encouraged a wartime coalition of labor, business, and the government that carried over into the Cold War era. Over the years, that cooperative relationship has been manifested in various forms. The American Federation of Labor's anticommunist activities in postwar Europe were financed

by U.S. businesses, for example. Currently, both labor and business serve on the board of the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED). A grant-making agency that finances pro-U.S. private groups overseas, NED supports politically active organizations in such strategic sectors as labor, business, and the media.

p12
The problem is in the overall type of unionism supported by the federation overseas. The AFL-CIO and its regional institutes adhere to an anticommunist, pro-U.S., and procapitalist agenda that shapes their choice of beneficiaries. Unfortunately, this agenda often pits the labor institutes against nationalist and popular movements that are struggling to redistribute economic and political resources in a more equitable fashion. Even in the Chilean case, the AFL-CIO's supportive efforts focused on its allies in the United Workers Central, while failing to publicize the repression of more radical unionists. Tragically, the federation has acted similarly in El Salvador, where popular labor forces that oppose the rightist government and the skewed social system it protects have suffered merciless repression.

Despite positive rhetoric about backing worldwide worker rights and vigorous unions, the federation and its institutes have sabotaged worker unity, promoted conservative and apolitical trade unions, and built parallel unions to sap the strength of more broad-based and progressive labor organizations. In various cases-as with the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, the Brazilian General Confederation of Labor, and the Haitian Federation of Trade Union Workers under Jean-Claude Duvalier-this has meant that the U.S. federation has sided with unions that have been controlled or influenced by right-wing governments.

... Rather than just being another player, the AFL-CIO has assumed a uniquely important role in U.S. expansionism. This expansionism is fueled by a bipartisan agreement that it is acceptable for the United States to intervene in the affairs of other countries. Described euphemistically by one study as a "sober sense of mission about [U.S.] responsibilities to struggling democracies elsewhere," this consensus has characterized most of U.S. foreign policy since the late 1800s.

... Throughout the twentieth century, the United States played an | ever-larger role on the world stage, but the collapse of the European l powers after World War II opened the globe to a vastly expanded U.S. presence. The United States soon came to dominate the international economy. In 1950, the United States produced a full 40 percent of the world's goods and services. At the same time, Washington built up its war machine. Under Truman, military spending jumped from $13 billion in 1950 to $50 billion in 1953, with only a small percentage earmarked for the Korean conflict. With the leverage provided by its economic and military resources, the United States restructured the international economy in its favor. It forced trade barriers down in Europe and began pushing into new markets in Asia and Africa, protected by newly established military bases around the world.

During the activist years from 1945 until the mid-1960s, bipartisan acceptance of U.S. expansionism supported a number of initiatives that extended the global reach of the United States. These included the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Southeast Asia
Treaty Organization, the Alliance for Progress, and the Vietnam conflict. Massive public opposition to the Vietnam War rattled the foundations of this consensus, but efforts both in and out of government were soon launched to reinvigorate national willingness to extend U.S. power overseas.

By the early 1980s, that consensus had recuperated considerably. Over the next few years, backed by substantial public support, the United States invaded Grenada and Panama; bombed Libya; sent U.S. military '`advisers" to El Salvador; backed anticommunist guerrilla movements in Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia; mined Nicaraguan harbors; and launched a full-scale war in the Persian Gulf. Washington also intervened in electoral activities in various countries, including Nicaragua, Eastern Europe, and the Philippines. Moreover, by 1991, Washington-funded advisers and technical teams were swarming through Eastern Europe, helping to restructure political and economic systems following the collapse of the previous governments.

Acting in tandem with official initiatives, the AFL-CIO boosts overseas unions that oppose worker movements holding radical positions. This holds true even when the interests of labor would be better served by more radical unions.

p16
... As one close friend of the AFL-CIO has said, "The central preoccupation of American labor in the field of foreign affairs...has been to mobilize democratic forces to counter the threat posed by totalitarianism." But the AFL-CIO defined "democratic" and "totalitarian" labor movements in East/West terms, perceiving even democratically organized left-wing and non-aligned union movements as dangerous allies of the Soviet Union.

p17
... the AFL-CIO became committed to fighting communism with whatever means necessary, ranging from the building of pro-U.S. labor movements to the backing of U.S. militarism. Those who developed the federation's foreign policy considered the conflict with communism a "permanent war," according to one analyst, in which "only one side [could] survive and the other be destroyed. Consequently, as in hot war, you do not speak of the good points of the enemy or your own bad points, and you permit no charity to neutrals."

Attitudes such as these led to a siege mentality and tunnel vision regarding radical movements in the third world. The AFL-CIO's anticommunism blended a fear of Soviet expansion, genuinely felt by many in the postwar years, with a fear of all forms of radicalism. The federation became not only anticommunist, said one union activist, but "anti-left. It even opposed the democratic left." As this activist explained, the leadership of the AFL-CIO held "idiosyncratic, fundamentalist views" of communism and left-wing movements for social change. "The anticommunism of the federation is excessively broad, it's not just anti-Stalinist, but is anti-leftist, anti-democratic left," the top union staffer observed.

... And in the postwar period, such attitudes were crucially misguided. In response to outrageous inequities, worker and social movements that demanded fundamental, even revolutionary change, sprang up throughout the developing world, especially after the success of the Cuban Revolution. Assuming that these movements were inspired or manipulated by the Soviet Union, the AFL-CIO climbed into a "Cold War straitjacket."

The federation developed a policy of "shunning" unions that were considered part of the communist camp. It implemented its anticommunism by red-baiting outspoken radical unionists and attempting to outlaw the political participation of communists in unions. Like other anticommunists, the federation helped to maintain order and an often-repressive status quo because upheaval and dissent were thought to open the door for communist infiltration, masterminded from Moscow. In the Cold War battle the AFL-CIO found itself on the side of conservative anti-union forces ...

... But in misreading the nature and objectives of militant social and nationalist conflict in East/West, communist/"democratic" terms, the U.S. labor federation placed itself on the wrong side of the fight for justice and equity. In the words of two labor activists, it violated "the fundamental principle of solidarity" by purging communists from its own ranks and forcing them to be excluded from other union movements. Because the Left was often the source of much of the dynamism and vision of these militant nationalist movements, the U.S. federation sapped the energy of progressive forces and participated in the "barren defense of the status quo" characteristic of much of U.S. foreign policy during the postwar years. It also marginalized itself from the world's progressive labor movements. As labor's friend Carl Gershman indicated, "The AFL-CIO's firmness of conviction...is...responsible for American labor's relative isolation on the world scene."

p18
The character of the relationship between the U.S. government and the AFL-CIO has varied in response to political and economic changes in both the domestic and international arenas. During wartime and in regions where the United States has carried out military operations or counterinsurgency actions-in World War II, postwar Europe, Vietnam, Central America, and the Philippines, for example-organized labor has acted as a full-fledged government operative. At other times and in areas less strategically important to the United States, the AFL-CIO's relationship with Washington has been more independent. Similarly, in times of exceptional economic pressure on labor, there are more discrepancies between labor's policy positions and those of Washington. The decade of the 1980s was one such period, when the decline of U.S. competitiveness in the global economy coupled with the anti-union philosophies of U.S. administrations drove a wedge between the AFL-CIO and Washington on certain foreign policy issues.

Workers of the World Undermined

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