American labour leaders were partners in this international criminal operation, not dupes or paid off lackeys.
by Joe Allen
In Blue Collar Empire, Jeff Schuhrke uncovers how US labor unions, driven by anticommunist aims, became tools of Cold War geopolitics. This review explores the book’s revelations on the contradictions between workers’ solidarity and imperialistic agendas.
Soon after Israel launched its genocidal war in Gaza with the full support of the US government, opposition emerged to the Biden administration in a place that many professional political commentators found confounding: within US trade unions. President Joe Biden regularly boasts, “I am the most pro-union president in American history”. So it was something of a surprise to outright shock that many unions—including major industrial unions such as the United Auto Workers (UAW) and an array of smaller local unions and leadership bodies—called for a ceasefire in Gaza. The most notable exception to this trend has been the Teamsters, led by Sean O’Brien.
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Yet, at the same time, trade union opposition to Biden’s support for Israel has been frustratingly limited, never really threatening to disrupt what the late historian Mike Davis called the “barren marriage” of the US labour movement and the Democratic Party. Resolutions and public statements by union leaders haven’t led to strike action in vital industries to stop the manufacture and distribution of weapons destined for Israel, despite it being one of the demands of the Palestinian trade union movement. Shawn Fain, the President of the UAW, a union representing many defence contractors, for example, undermined the union’s call for a ceasefire by endorsing Biden for reelection, then Kamala Harris after Biden dropped out.
However, the echo emanating for a ceasefire from US unions has spread far and wide, surprising many. This is a dramatic change from the past when US unions were reliable, if not enthusiastic, supporters of US foreign policy, especially when it came to Israel. Historian Jeff Schuhrke has played an important role in chronicling the burgeoning labour opposition to the US support for Israel in Jacobin and other publications. Jeff teaches labour studies at Empire State College. His new book Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade examines on a much grander scale the American labour movement’s support for US imperialism.
Jeff sets out his goal early on in Blue Collar Empire:
“The same twentieth-century American labor movement that brought a measure of economic security and personal dignity to millions of working people also participated in some of the most shameful and destructive episodes in the history of U.S. imperialism. For decades, trade unionists in the United States have struggled to make sense of this, reluctant to discuss or even think about it. But, with the U.S. labor movement now undergoing a youth-led renaissance, and with renewed superpower rivalries threatening billions of lives amid a host of other planetary powers, it is long past time for a thorough reckoning.”
Indeed.
The publisher, Verso, calls Jeff’s book “the untold story”, yet he is the first to admit that parts of this seedy story have been told before: “Union activists, journalists, and scholars first began documenting US labor’s Cold War intrigues in the late 1960”. In the decades that followed, many books on the subject have been published: Ronald Radosh’s American Labor and United States Foreign Policy; Paul Buhle’s Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor; Kim Scipes’ The AFL CIO’s Secret War Against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity Or Sabotage?
I would even include in this list Hugh Wilford’s The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, as well as El Golpe: US Labor, the CIA, and the Coup at Ford in Mexico by Rob McKenzie and Patrick Dunne, published in 2022.
Jeff argues that there was a narrowness to many of the earlier studies:
“Early studies and exposé characterized the AFL-CIO as being little more than a puppet of the US government. The spotlight was especially shone on labor’s shadowy ties to the CIA. Many assumed the spy agency was corrupting hapless union leaders, while many others mockingly called the labor federation the ‘AFL-CIA’. More recent studies have demonstrated how the CIA was only the most notorious government entity that organized labor partnered with. In reality, the AFL-CIO became closely allied with almost the entire US foreign policy apparatus—not simply the CIA, but also the State Department, Agency for International Development, and the National Endowment for democracy.”
American labour leaders were partners in this international criminal operation, not dupes or paid off lackeys. They were true believers in the anti-Communist crusade. What makes Jeff’s book unique is that he provides us with a century-long history—with an emphasis on the post-WWII era—that chronicles the hand-in-glove workings of the AFL-CIO and various US government agencies, most importantly the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the covert and later overt ways that the US unions operated abroad. It’s illuminating and shocking. Reckoning with this history and changing it is the challenge, given that American trade unions continue to have a significant presence in countries around the globe.
I don’t want to recount the whole sordid story here. You should read the book. But I think it worth saying that this alliance between the US government and American trade unions would not have been possible without the crucial role played by ex-Communists, most notoriously by Jay Lovestone, the former leader of the US Communist Party, ex-socialists like Walter or Roy Reuther of the UAW (who later became critics of the CIA connection), or the octogenarian leader of the Socialist Party, Norman Thomas, in the 1950s and 1960s. They provided the US government with inside knowledge on the union movement, the left, international connections, and political cover for US government operatives abroad.
There are two areas in Jeff’s book that I’m critical of. I think he looks back to the founding of the World Federation of Trade Unions in 1945 as a lost moment in international solidarity: “With the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), communist and noncommunist labor organizations attempted to build the kind of international that might have served as a powerful rebuke to the Cold War, but the AFL and the CIO sabotaged this vision”. While Jeff is correct that the AFL and CIO sabotaged the WFTU, the member unions from the former USSR and other “socialist” countries were state-controlled trade unions, pursuing their own countries’ foreign policy interests, especially the USSR’s.
This leads to a second problem, which is a bigger issue for the left internationally. Jeff writes:
“If they are to be serious vehicles for strengthening and protecting the working class both at home and abroad in this era of overlapping crisis, today’s AFL-CIO and its affiliates must adopt the kind of principles labor internationalism that would inevitably bring them into conflict with U.S. foreign policy instead of reflexively serving it. But a labor movement that places class struggle and anti-imperialism ahead of deference to Washington’s international designs will not come into being unless workers, both within and outside the AFL-CIO, built it themselves.”
I wholeheartedly agree with Jeff, but how do we do this without mass-based revolutionary working-class parties—the kind of parties spawned by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which had a short-lived existence during the early years of the Communist International? We have lived with the deadening legacy of Stalinism and social democracy for many decades, only to be followed by the collapse of both, along with the unravelling of the older industrial union movement across Europe and North America. These have been some of the most difficult decades for the class struggle and anti-imperialism in modern history. Rebuilding a socialist, anti-imperialist, working-class movement is an international task.
The roots of the current opposition can be traced back in a herky-jerky manner to opposition to President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and even further back to Ronald Reagan’s wars in Central America in the 1980s and the closing years of the Vietnam War. War weariness is widespread in the United States today, a product of two decades of the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with an expanding and visible social crisis at home—issues I have written about and participated in. Much work needs to be done. The world is a much more dangerous place now than just a few years ago. Jeff’s book is an important contribution to understanding how we got here and how we can move forward.
First published at Joe Allen on Medium. Joe Allen is a socialist based in the United States and the author of Vietnam: The (Last) War the US Lost.
Joe Allen worked at UPS for nearly a decade, rising from a part-time loader to a package car driver in Chicago. His career spans major freight and logistics employers and involvement with Teamsters for a Democratic Union. A socialist since high school, Allen has written books on race and war and contributed to various leftist publications.
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