When U.S. Labor Backed U.S. Imperialism
During the Cold War, the CIA and State Department understood that there is power in a union. After the successful purges of leftists from unions, U.S. labor leaders were enlisted by government officials to join in their imperialist operations across the world.
The U.S. labor movement was a major force to be reckoned with throughout the twentieth century, playing the key role in establishing the rudiments of a welfare state, eking out a modicum of democracy on shop floors that were previously bosses’ dictatorships, and backing a wide range of other progressive causes like the civil rights movement. There was undoubtedly power in a union. But that power wasn’t always wielded for the working class.
During the Cold War, the United States government sought to establish global dominance. Waging bloody anti-communist campaigns everywhere, the national security state turned to American labor unions for help. Taming the working class throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America was key to winning the Cold War, and the CIA and State Department quickly realized they couldn’t win over workers abroad without the help of American unions.
The war abroad was also a war at home during the height of the postwar Second Red Scare. The anti-communist labor forces that advanced American power overseas would not have been able to carry out that mission without first purging left-wing unions and leftist union organizers inside the United States.
In his new book Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of U.S. Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade, labor historian Jeff Schuhrke tells the story of American labor’s central role in the U.S.’s Cold War, how labor leaders tasked with fighting for the working class ended up doing the bidding of the ruling class, and how these actions eventually helped produce the weakened workers’ movement that we all confront today.
Jacobin editor Micah Uetricht interviewed Schuhrke on his book for our podcast the Dig. You can listen to the conversation here1. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Socialist Viewpoint is printing an excerpt of this interview focusing on the labor leadership collaborating with U.S. imperialism.
Jeff Schuhrke: There was the Free Trade Union Committee under the AFL, which lasted until just after the merger with the CIO in 1955. Shortly after that, four years later, the Cuban Revolution happened, and anti-communist Cold Warriors in the United States now became fixated on Latin America, worrying that Latin America was going to “go communist.” So, the AFL-CIO now created a new international arm to focus specifically on workers in Latin America, to do stuff that was similar to what the Free Trade Union Committee had done in Western Europe. They created, in 1960–61, the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). Right from its founding, AIFLD was receiving millions of dollars from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to be part of John F. Kennedy’s hearts-and-minds Cold War campaign, the Alliance for Progress program in Latin America. AIFLD would continue to exist until 1997, so it lasted for well over thirty years and became the biggest and most notorious of the AFL-CIO’s international arms; it received millions of dollars from USAID, but it was also known to partner with the CIA.
To back up a little bit: in the 1950s, before the merger and before AIFLD was created, the AFL’s international representative for Latin America, Serafino Romualdi, was complicit in the coup against democratically elected, left-leaning president Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Romualdi wrote a letter to other officials in the AFL a few months before the coup, and you could tell he knew all about it. He was in on the plot. He was saying, “There’s reason to believe that the final word hasn’t been written on Guatemala, and extraordinary events are going to be happening very soon there.” Árbenz was a progressive nationalist who was trying to implement agrarian reform and take land away from multinational corporations like the United Fruit Company and give it to campesinos [peasants]. For that reason, he was labeled a “communist” and targeted for overthrow by the CIA. That’s a story that people probably know. But the AFL was part of that. There were anti-Árbenz union groups or labor front groups that were being financed by the CIA and supported by the AFL.
To return to the 1960s with AIFLD: it was implicated in the 1964 coup in Brazil against João Goulart, another populist, left-leaning president who was labeled a communist even though he wasn’t and was overthrown by the Brazilian military with support from the U.S. government, including the CIA. One of the key things AIFLD was doing was labor education, union training, getting Latin American workers into these training programs where the focus was how to be more like a business unionist. Some courses focused on collective bargaining and union administration, but they would also focus on how to combat leftists and communists or anti-imperialists within your own union ranks, and how to make sure Latin American unions would remain pro–United States and pro-capitalist. Latin American trade unionists received a lot of this training in Washington, DC, and then AIFLD eventually had a whole complex in Front Royal, Virginia. It was sort of like the School of the Americas but for labor.
Micah Uetricht: The School of the Americas, of course, was where many of the right-wing forces throughout Latin America came to the United States to study how to suppress their own domestic lefts, including through gruesome techniques like torture.
Jeff Schuhrke: Right. I’m not saying that’s what they were learning at the AIFLD training school. But it was the similar idea of bringing Latin Americans up to the United States and training them in how to fight leftists back home, in this case in their unions.
A year before the Brazilian coup, there was an all-Brazilian class of AIFLD trainees. They had hours and hours of training on how to combat leftists in their own unions. When the coup happened, the military regime that took over immediately set about taking control over Brazil’s trade unions and purging them of leftists and Goulart sympathizers. Some of the people the coup regime put in charge of these unions were AIFLD graduates. And one of AIFLD’s top leaders, Bill Doherty, who eventually became the head of AIFLD for many years, was on a radio program shortly after the coup, where he was actually openly bragging that some AIFLD graduates participated in what he called “the revolution.” He even said they were involved in some of the “covert activities” that led to the coup.
AIFLD was also implicated in the notorious coup in Chile in 1973. There are many other stories about this that are all in the book. But AIFLD was, for all intents and purposes, an appendage of the U.S. government in waging the Cold War in Latin America for well over thirty years.
How to smash the left in labor
Micah Uetricht: Let’s talk a bit about the nuts-and-bolts details of what this intervention looked like. You’ve already alluded to Latin America. You have a section of the book on Argentina, which was an example that I found fascinating, because it is about opposing Peronism in Argentina. Could you explain what Peronism was? It was decidedly not communism, but it was also not a vision of politics and economics that was fully in line with what Americans wanted to see in Argentina and in the entire region. And because it was not in lockstep with the U.S. vision of politics and economics, the State Department, the CIA, and the representatives of the American labor movement decided they had to squash it. They didn’t fully succeed, but it’s telling that even this noncommunist model was totally unacceptable to those forces.
Jeff Schuhrke: Argentina is an important example, and there are others as well. It’s ultimately about U.S. hegemony and imperialism; communism would often be the convenient label that they could give to any kind of nationalist or anti-imperialist political movement around the world. They couldn’t label Juan Perón a communist. Instead, they labeled him as a fascist (and he was an admirer of Mussolini, so there is that). But Peronism, at least in this period of the 1950s when Juan Perón was president of Argentina, was not about to become subservient to the U.S. economically. He wanted to promote import-substitution industrialization—to let Argentina’s economy modernize and industrialize on its own—by keeping out manufactured goods being dumped by the United States and also grow his own alliances within Latin America. He wasn’t asking for Washington’s permission.
Because Peron was very beloved by Argentina’s working class—he had been a minister of labor before he became president, and he promoted social welfare policies and unionism—the Argentine General Confederation of Labor (CGT) was in a close alliance with Peron and his government.
In the same way that the AFL was sending out international representatives to spread its style of business unionism, Peron and the Argentine CGT were sending out their own representatives, actual rank-and-file workers, to other Latin American countries as diplomats to explain Peronism and promote economic sovereignty for Latin Americans—not dependence on the United States.
This really frightened and upset folks at the State Department. During World War II, when FDR was president, the United States operated under the “Good Neighbor Policy” of not interfering in Latin America’s affairs as it had done before the 1930s (and would do again after World War II). But as the Cold War began, folks in the State Department really wanted to abandon the Good Neighbor Policy and once again make Latin America economically subservient to the United States as a provider of raw materials and importer of U.S.-manufactured goods. Peron wasn’t going to go along with that. Having a fairly state-controlled labor movement, but a strong labor movement, did deliver for much of the working class of Argentina. This is what the U.S. government and AFL-CIO did not like. Peron wasn’t at all a communist, but the United States still wanted to undermine him and fight back against him, because he was an obstacle to U.S. hegemony.
Micah Uetricht: Earlier, you were also talking about the Chilean example. Many readers will be familiar with the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected socialist president. But can you talk a bit more about what the AFL-CIO was up to, and what the mechanisms were through which they carried out an anti-communist agenda in Chile?
Jeff Schuhrke: Much of the Chilean labor movement was pro-Allende. The Workers’ United Center of Chile (CUT), the main trade union federation, was led by communists and socialists. AIFLD really couldn’t do anything about that. So, it ended up partnering not with traditional working-class organizations, trade unions, but instead working with associations of middle-class professionals called gremios: associations of physicians and engineers and truck owner-operators, shopkeepers. Through AIFLD, the gremios received a lot of financial support, technical support, and training—and ultimately, as would be revealed after the coup, money from the CIA to launch very crippling strikes.
In the months leading up to the 1973 coup, there was a strike in the copper mines. It wasn’t so much by the rank-and-file copper miners but more by the supervisors and engineers. There were at least a couple of major strikes of the trucking gremio that shut down distribution of food and fuel and other essential products. Shopkeepers closed down their stores and doctors and other professionals staged strikes, all to protest Allende and his socialist government.
That served, to use the phrase from Richard Nixon, to make the economy scream. The U.S. government was also withholding aid, canceling loans, messing with Chile’s economy in all different types of ways. Having these gremio work stoppages was one of those ways. And AIFLD, on behalf of the AFL-CIO, was helping coordinate a lot of this stuff.
When we on the Left hear about a bunch of workers striking, when there’s a general strike and or thousands of people are in the streets, our gut reaction is to cheer them. But these strikes in Chile, and the similar example in British Guyana that I write about in the book, were meant to undermine a democratically elected leftist government and were being secretly bankrolled by the CIA, by the U.S. government. These strikes harmed the Chilean economy and served as a pretext for the Chilean military and Augusto Pinochet to stage the coup on September 11, 1973.
Micah Uetricht: Your book offers a tour of some of the greatest hits of the Cold War era. The coup in Chile is one of them—so, obviously, is the war in Vietnam. Can you lay out how the AFL-CIO participated in the U.S. government’s anti-communist campaigns in Vietnam?
Jeff Schuhrke: A lot of credit here goes to a historian named Edmund Wehrle, who wrote a whole book about the AFL-CIO in Vietnam called Between a River and a Mountain. I draw heavily from that.
In addition to AIFLD in Latin America, the AFL-CIO ended up creating international arms for Africa and for Asia in the 1960s. The one in Asia was called the Asian American Free Labor Institute (AAFLI). Through AAFLI, and even before, the AFL-CIO was partnering with the Vietnamese Confederation of Labor (CVT), which was South Vietnam’s anti-communist trade union center. It was led by a guy named Tr?n Qu?c B?u, who was a nationalist but anti-communist, and a major client of the AFL-CIO. The idea there was to organize the working class and the peasants of South Vietnam, to try to deliver material benefits for them so that they would not go along with the National Liberation Front and North Vietnam’s government. Irving Brown, whom I mentioned earlier, the AFL’s early representative in France in the 1940s, was also visiting Vietnam a lot in the 1950s and 1960s. He thought the CVT could train Vietnamese workers to be like paramilitaries and fight back against the Communist guerrillas with the NLF.
The AFL-CIO through the CVT promoted a land reform program, trying to undercut the potential appeal of communism to peasants in South Vietnam. At the same time, the AFL-CIO leadership through its president George Meany was very vocally supportive of the war, even as the antiwar movement at home started to grow.
The Vietnam War is when the early Cold War anti-communist consensus was shattered as the realities of U.S. foreign policy were laid bare to much of the public. And you had splits happening within the labor movement, especially, with the UAW under Walter Reuther, who had disagreements with Meany over the war. Reuther himself was supportive of the war early on, when Lyndon Johnson, his friend and ally, was still president. But within the UAW, among the rank and file and among some of the leaders and staff, they were protesting to Reuther, saying, “You need to speak out against this war. You’re one of the most well-known, most beloved labor leaders in the country, certainly more popular than George Meany.” And he didn’t want to speak out against the war until after Johnson announced he wasn’t going to run for reelection in 1968. Eventually, because of some of these foreign policy disagreements as well as personal disagreements, Reuther pulled the UAW out of the AFL-CIO. The UAW would go back into the AFL-CIO later, but some of the same kind of splits that the AFL-CIO had engineered in foreign labor movements were now coming home.
There were unions like 1199, which today is part of Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Back then, it was still an independent union of Black and Latino hospital workers in New York. As early as 1964, it was protesting against the U.S. military buildup in Vietnam that turned into the full-scale war. And unions like United Electrical Workers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union had been leftist-led unions that had been expelled from the CIO back in the late 1940s; they were protesting against the war early on.
But a lot of the mainstream labor leaders like Meany were very pro-war. And then there was the notorious 1970 Hard Hat Riot in New York, where construction workers with the New York building trades unions violently attacked a group of student antiwar protesters in lower Manhattan. That got a lot of news headlines. So, the memory became “all the working class is reactionary, pro-war, part of the establishment,” even though the reality was more complicated. But this served especially for the New Left that emerged out of the antiwar movement or at least grew through the antiwar movement. Much of the New Left came to see the AFL-CIO and the labor movement, labor officialdom, as part of the enemy and hopeless and not worth engaging with. It was politically detrimental to the image of the labor movement to not be part of all the broader social justice movements of the time that were all overlapping with the antiwar movement.
Labor’s cold war, exposed
Micah Uetricht: In the 1960s and 1970s, the AFL-CIO is carrying out these anti-communist missions in places like Brazil, Chile, Vietnam, and many other places that you’ve mentioned. But it’s also during this era that there starts to be real exposure of State Department and CIA funding for the AFL-CIO, and a conversation starts on the Left and within the labor movement of the United States about all these nefarious activities. Did that slow the AFL-CIO’s anti-communist agenda at all?
Jeff Schuhrke: George Meany and the AFL-CIO’s high-profile support for the Vietnam War, even as the war was becoming more unpopular, put a spotlight on the AFL’s foreign policy. And mainstream journalists from the New York Times and Washington Post started looking into the AFL-CIO’s connections to the foreign policy apparatus. Starting around 1966–67, there was a series of exposés showing how the CIA was bankrolling various AFL-CIO-affiliated unions through these shadowy foundations, some of them real foundations, some of them just dummy foundations that only existed on paper.
When this got out, it caused a big outcry. And then the fact that the Vietnam War itself shattered the anti-communist consensus in the country made a lot more people dubious about what the United States was doing overseas. In addition, this is when there were a series of rank-and-file rebellions within the AFL-CIO-affiliated unions, because a lot of the leaders of these unions were really old and were not fighting against corporations. And you had this younger generation of workers and rank-and-file union members who were more militant, more diverse.
So, all of this came together, and you started to have rank-and-file movements questioning the AFL-CIO’s connections with the CIA and the State Department, questioning AIFLD. Then, when the Chilean coup happened in 1973, American leftists were very appalled by the coup and the role of the United States in it. And they were able to make connections with how AIFLD had been supporting these anti-Allende gremios.
There was a plumber in California named Fred Hirsch who wrote a pamphlet about the AFL-CIO’s connections with the CIA in Chile that was circulated to thousands of rank-and-file union members in the mid-1970s. The Cold War itself had really been discredited in large part by the failure of the U.S. empire in Vietnam. And then you had the beginning of détente and U.S. political leaders trying to have a different kind of relationship with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. George Meany protesting Nixon going to China really looked like an out-of-touch dinosaur. So, all of that was important in slowing down or at least discrediting the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy, which would then come into play much more prominently in the 1980s.
Micah Uetricht: In the 1980s, the era of Ronald Reagan, changes come about in how the AFL-CIO is conducting this agenda abroad. The exposures had happened in the 1960s and 1970s of its covert activities and it taking money under the table from the State Department or the CIA. But then you talk about how in this renewed era of anti-communism coming from the Reagan White House, the funding of these kinds of activities of the AFL-CIO actually comes out in the open. It is no longer a secret in the way that it once was. In fact, institutions are built that are very openly funneling money to the AFL-CIO from the U.S. government to carry out an anti-communist agenda, especially in Europe, in countries like Poland, and against the Soviet Union in general.
Jeff Schuhrke: Yeah. This was especially the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) created in 1983 by Congress, with Reagan leading the way. The AFL-CIO played a big role in pushing for the creation of NED. The AFL-CIO president by this point was Lane Kirkland, Meany’s successor and another rabid anti-communist.
Micah Uetricht: A lot of these labor leaders were from the working class. Meany was a plumber, and then he became a Cold Warrior. Lane Kirkland was mostly a career Cold Warrior, right?
Jeff Schuhrke: Yeah. He had been in the merchant marine in World War II. But then after the war, he was a student at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, where a lot of diplomats go to get their education.
Micah Uetricht: This is hardly an institution of salt-of-the-earth, working-class types.
Jeff Schuhrke: Right. And one of Lane Kirkland’s closest personal friends was none other than Henry Kissinger. They spent their Thanksgivings together. Kissinger eulogized him when he died. So, this is who was the president of the AFL-CIO in the 1980s. He promoted this idea of creating NED, which was channeling money to the AFL-CIO and other institutions to carry out these interventions overseas but now doing it out in the open by saying, “Hey, this is about democracy and freedom.”
At the same time, the AFL-CIO was still receiving millions of dollars from USAID, as it had been since the 1960s. And with Poland and Solidarity, the underground anti-communist trade union in Poland, the AFL-CIO wasn’t just supporting containment. It was supporting rollback. It was actually going into the communist world and trying to topple a communist government. Sometimes Kirkland and the AFL-CIO were pushing harder on that than even Reagan.
Micah Uetricht: You have quotes in the book from that era of Republicans saying, basically, “These AFL-CIO guys are even further right on this stuff than we are. Slow down!”
Jeff Schuhrke: Right. One of the top aides for Orrin Hatch, a notoriously anti-labor Republican senator, told a reporter that the AFL-CIO has foreign policy positions to the right of the Reagan administration. Reagan was trying to shake off the defeat in Vietnam. So, the 1980s were a comeback for the anti-communists in the AFL-CIO and beyond. They were actually partnering with Reagan on rejuvenating Cold War tensions—including, importantly, in Central America, in El Salvador and Nicaragua. AFL-CIO leaders like Lane Kirkland were on board with Reagan’s policy of violent counterinsurgency. And AIFLD, again, was on the ground in El Salvador supporting a lot of this, trying to dampen the Salvadoran left by propping up nonradical, politically moderate, conservative unions and peasant organizations getting lots of money from the State Department, from USAID, and so on. This is at the same time that Reagan is declaring war on the working class at home, firing the air traffic controllers in the PATCO strike, cutting social spending, opening the doors to this new wave of union busting.
The rank and file within the U.S. labor movement was protesting and speaking out against Reagan’s foreign policy, especially in Central America but also in South Africa, because Reagan had the “constructive engagement” policy with the apartheid regime: to go easy on the apartheid regime and hope that eventually they’ll get rid of apartheid. A lot of rank-and-file workers in the labor movement were pushing back against this. But what was unique and important in the 1980s is that many union presidents within the AFL-CIO also started pushing back against this foreign policy, specifically against the AFL-CIO’s own foreign policy and partnership with Reagan. The Vietnam War was still fresh in their memories. It had only ended roughly five or ten years earlier. They had seen how unpopular the labor movement became because of George Meany’s support for the Vietnam War. They didn’t want that to happen again. They thought El Salvador might turn into another Vietnam—maybe Reagan would send ground troops, and it would become another disaster with millions of people killed. As it was, there was plenty of disaster, with roughly 75,000 people killed, largely because of the role of the United States in sending weapons and money to the Salvadoran regime, Salvadoran military, and death squads.
These death squads were targeting trade unionists in El Salvador. So many union presidents—including Jack Sheinkman from the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, William Winpisinger, president of the International Association of Machinists, and Owen Bieber, president of the UAW—formed a group called the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador, or the National Labor Committee for short. And they got other AFL-CIO-affiliated union presidents on board to directly challenge, for the first time, the foreign policy of the AFL-CIO itself—to challenge AIFLD and Kirkland to be in solidarity with these leftist trade unions in El Salvador and Nicaragua and call on Congress to halt military aid, to have an arms embargo on El Salvador and the Contras in Nicaragua. This was an important break. And there were, for the first time, at the AFL-CIO convention in the mid-1980s, actual open debates about Cold War foreign policy.
Micah Uetricht: I can’t say that your book is a particularly uplifting read, but this period is actually quite inspiring. It is an example of working-class internationalism that takes hold among large segments of the organized working class in the United States. Rank-and-file union members and top trade union leaders come together around an opposition to both the Reagan administration’s bloody foreign policy in areas like Central America and the AFL-CIO’s support of that bloody foreign policy. And it eventually creates the kind of momentum that can finally unseat these Cold Warriors who have been in the driver’s seat of American labor for decades, culminating in the mid-1990s with the leadership change in the AFL-CIO.
Jeff Schuhrke: Right. Once you have some of these more progressive labor leaders backed up by the rank and file challenging the AFL-CIO’s top officials like Kirkland in the 1980s, that paves the way for Kirkland’s ouster in the 1990s. NAFTA was passed in 1993, and then right after that, Republicans took control of Congress in the 1994 election, and a lot of these same union presidents who had been behind the National Labor Committee in the 1980s challenging Reagan’s foreign policy and challenging Lane Kirkland’s foreign policy were able to challenge the actual leadership of Kirkland and the other old hardline anti-communists who had been in control of the AFL-CIO for decades. In 1995, that led to the formation of the New Voice slate, led by John Sweeney of SEIU and Richard Trumka of the United Mine Workers. Sweeney had been part of the National Labor Committee, and Trumka was also a major force in the anti-apartheid movement and pushing the AFL-CIO itself to take a better position on combating apartheid.
So, this newer, younger generation that was not all obsessed with the Cold War and anti-communism came into power in the AFL-CIO in 1995. But the Cold War was over at this point. Anti-communism was outdated. And New Voice wasn’t exactly a democratic, rank-and-file-led movement. Some have described it as more like a palace coup. But it was significant that there were “new voices” coming in. And it did lead to the AFL-CIO shutting down AIFLD and its other foreign institutes but reconstituting them into something else: the Solidarity Center. The AFL-CIO continues to be involved in the labor movements of other countries, ostensibly more from a place of actual solidarity, but still almost completely financed by the State Department, USAID, and NED.
Labor’s foreign policy today
Micah Uetricht: You’re bringing us up to the current moment. I wanted to ask if you can talk about what foreign policy the AFL-CIO has carried out since that time. What’s the good? What’s the bad? We’re at a time when these institutions like USAID are under attack from the Trump administration, and it has become a liberal cause to denounce those attacks in recent weeks. Obviously, there are some genuinely humanitarian policies that USAID is funding around the world, but USAID has always been a tool of U.S. soft imperial power. How do you feel about seeing USAID and NED under attack by Donald Trump?
Jeff Schuhrke: Since the late ’90s, the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy has been conducted through the Solidarity Center, which often hires actual union organizers to go overseas. It’s been active in over sixty countries fighting against sweatshop conditions, pushing for health and safety standards in sweatshops, trying to bring the more marginalized sections of foreign labor movements—women and domestic workers in places like South Africa and hotel workers in Cambodia—into contact with U.S. workers. It’s almost NGO-type work, which isn’t class-struggle unionism, but it can still be beneficial to workers.
But also, the Solidarity Center has been implicated in trying to aid the U.S. government’s attempts to overthrow Hugo Chávez in Venezuela as recently as 2014, for example, and it stepped up involvement in the Middle East after George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. So sometimes the Solidarity Center’s priorities have seemed to mirror or follow the U.S. government’s foreign policy priorities. And again, Solidarity Center is not funded or controlled by workers. It’s funded by the State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy, and USAID. Right now, Trump and Elon Musk have been dismembering USAID and also putting a stop on the funds that go through NED.
What I’ve heard recently is that Solidarity Center is laying off lots of its staff, furloughing people—basically all but shutting down and maintaining a skeleton crew in its DC headquarters. So, what does this mean for the AFL-CIO? The AFL-CIO has been speaking out against a lot of what Musk has been doing to the federal workforce. But it hasn’t been protesting about how this is affecting the Solidarity Center. The fact that Solidarity Center has to basically shut down because of Musk’s attacks on the federal government shows that the Solidarity Center is an arm of the federal government, more so than of the labor movement.
USAID has always been an instrument of soft imperialism—same with NED. Now, USAID does provide lifesaving medicines and other important humanitarian assistance to people—that’s also being gutted. I’m all for dismantling instruments of U.S. imperialism. But they’re only dismantling the soft power part, not so much the hard power part: the military. They’re not reining in multinational corporations that go into these countries and exploit the workforce and exploit the environment.
The reason USAID and programs like the Solidarity Center exist is to try to contain the potential disruptive potential of the working class and the poor in other countries, to basically say that the U.S. empire can do all these awful things but then make sure we’ll have these programs to try to try to smooth things over—sort of like how the wealthy exploit people and make a fortune, then throw some crumbs back in philanthropy and charity. But what’s happening now is they’re getting rid of the philanthropy but still exploiting everybody.
I think what it means is that Trump and Musk don’t see much threat from the working class abroad. They don’t see much threat from foreign unions. They’re not like the CIA was after World War II, afraid of the global working class’s potential. Trump and Musk don’t seem to be afraid. They seem to think, well, we can get rid of this stuff and there’s not going to be any consequences. There’s not going to be any kind of blowback. There’s not going to be any mass movements to fight against U.S. empire. So, we don’t need these sorts of soft power to smooth things over.
Micah Uetricht: What do you think this history has to teach us labor activists today? As we’ve been discussing, the U.S. labor movement is not enlisted as a tool of American imperial power in quite the same way. That’s because the Cold War is over, but also because the labor movement is incredibly weak right now, and its power seems to be declining every year, even as there are some hopeful green shoots. What does it mean for labor activists today to understand this history, and how should they integrate it into what they are trying to do to revive the American labor movement?
Jeff Schuhrke: For one thing, it reiterates the necessity of rank-and-file democracy in our unions. As union members, we need to know what the top officials of our unions are up to, not only here at home but also overseas. Also, my argument in the book is not that the U.S. labor movement should be isolationist. It cannot be. It just doesn’t make any sense for it to be an arm of the U.S. government, serving U.S. foreign policy interests. If we want to have genuine working-class internationalism, it has to be anti-imperialist. It has to challenge U.S. foreign policy. I think many union members and some union presidents are already understanding this from the experience of the last year-and-a-half, with Palestine and the U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza. Many unions early on were coming out in support first of a cease-fire and then an arms embargo—and also talking about the need to divest their own money, their pension funds, from Israel and companies that do business with it, to be part of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. There’s historical precedent of this, with the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and unions in the United States playing a big role in solidarity with other workers and unions in other countries.
We should also be more curious about unions and labor movements abroad and how they do things. We often talk in the United States about a general strike as a kind of utopian, impossible thing, but very diverse countries, from Brazil to Greece to India to South Korea and others, regularly have general strikes. Can we learn anything about that?
—Jacobin, May 26, 2025
https://jacobin.com/2025/05/afl-cio-cold-war-imperialism