Labor’s Reckoning: What We Can Learn From the Cold War History of the AFL-CIO

Labor journalist and historian Jeff Schuhrke’s first book, Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade, dives into American labor unions’ role in Cold War-era interventions across Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and their lasting impacts today. Out September 24 from Verso Books, Blue-Collar Empire examines this history, and draws lessons for the present day.

One of the main operations Schuhrke explores is the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), a partnership between the AFL-CIO and the CIA, intended to promote free trade unionism abroad. Under the guise of education, officials with AIFLD worked with the State Department and other Washington officials to surveil and squash radical worker movements abroad that they suspected to be communist—at times resulting in violence, repression of workers’ rights, and strengthening of right-wing dictatorships. 

Schuhrke argues that while the AFL-CIO and other large unions’ leadership were busy with these interventionist projects, aligning themselves with Washington and corporate interests, the labor movement became complacent, invested less in new organizing, and declining initially to align itself with other popular social movements of the era. All of these factors contributed to labor’s eventual downturn throughout the second half of the 20th century, he argues. 

Nevertheless, in an interview with Workday Magazine, Schuhrke surmises that labor is seeing a sort of “rejuvenation, or renaissance.” He says, “There’s a lot more energy, more pro-union sentiment, and a more class-conscious generation of workers who are getting involved in the labor movement. And I thought it was important that they know about this history.” The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Workday Magazine: What would you say is the most important takeaway from Blue-Collar Empire?

Schuhrke: That the U.S. labor movement has always, or at least for several decades, been very much involved in international issues and foreign policy controversies, and often on what I would say is the wrong side, on the side of militarism and imperialism, and that it has in the long run harmed workers, both in the U.S. and around the world. This made it easier for multinational corporations to engage in this global race to the bottom and move production to wherever they can exploit workers the most. 

Labor has always been involved in foreign policy. In recent months, every time people try to say “Unions should stand for a ceasefire in Gaza” or “Stand in solidarity with Palestinians” or anything else, there are critics who say “Why are unions talking about this? This has nothing to do with unions.” But that’s a very ahistorical position, and I hope the book will show that. 

Workday Magazine: Why do you think this history is relevant to unions and workers today?

Schuhrke: We’re still dealing with the consequences in a lot of ways. One of the biggest arguments of the book is the fact that the AFL-CIO, in partnership with the U.S. State Department, the CIA, and other federal agencies, worked to undermine, divide, or weaken more militant labor movements abroad. 

All of that helped make it easier for capital to be able to go in and exploit workers anywhere around the world. There was not as much of a pushback or fightback as there could have been. The collapse of the Soviet Union arguably led to this world of neoliberal globalization where there’s no alternative to capitalism. Now it’s all just capitalism everywhere. All of that ultimately hurt workers around the world, but also here in the U.S.—the deindustrialization, offshoring, and the growing power of multinational corporations. Hopefully, with the labor movement going through a kind of resurgence, those same mistakes won’t be made again and there will be a focus on internationalism in our unions. Working with unions in the Global South, in particular.

Another important point is that unions in the U.S. and the AFL-CIO are willing to at least occasionally go against the U.S. foreign policy establishment—not just always fall into line and agree but instead actually chart a more independent foreign policy that is willing to criticize or stand against U.S. militarism and U.S. imperialism.

Workday Magazine: How do you think the labor movement, especially the AFL-CIO, should reckon with this history? Have you seen this happen in any context?

Schuhrke: In 2004, there was an effort in California by the California Federation of Labor. They passed a resolution that was driven by rank-and-file workers, called Build Unity and Trust Among Workers Worldwide. They called on the national AFL-CIO to open up their archives and make some kind of public apology for working with the CIA. It passed, but then it went to the national AFL-CIO convention, which was in Chicago, and it didn’t even make it to the actual convention floor. Today, what it could look like is something similar to that, some kind of official resolution. But I think it has to really start with a discussion within labor circles—not only about the past and expressing that this is what we did and it was wrong, but also some kind of apology. 

But also, the ongoing partnership between the AFL-CIO, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the State Department, and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the Solidarity Center is why I think there needs to be some more discussion. On the one hand, the Solidarity Center is doing stuff that is fairly decent and benign, but at the end of the day, almost all of their resources come from the federal government. There is some evidence that in certain countries, at certain points in time, they’re up to the same old tricks that they used to do in the Cold War. 

Personally, I say it is time for the labor movement to not have to rely on any funds from the State Department or from the NED and to be able to carry out a totally independent foreign policy.  This is what the United Electrical (UE) workers do. For the last thirty years or so, they’ve had partnerships, in Mexico in particular, where it’s union-to-union, worker-to-worker types of solidarity organizing. I think more of that would be good, without the federal dollars.

Workday Magazine: How do you see unions today, especially the AFL-CIO and large unions like the UAW, interact with foreign policy? 

Schuhrke: When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it was very easy for the AFL-CIO and most of its affiliated unions to issue these statements saying they’ve totally condemned Russia and are in full solidarity with the Ukrainian people and their right to self-determination. Nobody was saying, “Why are you talking about this?” Since October of last year, and even before that with previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, some local unions started to say “This is wrong.” They called for a ceasefire, or they called for labor to endorse the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, and it creates this big controversy. They say, “You can’t talk about that.”

In the first week of the genocide in Gaza in October, the AFL-CIO’s top officers issued a statement that was just sort of like “We condemn Hamas.” But they did not condemn Israel killing civilians. The exact quote was “We call for a swift resolution,” but not calling for a ceasefire and not really explaining what a swift resolution meant. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) issued a similar statement, showing that they were taking the same basic position as the Biden administration. No criticism of Israel, only that Israel has a right to defend itself. 

That’s very similar to what I’m talking about in the book—where union officials just take these positions that are in total line with Washington. There has been a pretty remarkable movement calling for a ceasefire, remarkable because it happened pretty fast. With Vietnam, most unions ended up calling for an end to the war, but it took years for them to get there. Early on, they supported the war. By last February, a majority of the biggest unions representing millions of workers, and the AFL-CIO itself, eventually were calling for a ceasefire. So that was promising. 

But what’s been missing from a lot of unions is any kind of plan for a material action to make a ceasefire happen or engage in divestment activities—divesting their pensions from companies that do business with Israel, divesting their own state of Israel bonds, or boycotting Israeli companies or companies that do business with Israeli companies that have been targeted by the BDS movement. It was only last month that the most significant thing so far happened, which was seven major unions, including the UAW, SEIU, and National Education Association (NEA), putting out that letter to Biden calling for an arms embargo on Israel. That’s something stronger than just vaguely saying we want a ceasefire.

There’s a lot of rank and filers in these unions who have been organizing for that and calling for that. And a lot of the union leadership isn’t really listening. They’re willing to make a statement, they’re willing to write a letter, but that’s as far as they’re willing to go. So it’s progress, but it’s slow. And obviously for Palestinians, especially in Gaza, it means nothing because they’re still being slaughtered every day. 

Workday Magazine: What is the role of the rank and file in steering a union’s approach to foreign policy?

Schuhrke: A lot of it is organizing within their unions, forming committees or caucuses that are focused on some particular foreign policy issue, a focus on a particular country, like Palestine, and trying to use the democratic processes within their unions to push national union leadership to take better positions, putting forward resolutions at their national union conventions. Just taking particular action locally. For example, during the Free South Africa movement in the 1980s, a lot of local unions formed anti-apartheid committees and got their cities and local city governments to divest from apartheid South Africa. They participated in protests at their local South African consulates, or if they were in the logistics sector, they sometimes took direct action: I’m thinking especially of International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10 in the Bay Area boycotting South African cargo. So being able to take local action or pass local resolutions and put pressure on the national union leaders and getting them to actually care about these issues, take a better position, and put pressure on the politicians. 

This really starts with the rank and file. When the UAW came out in support of a ceasefire on December 1 last year, Shawn Fain said it was because of the rank and file demanding it. So he credited the rank and file with getting the UAW International Executive Board to take that position. 

Workday Magazine: What comes after the Cold War? What era are we in now? 

Schuhrke: We’ve been in this era of the war on terror, and the U.S. has this idea of a global war on terror, where the U.S. was pretty much unchecked in being able to go anywhere. The height of that was the invasion of Iraq in 2003, of U.S. militarism expanding all over the place, and a continuation of the same Cold War logic where we have to have bases everywhere, we have to be able to send troops everywhere, we need to maintain this huge, bloated Pentagon budget that gets bigger every year and maintain the military industrial complex. But instead of communism being the big threat, it was terrorism or Islamic fundamentalism. 

In terms of foreign policy, it’s like we’re returning to the so-called great power rivalries of China and Russia, and maybe you could also throw in Iran and North Korea, other powerful countries with big militaries or nuclear weapons like India and Pakistan, or powerful economies like Brazil. Now, the U.S. cannot be quite as unchecked as it has been in the past. And more and more we see this with the war in Ukraine, with the military buildup around the South China Sea. We’re getting back to a sort of Cold War, even though we never really left. We substituted communism with terrorism. We can see that Israel’s war in Gaza is, in many ways, an extension of U.S. foreign policy, and they’ve been able to act with impunity. 

The other big thing in this era, the biggest threat is obviously climate change and ecological decline, which is part and parcel of global capitalism with greenhouse emissions running wild and being unchecked. So in terms of where workers and labor fit in, it’s not only a fight against exploitation and being pitted against workers across the border, but also a fight for survival. We were talking about how hot it is everywhere. This is just the new normal. And then there is the ongoing threat of nuclear war, which was a big threat during the Cold War period, and seems to be making a comeback now. So it really is more urgent than ever that workers around the world unite to end capitalism and the effects of capitalism that include climate change and non-stop warfare.

A big threat to that in the U.S. and other countries is this rise of a return of fascism and Trumpism in particular. Trump has a fake brand of worker populism, and he talks about how those workers in other countries are the problem. It’s the workers in China and their electric vehicle plants that are hurting autoworkers in the U.S. Or it’s migrant workers from Central America or workers in Mexico that are the big problem. They’re stealing our jobs so we have to put up higher tariffs and build a wall and isolate ourselves and have a bigger and bigger military. That’s pulling the labor movement in exactly the wrong direction at the worst possible moment. This message of “Foreigners are the enemy, immigrants are the enemy.” That’s the exact opposite of everything I’ve been talking about in terms of internationalism. 

Workday Magazine: Something I found really interesting in the book is how much irony there is in this history. Whether it’s communist radicals going on to work for the CIA or union leadership making these Faustian bargains that end up sabotaging the labor movement in the coming years. How do you see irony as a theme in this history and in your retelling of it?

Schuhrke: It’s part of the broader picture of the history of the United States. It’s a country founded on, supposedly, democracy and equal rights, that all men are created equal. But there were millions of people enslaved and a country founded on land theft and genocide when you look at the broader context of foreign policy and the U.S. presents itself as the savior to the world, the indispensable nation. So, the irony is just maybe baked into how I look at U.S. history in general. 

Like you mentioned, like Jay Lovestone, a former communist turned rabid anti-communist, worked with the CIA. A lot of what I hope comes through in the book is that the policies and actions that the AFL-CIO took with regard to the Cold War were because of these very personal relationships from a handful of guys at the top of these organizations making a lot of the decisions, and a lot of them just had personal feuds with each other, or with the Communist Party, or whatever. So whatever their politics or their principles were could change just based on their own personal feelings, being angry at someone, or being feeling like they were stabbed in the back. 

It gets to why it’s actually so important for the rank and file to have a role in the decision-making on foreign policy issues, in the same way that it’s generally recognized in the labor movement that on collective bargaining issues, the rank and file need to have a say. They need to at least vote on a contract and, better yet, be actively involved in bargaining. But that hasn’t been the case when it comes to foreign policy issues and decisions. It’s always just been left up to a small clique at the top, and we see the consequences of that in the book.

Workday Magazine: In the book you write about how this history coincides with American labor’s disinvestment from new organizing campaigns and negligence of the South, workers of color, domestic workers, agricultural workers, and more. How did this focus on anti-communism undermine unions domestically? How has this foreign policy itself directly harmed the labor movement in the U.S.?

Schuhrke: There was so much energy and so many resources, especially from the AFL-CIO, that was going towards foreign policy. In the 1960s, I saw that roughly a quarter of the whole budget was going towards foreign activities, and that doesn’t even include the millions and millions of dollars it was taking from USAID and the State Department. The history of the mid-to-late 20th century, where the Civil Rights Movement and other major social movements like the women’s liberation movement and the environmentalist movement were happening, where the mainstream labor movement was missing in action. If not missing in action, it was sometimes actively opposed. With the antiwar movement especially, which was the major, key movement that brought all the others together in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the AFL-CIO was not only absent, but actively on the wrong side. That really hurt the image of the labor movement in the popular imagination.

Also, there were a lot of structural things that were changing with the global political economy, starting in the ‘70s and continuing the ‘80s—corporate attacks and deindustrialization. But also just the fact that the AFL-CIO leadership saw themselves as part of the political establishment meant that they were complacent. They thought, “Well, we have our members, we have good resources, we have influence, we have clout.” It seems they just assumed things would always stay that way. So I think it was a matter of complacency that served to distract a lot of labor leaders instead of focusing on organizing the unorganized. 

The labor movement leadership saw themselves on the same side as Washington and on the same side as corporate America, more or less believing that whatever differences they had with corporate America were minimal and they could figure things out as gentlemen at the bargaining table, without having a class-conscious perspective at all and being hostile to any talk of class-consciousness. All of that was part of why they were not focused so much on organizing and not able to see that the victories that they had attained during World War II were very tenuous and could easily be lost. 

Workday Magazine: What can today’s rank and file learn from this history? 

Schuhrke: Moving out of the Vietnam War era, there were more and more rank and filers speaking out against the AFL-CIO, or what they would call the “AFL-CIA.” A great example is Fred Hirsch, who comes up in the chapter around Chile. He was a plumber in California, who wrote this popular pamphlet about the role of the AFL-CIO in the Chilean coup. It shows how the rank and file can make a difference by investigating some of this history and using what connections they have within their unions to get more details and start to organize and educate fellow union members.

Isabela is the Senior Associate Editor for Workday Magazine.