To Build a Left-Wing Unionism, We Must Reckon With the AFL-CIO's Imperialist Past
FRIDAY, JAN 10, 2020, 3:05 PM
BY JEFF SCHUHRKE
Two days after Bolivias socialist president Evo Morales was forced from office in a right-wing military coup last November, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka condemned the coup on Twitter and praised Morales for reducing poverty and championing indigenous rights. In doing so, Trumka joined Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other prominent figures of the Left in countering the US political and media establishments dominant narrative that Moraless violent ouster was a win for democracy.
While its fitting for the president of the nations largest union federation to denounce a right-wing coup against a leftist foreign leader which was endorsed by the State Department and CIA it also represents an important break from precedent for the AFL-CIO. Though rarely discussed, the federation has a long record of supporting the US government in disrupting leftist movements around the world, including through coups détat in Latin America.
Throughout the Cold War, the AFL-CIOs Executive Council and International Affairs Department were run by zealous anticommunists determined to undercut the rise of left-wing trade unions overseas. Like their counterparts in the US government, George Meany, AFL-CIO president from 19551979, and Lane Kirkland, his successor who served until 1995, understood that if allowed to thrive, class-conscious labor movements would pose a serious threat to global capital.
Meany, Kirkland, and other AFL-CIO officials subscribed to a philosophy of business unionism, meaning they had no desire to topple capitalism but instead promoted the idea that class collaboration and limited workplace bargaining over bread and butter issues would bring workers all the prosperity they needed. They championed economic nationalism over transnational labor solidarity, reasoning that US workers would see higher wages and lower unemployment as long as US corporations had easy access to foreign markets to sell products made in the United States a version of the kind of nationalist ideology that has fueled racism and xenophobia among segments of the US working class and aided Trumps rise to power.
From aiding US-backed military coups in Brazil and Chile to cheerleading ruthless counterinsurgency wars in Vietnam and El Salvador, the AFL-CIOs foreign policy during the Cold War was fundamentally geared toward the interests of US empire. By the 1970s just as capital launched a renewed, decades-long attack on workers rights around the globe the US labor federation had lost whatever credibility it might have had as a vehicle for international working-class liberation, derided by anti-imperialists at home and abroad as the AFL-CIA.
More:
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22245/left-wing-union-afl-cio-imperialism