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AIFLD to ACILS: New Labor Foreign Policy or Old Wine in New Bottles? By Mike Olszanski Term Paper For L580 Comparative Labor Movements Indiana University Northwest Spring 2005

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Paper on AFL-CIO involvement with CIA in Latin America.

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AIFLD to ACILS: New Labor Foreign Policy or

Old Wine in New Bottles?

By Mike Olszanski

Term PaperFor

L580 Comparative Labor MovementsIndiana University Northwest

Spring 2005

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Olsazanski April 28, 2005

There were [AIFLD] personnel who had nothing to do with the CIA. In many ways and in the long run they were doing more harm.

-Ruth Needleman, 2005 interview

This is the patent age of new inventions/ for killing bodies, and for saving souls,/ all propagated with the best intentions.

-Lord Byron, quoted by Graham Greene in The Quiet American

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

- frequently attributed to Karl Marx and anonymous, but occurrences of Samuel Johnson, Rita Disbennett, Delenn, Jane Austen and Richard Baxterand have been noted as well.

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Olszanski 1 L580 Comparative Labor Movements

AFL Foreign Policy: Why Should I Care?

American Federation of Labor (AFL) and later AFL-CIO foreign policy has been,

and is today pro-business. As such it cannot help but be anti-worker. Sociologist Kim

Scipes calls it no less than “Labor Imperialism.”1 This is the result of the dominance of

business unionist2 ideology in the organization. American workers throughout the

hemisphere are weaker, more disorganized, and less able to resist the class warfare

manifest in the ongoing global neoliberal assault by corporations and their friends in

government against workers, because this convoluted and confused ideology leads them

into collaboration with the class enemy. Therefore, I argue here, AFL-CIO foreign policy

acts against the interests of North, South and Central American workers, and needs to be

changed by U.S. workers by substituting social unionism in place of business unionism.

As this is being written, former military dictator General Augusto Pinochet is on

trial in Chile for the torture, murder and disappearance of thousands of his own and U.S.

citizens during his administration of the country after the September 11, 1973 coup which

1 Kim Scipes, “The AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy Since 1995:Labor Imperialism Redux?” in Monthly Review, May, 2005, pre-publication draft. When I interviewed him on March 31, 2005, Scipes added that, “For years the early stuff that came out all blamed labor’s [AFL-CIO] foreign policy on external factors—the U.S, Government, the White House, the CIA, the State Department, etc. I’m convinced that that’s wrong. U.S. labor’s foreign policy comes out of labor, at the very highest levels….This is an attack on everything we think the American labor movement [should] stand for—the democracy, the rank & file control, etc. And..it’s a very conscious effort to keep working people and our unions ignorant of what they’re doing.”

2 By business unionism I mean the narrow view that unions dare not oppose capital’s ownership of the means of productions and hegemony over production and the world, for that matter, but should limit themselves to bargaining for hours, wages and working conditions, each union for its own members. It is a view that tends to divide workers along national and even industry lines (formerly also along craft lines) rather than uniting us world-wide to challenge the capitalists politically and socially as well as economically—as social unionism tends to advocate. Business unionism in my view is fundamentally pro-capitalist, hence tend to be strongly anti-communist and anti-socialist.

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killed democratically-elected president Salvadore Allende. Given the now widely known

facts, it is no exaggeration to call the Pinochet regime fascist. A favorite tactic of

Pinochet’s minions was said to be throwing captive dissidents into the ocean from planes

to eliminate all trace of them.3 For some time it was feared he would cheat justice using

the excuse of his age and infirmity, but the Chilean courts finally judged him fit to stand

trial early in 2005. Also well documented is the fact that the U.S. Central Intelligence

Agency (CIA) and its partner in Latin America, the American Institute for Free Labor

Development (AIFLD) engineered, facilitated and largely paid for the Coup.4

My personal interest in Chile, and the involvement of Nixon, Kissinger and the

U.S. labor movement in the 9/11/73 coup and subsequent fascist dictatorship began with

what I, like millions of U.S. workers, saw on my television screen in the early 1970’s.

The events in Chile happened at a time when my own political consciousness was rapidly

developing. I was a steward in United Steelworkers of America (USWA) Local 1010,

representing workers at Inland Steel Company’s giant Indiana Harbor Works on Lake

Michigan. Ignorant, as most in the United States were, of Latin American politics and the

role in them of the U.S Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and an organization called the

3 With the right-wing think-tanks’ continued use of Pinochet’s Social Security “Reforms” as a model for the U.S., one cannot help but speculate at the use of such measures to reduce the surplus senior citizen population—a very effective (if slightly Draconian) way to cut Social Security costs?

4 Documentation of AIFLD perfidy in Chile and its role in the bloody coup is widely available from many reliable sources. Perhaps the best place to start is Fred Hirsch and Virginia Muir,  1 “A Plumber Gets Curious About Exporting McCarthyism” in Ann Fagan Ginger and David Christiano, eds., The Cold War Against Labor (2 volumes)  Berkeley:  Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, 1987, pp.  723-768. Primary sources were available to me from Ruth Needleman, who interviewed numerous AIFLD, State Department and related officials just after the coup, in 1974. Excellent resources are also the numerous recent works on the subject by Kim Scipes, Tim Shorrock, Judy Ancel and others.

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American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) I watched a live television

address by Salvadore Allende circa 1971, explaining to the people of the United States

his need to nationalize the copper industry. Still a bit naïve and conflicted about his

Marxism (I was not quite ready to call myself a socialist at that time) I none-the-less saw

Allende as a democratic president doing what had to be best for the Chilean people,

exploited as they were by the same U.S. corporations who were screwing me and my

union brothers and sisters here. He was right to do it, I thought then. But I sensed in his

voice and his demeanor that he must know and fear the danger he faced taking on

Nixon’s white house. Then I watched in disbelief on TV two years later as strikes and

“internal” strife tore Chile apart, and finally precipitated (so we were told) the coup and

Allende’s “suicide.”5 It would be another year or two before, again in front of the T.V.

set, I heard CBS TV’s Walter Cronkite report on allegations that the CIA, and the

American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) affiliate

AIFLD had in fact engineered and funded the coup. By then it was no surprise to me that

our government would do such a thing. And I had by then come to see George Meany,

I.W. Abel and other leaders of the labor movement as business unionists who might be as

anti-communist as they claimed to be pro-worker. But my union aiding and abetting

Nixon and Kissinger in this perfidy? My union dues, mixed up with dirty CIA dollars

used to pay for a military coup against a democratically-elected friend of workers? By

that I was stunned.

Shortly after that revelation, at my first USWA convention in 1976, all of us

delegates were given a little book containing president I.W. Abel’s lecture at Carnegie-

Mellon University in which he proudly announced,

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“The American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), an

auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, is beginning its eleventh year of activities aimed

at helping the efforts of the workers in Latin America to improve living

standards, overcome Communist infiltration and subversion, and develop

effective and responsible trade unions.”6

The irony in that statement is profound. By 1976, if not earlier, Abel surely knew quite

well the role of AIFLD in the Chilean atrocity, not to mention similar antidemocratic,

anti-worker, anti-union activities throughout Latin America. And he gloated to the

business community about it. For this, as much as for his dictatorial rule of the USWA

and sell-out to the steel companies, his name will forever live in my mind in infamy. 7

Years later, trying to understand the role of my own union in AIFLD and its

nefarious activities, I found Fred Hirsch’s comprehensive and very well documented

study, published in the Mickeljohn Institute’s weighty two volume collection of essays

The Cold War Against Labor. Coincidentally I had a small article of my own published

in the same anthology. I strongly identified with Fred, who calls himself a “Plumber

Who Gets Curious About Exporting McCarthyism.” My own story might just as well be

titled “A Steelworker Who Also Gets curious…” With all the indisputable evidence and

documentation now available, the case against AFL-CIO leaders like George Meany as

accomplices to crimes against humanity is pretty strong. But setting aside, for the

moment the CIA and military dictatorship involvement, for their collaboration with the

bosses—foreign and domestic—the USWA constitution might be construed as

denouncing leaders like them as “devoid of principle and destitute of honor.” Unless, as

many of them would undoubtedly argue, the anticommunist clause trumps the

responsibility to the members clauses.

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AFL and later AFL-CIO support of reactionary U.S. cold war foreign policy

through groups like AIFLD, reflected the triumph of business unionism in the United

States. That business unionism—the narrow view that unions dare not question corporate

capital’s domination of production and the world, for that matter, but should limit

themselves to collective bargaining for hours, wages and working conditions for their

members—has severely undermined the power and status of American workers through

foreign policy, as well as through the destruction of militant trade unionism domestically.

American workers—North, South and Central American workers—have all paid a huge

price for the collaboration of AFL-CIO leaders with the U.S. government in the interest

of U.S. corporations in places like Latin America. While they should have been fighting

for the interests of all American workers, and indeed supporting world wide labor

organization and solidarity, AIFLD-CIA policy in Latin America undermined real,

militant unions there, and funded company unions which sold out the workers. The effect

on American copper workers in places as distant as Chile, Peru, Montana and Arizona

was devastating, as for example trans-national copper corporations like Anaconda,

Phelps-Dodge and Kennecott played U.S. workers against their Latin American

counterparts for years with impunity, while the labor movements of the countries

shunned cross border organizing and solidarity.8

Business unionism advocated by the AFL triumphed over social unionism with

the purges of left wing militant unions and unionists by the CIO in the late 1940’s and

early 1950’s.9 The merger of the AFL and CIO in 1954 was in fact a recognition of this

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accomplished fact—a surrender of social unionism as epitomized by the CIO’s left-led

unions to the old class-collaborationist tendency of the AFL. Business unionism

weakened the U.S. labor movement in many ways. With the adoption by the AFL-CIO of

U.S. cold war foreign policy, and its collaboration with the CIA around the world, this

ideology added a new dimension to its undercutting of U.S. workers and their unions—it

worked against and in fact effectively precluded cross border organizing and international

labor solidarity.10 Even before the cold war mentality twisted the minds of many into

believing that the communist enemy required an alliance of capital and labor to defeat it,

the AFL under Gompers was busy making deals with the bosses in return for a small

piece of the pie. When business unionists smashed the CIO’s social unionism, calling it’s

advocates Communists, traitors and un-American, a creature like AIFLD became not

only possible, but a logical extension of class-collaborationist thinking.

In Latin America, the pro-corporate, anti-communist foreign policy initiative by

AFL leadership through AIFLD negatively impacted the union movements of virtually all

the countries of the hemisphere. This was truly a Cold War against “American” workers.

President of Chile’s militant CUT in the 1970’s, Luis figeroa called the AFL-CIO “an

instrument of [U.S.] imperialism,” and called AIFLD’s activities in Latin America

“thirteen years of massive social espionage.”11 One does not build cross-border nor

international labor solidarity on such treachery.

AFL-CIO’s criminal behavior in Latin America hurt union members in the U.S. in

a number of ways, some general and some specific. First, union leaders were sitting down

and plotting with corporation heads about how to undermine “communist” militant

unions in other countries, when they should have been meeting with their own members

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and developing strategies to fight the corporate bosses, and especially fight their

exploitation of cheap foreign labor which was used to replace union labor here. The

hours, days, weeks they spent collaborating were hours they were paid by the members to

represent our interests and build our unions. Both the (dues) money and the time were

from this standpoint misspent. The staff they assigned to AIFLD and the other CIA fronts

were staff who should have been organizing workers, perhaps in fact organizing cross-

border where appropriate, or more likely assisting Latin American labor movements that

were fighting their (and our) Pan-American bosses. Indeed, instead of purging its most

militant, effective and politically smart leadership the CIO could have better served its

own members by utilizing its strong left wing to help organize the unorganized, build

international solidarity and fight the bosses globally—as CIO leftists had proven their

ability to do effectively during the 1930’s and 40’s. U.S. union leaders should also have

been sitting down with the leaders of labor organizations like the CUT in Chile and

planning joint actions, against corporations who were putting U.S. copper workers in

competition with their Chilean counterparts, thus driving down the wages of both. AFL-

CIO leaders should have been building international labor solidarity to confront

globalization. Instead they were training business unionists, building company unions and

conducting espionage for the corporations, military regimes and the CIA. Ironic, in view

of the collaboration, that the CIA has become known by those working for it as “the

company.”

Had the AFL-CIO eschewed active participation in foreign policy completely, the

time, effort and resources devoted to AIFLD could have been well spent organizing the

unorganized in this country, training union leaders here in effective, militant

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representation of workers and our interests, and political action on working class issues,

perhaps even building a real labor party to advance the social agenda of a class-conscious

labor movement. Instead, resources and energy desperately needed to build and

strengthen the U.S. labor movement, if not a world-wide labor movement, were turned

over to trans-national corporations and their CIA agents and used to destroy militant trade

unionism throughout the Americas, even while here in the U.S. class-collaborationist

leadership of the AFL-CIO weakened and disabled our own labor movement.

The members noticed. Union membership in the U.S. dropped precipitously after

the purges. And alienation of the members from the leadership grew. Today many union

members see the union as merely a dues collecting organization which is not interested in

their input or their problems. And too many workers in non-union enterprises are loathe

to join unions, which they see as of little help since they have failed to protect their own

members from capital’s neoliberal assault. What use is it to join a union which is all too

often on the side of management, in this country as well as in other countries?

Why did (does?) the AFL leadership, and more importantly the “best and

brightest” young trade unionists hired to do foreign affairs allow themselves to be used as

capitalist dupes in the service of U.S. Business Imperialism? As I will argue, the road to

hell may well be paved with their good intentions. And the middle of the road, as we

know, has nothing in it but a long yellow stripe, and road kill.

Union Internationalism Subverted

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Internationalism—the union goal of building a global federation of unions and

union members with which to confront multi-national and trans-national capital reached a

high point in 1945 with the creation by the British and Soviet labor movements and the

CIO of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) at a conference in London. By

1949, the CIO’s Philip Murray had denounced the WFTU as Communist dominated, and

created the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) dominated by

business unionists.12 In the cold war double speak of the Company/Union/Government

triumvirate that emerged after 1949, “free” came to mean not just anti-communist, but

avidly pro-business. If the militant, progressive unions AIFLD sought to undermine

were “communist dominated” the unions AIFLD promoted, bribed or created were for

the most part company unions. As J. Peter Grace, CEO of W.R. Grace Company and first

chair of AIFLD put it, AIFLD’s goal was to “Teach workers to help increase their

company’s business [and] promote democratic free trade unions, to prevent communist

infiltration, and where it exists, get rid of it.”13 What that meant in practice became all

too clear with the eventual disclosure of AIFLD espionage and subversion in Chile.

Cloak & Dagger Bedfellows

If, as I argue, AFL-CIO leadership was in bed with U.S. corporations since they

ran the militants out in the 1940’s, they officially got into bed with the Central

Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the 1960’s. A CIA front, intelligence-gathering operation

and money-laundering apparatus, AIFLD (commonly pronounced “A Field” with a long

A) was created in 1961. 14

14 AIFLD was created by the Labor Advisory Committee on Foreign Assistance. Incorporated as a “non-profit Delaware Corporation” in 1961 so that it could “receive foundation money legally” AIFLD’s first president was George Meany and business magnate J. Peter Grace of W.R. Grace Company chairman of the board. In June 1962 the Institute opened for business. Initial funding

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AIFLD trained business unionists in Chile and other Latin American nations, and

arranged for selected union members with “leadership potential” to get further training at

Front Royal, Virginia. In the process of inculcating AFL ideas in potential labor leaders,

did AIFLD also keep records of those who showed signs of leftist tendencies? Might such

information have been passed on to the CIA, to eventually find its way into the hands of

came from a $100,000 grant by President John Kennedy, “hand-carried” by Arthur Goldberg— USWA and CIO general counsel appointed by Phillip Murray to replace Communist Lee Pressman.? Goldberg was a staunch anti-communist, and chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Labor Division during World war II. He wrote the first anti-communist clauses into the CIO and USWA constitutions. His position as confidant and aide to Phillip Murray put him at the center of USWA as well as CIO policy. Goldberg would mold cold war AFL-CIO foreign policy to conform with State Department and CIA strategy throughout the world (See Hirsch and Muir, 737. See also David L. Stebenne, Arthur J. Goldberg, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 pp. 73-119).Former Office of Strategic Services (OSS) agent Serafino Romualdi headed up the initial group. Romaudi, who had worked for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) president David Dubinsky, was the key organizer of AIFLD’s predecessor the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers (Spanish acronym ORIT) just after World War II. People like former Communist, later virulent anti-communist Jay Lovestone were on-board from 1943, setting up the AFL’s foreign policy arm the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC). “One of Romualdi’s first contacts in Latin America, Wenecslao Moreno,” was apparently a CIA agent working to undermine and eliminate the militant 2 million-member left wing National Labor Center Central Unitaria de Trabajo (CUT). AIFLD was aimed at creating “free” (that is, CIA controlled and U.S. business-friendly class collaborationist) trade unions in Latin America, and undermining, subverting or destroying “Communist” (that is, militant, class-conscious, confrontational) unions in that area of the world. Continued funding came from the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), an agency whose avowed mission is to “ provide economic and humanitarian assistance in over 100 countries to provide a better future for all.” (See USAID Website: http://www.usaid.gov/ ) AID picked up 90% of all further funding.( Hirsch and Muir, p 741) Labor Institutes were also created for Africa and Asia. See Fred Hirsch and Virginia Muir, p 741, also Kim Scipes, “It’s Time to Come Clean: Open the AFL-CIO Archives on International Labor Operations,” Labor Studies journal, Summer 2000.

5 Hortensia Bussi, widow of the president Allende, claims he fought off the army with a machine gun to the end, and was murdered. See Pilar Aguilera and Ricardo Fredes, Eds., Chile: The Other September11. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2003.

6 I.W. Abel, 1975 Benjamin Fairless Memorial Lectures, Collective bargaining Labor relations in Steel: Then and Now, New York: Columbia University Press, 1976, p 39.

7 At the 1968 USWA Convention, president I.W. able had proudly introduced to the delegates,

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the likes of Pinochet’s military, where it was used to round up and dispose of dissidents?

“Our” kind of trade unionists (pro-business, anti-communist) were schooled, funded and

promoted into the ranks of “Our” kind of Latin American “democratic” trade unions.

Those who could not be bought or persuaded to think like AIFLD were black-listed—and

these lists could mean, in places like Pinochet’s Chile, exile, torture, disappearance or

top officers of AIFLD including Angelo Verdu, Samuel Haddad, and Alberto Garza along with former USWA staff representative and then U.S. Department of Labor Chief of the Trade Union Exchange Programs Division, Edward Lonergan, and no less than 25 other AIFLD operatives. That same convention heard reports on the previous year’s nine month copper strike, during which transnational copper Corporations were able to increase output from their Latin American facilities, and the International Longshoreman’s association was asked to boycott foreign copper imports. AFL-CIO President George Meany addressed that convention, defending AFL-CIO foreign policy against attacks by Walter Reuther’s United Auto workers (UAW) over support for the Viet Nam War.(See USWA Proceedings of the Fourteenth Constitutional Convention, Chicago, Illinois, 1968 pp. 44, 74-76, 94-96)At the 1984 Steelworkers Convention, Angel Rodriguez, president of Local 616 in Morenci Arizona, pleaded for support for the copper miners striking against Phelps Dodge, who were being decertified. USWA President Lynn Williams announced a Corporate Campaign against Phelps Dodge, showed a film entitled “High Stakes in Morenci” and passed the hat. (See USWA Proceedings of the 22nd Constitutional Convention, Cleveland, Ohio pp. 113-118)

8 See Janet Finn, “Intimate Strangers: The Interlocking Histories of Butte, Montana and Chuquicamata, Chile,” article excerpted from Tracing the Veins of Copper, Culture and Community from Butte to Chuquicamata, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. www.his.state.mt.us/education/cirguides/buttearticfinn.asp The USWA copper strike of 1983 saw the destruction of a local union and a town, and might have been won if not for the copper corporations’ ability to increase Latin American production while their U.S. operations were struck, as well as hire replacement workers due to a weakened U.S. labor movement’s inability to stop them.(See Jonathan Rosenblum, Copper Crucible, Ithaca, N.Y. ILR Press, 1995.)

9 Murray, long an advocate of collaboration with capital, turned on communists and other radicals in 1947, and in 1948 replaced CIO chief counsel (and Communist) Lee Pressman with former OSS anti-communist Arthur Goldberg, an advocate of the liberal “middle way” that aimed for a triumvirate of capital, labor and government. See David L. Stebenne, Arthur J Goldberg, New Deal liberal, pp. 42-43, 53-54, 65, 71. Goldberg’s anti-communist “middle way” sounds very much like the “third force” advocated by the CIA agent “Pyle” in Graham Geenes’ Viet Nam novel The Quiet American.

10 Such solidarity, first advocated by Marx in the Communist Manifesteto (“Workers of the world, unite!”) as the antidote to capitalist global expansion and trans-national operations is absolutely essential if workers are to have any chance of survival in the face of global capital’s neoliberal assaults. Starting from the premise that the interests of the worker are antithetical to those of capital (as Adam Smith declared in 1776, Marx elaborated upon, and left leaders of the

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death. Hence it is not a stretch to say that AIFLD was to some degree complicit in the

worst crimes of the regime.15

Is Sweeney’s Foreign Policy Better?

The dissolution of AIFLD by incoming president John Sweeney was heralded by

most labor progressives as a new day for AFL-CIO foreign policy. Sweeney replaced

AIFLD, and the other regional institutes with the American Center for International

Labor Solidarity (ACILS) in 1997 to replace the four regional institutes. But two facts

cast serious doubt on the thoroughness, if not the sincerity of the Sweeny reforms. First

in Venezuela, as Tim Shorrock and Kim Scipes have noted, there is strong if

CIO took for granted) collaboration with the bosses is simply unthinkable. Given this basic assumption, trying to understand the convoluted, tortuous logic which led the leaders of the “free world’s” premier labor organization to join forces in a troika with business and pro-business government would require no less than a kind of Orwellian double-think. But business unionists never really adopted this basic premise. For them it is not workers of the world against the bosses, it is more like, plumbers and plumbing contractors of Philadelphia against the world.

11Luis Figeroa Speeches: 9/11/74 Stockholm and March 1975 Mexico City cited in Hirsch and Muir, p 755.

12 The CIO delegation’s Sidney Hillman played a major role in the formation of the 66 million member WFTU, which included delegations from 55 nations. Its declared program was to “promote world cooperation and peace, full employment and a rising standard of living for all workers.” Retired United Electrical Workers (UE) vice president Ernest DeMaio was chosen to represent the WFTU at the United Nations, where he served for many years. By 1949, however, the CIO under Phillip Murray had renounced it membership in the WFTU (and expelled the UE) claiming both were “dominated by communists.” The CIO formed a rival organization, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) which excluded unions in “socialist and developing nations.” While the WFTU grew to a membership of 230 million workers in 126 countries by 1978 without U.S. participation, the ICFTU, which became a cover organization for AIFLD and other world wide CIA subversive operations “never rose above 25 million” members. See Elenore H. Binkley, Reflections on the Labor Movement of the USA, New York: New Outlook Publishers, 1983 pp. 221-225

13 This quote has been widely published, by friend and foe alike of Grace and AIFLD. AIFLD’s own booklet “AIFLD: A Union to Union Program for the Americas”, 9/16/65, used it. It was published in U.S. News and World Report, 3/19/84, p. 60, as well as in Grace’s bio in Who’s Who in America, Volume 24. Hirsch and Muir cite it on p. 742.

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circumstantial evidence that the in-country agents of ACILS may have been up to some

of AIFLD’s old dirty tricks once again. Supporting the right wing Confederation of

Venezuelan Workers Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV) which allegedly

plotted with business forces to incite a military coup, ACILS has been accused of

playing Venezuela’s workers much as they did the workers in Chile. 16 The AFL-CIO

does not deny cooperation between FEDECAMARAS, the Venezuelan Chamber of

Commerce and Carlos Otega, president of the CTV, but defend the strike called by the

CTV as legal, justified, and in no way connected with or aimed at inciting the coup—an

argument which calls for quite a stretch of the imagination, based on the preponderance

of facts.17 Calling Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez a “populist” who promulgated

laws which limited collective bargaining rights in the oil industry, the AFL-CIO argues

that their “partners” in the CTV “invited” ACILS to help them with a process of “internal

democratization” and that ACILS is only interested in supporting “free, fair and

democratic” unions in places like Venezuela.18 It was their support for “core values” like

the right to strike which led them to support the CTV’s strike against the government,

which according to AFL sources was only coincidental to the attempted coup. The AFL-

CIO defends its actions in Venezuela as strictly pro-democracy and pro-union, and

continues its attacks on the leftist Chavez administration with a web site posting (in

2003) calling on the Chavez administration to lift a detention order against Carlos

Ortega and release business magnate and FEDECAMARAS president Carlos Fernandas,

both accused of “treason, civil rebellion, instigation of crimes, gang activity and

devastation.”19   “Today,” as Cathy Feingold puts it “Cold War divisions are less and

less” important to the AFL-CIO.20 Yet somehow, ACILS activities opposed to the

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democratic but leftist Chavez administration in Venezuela produced consequences which

verged on disaster for that country’s workers. And refusal of the AF-CIO to accept a

measure of responsibility for the bloody coup attempt begs questions about the sincerity

of its leaderships intentions.

As Scipes has also found, the Advisory Committee on Labor Diplomacy

(ACLD) created in 1999 under President Clinton was until recently a joint operation of

the Bush State Department and “AFL-CIO foreign policy leaders”:

Top AFL-CIO officials have been involved in the committee, including

John Sweeney and Linda Chavez-Thompson, as well as William Lucy,

Secretary-Treasurer of AFSCME, an AFL-CIO Executive Council

Member, and oversees the International Affairs Department (IAD) for the

Executive Council. Former AFL-CIO President (and long-time Secretary-

Treasurer), and Board Member of the National Endowment for

Democracy (NED), Thomas R. Donahue, chairs the ACLD. Another

participant from Labor is the former President (1979-1999) of the

Bricklayers, John Joyce.21

Scipes claims this AFL-CIO/State Department collaboration did not challenge

Bush administration foreign policy, but pretty much rubber stamped it.22 The AFL-CIO’s

Cathy Feingold argues otherwise, and says the committee’s 2 year mandate has not been

renewed by Bush.23 Perhaps most telling is the allegation that today’s AFL-CIO has

refused to “come clean”—either about the details of AIFLD’s involvement in Latin

America, or ACIL’s support of reactionary elements in Venezuela. Transparency,

essential in a democratic labor movement seems, in the U.S. labor movement’s top

leadership, seems sadly lacking. Feingold argues that more and more documentation of

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ACILS activities is in the process of being made publicly available on the AFL-CIO

website, so that the issue might very well become moot in the near future.24 What no one

in the AFL-CIO leadership seems ready to come to grips with are the fundamental

contradictions inherent in its continuing business unionist ideology, that seem to continue

to drive its foreign as well as domestic labor policy.

Why? A Case of Pyles?

The McCarthyite anticommunists used to say of militant trade unionists and other

accused Communist “sympathizers” that they were either co-conspirators or unwitting

dupes. One or the other. Or some of both. Given the facts known about recent ACILS

activities in Venezuela around the time of the unsuccessful coup against democratically-

elected president Hugo Chavez , a similar question might be asked of AFL-CIO

personnel involved. Certainly Sweeney and the old hands should know better. New

recruits are another question. Like novelist Graham Greene’s Quiet American “Pyle” (a

fitting name for the pain in the ass the young CIA agent is shown to be) many of

Solidarity Center’s young recruits mean well, just as Needleman says of many AIFLD

operatives who had no direct connection with the CIA in Chile. In his classic and

prescient 1955 novel, Greene describes U.S. “innocence” in 1950’s Viet Nam as “like a

dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm,” and hence

much to be feared for the unwitting damage they can wreak.25 Naive, “innocent,” true-

believers in “America’s” superior knowledge and virtue, ACIL’s in-country liberal

business unionists likewise seem to blunder on in their befuddlement, threatening to

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cause much bloodshed and misery for the workers of Venezuela and wherever else in the

world they alight. Anticommunist if not consciously pro-capitalist, moved by “terrible

notions of duty” they appear to seek, like Greene’s paternalistic Pyle, to help the

“ignorant” Latin American workers find a “third way” or “middle way”26 between

communism and neocolonialism through “independent” (but pro-business and pro-U.S.)

unionism. “I know the harm liberals do,” says Greene’s hard-bitten news correspondent

“Fowler,” of the attempt of the CIA to introduce “textbook notions of democracy and

freedom” into 1950’s Viet Nam. 27 Like the young, idealistic CIA agent Pyle, might not

ACIL’s exuberant missionaries, in their zeal to “do God’s work”28 instigate unintended

and disastrous consequences? Suspicious of and ideologically opposed to the leftist labor

leaders, they end up on the side of business—and in the case of Chile and more recently

Venezuela—terrorists and coup-plotters. The old hands should know better. Is it simply

hubris—of the variety that seems to have infected formulators of U.S. foreign policy

since we first became a world power? Have our labor leaders not learned the lessons of

Viet Nam, nor of the AIFLD’s bloody bungling? God knows they mean well. Obsessed

with “pluralism” and “freedom of association” as measures of “democracy” they

engineer “an impressive process of internal democratization” highlighted by “free and

fair” elections in Venezuela’s CTV labor center. The result: “nearly all the parties of the

left” included in the leadership (how many, at what level they don’t say) but also strong

representation for the bosses, who by all accounts used Ortega and the CTV to help set

the stage for a military coup against democratically -elected President Chavez. Do

“Workers Rights” according to AFL-CIO foreign policy, include the right to have

management or at least management interests represented in union leadership—a

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concept somewhat at odds, it would seem with U.S. Labor law ?29 The unintended

consequences of ACIL’s Venezuelan effort were (perhaps unwitting) support for a nearly

successful coup, which sought to tear up the constitution and return the country to rule by

the oligarchy. And union members throughout the world are watching. Are these people

stupid, we must ask ourselves, or just confused by their twisted ideology?

This problem of ideology—or the lack of clarity about it—and the “third way”

were addressed by AIFLD’s Joseph Palisi, interviewed by Ruth Needleman in 1974.

Identifying himself as “against the business unionism of the AFL,” he says introducing it

into Latin America was the result of “not having an ideology…having no ideals or

guidelines,” “that the bread-and- butter orientation of the AFL leads to a repugnant grab-

what-you [can] psychology which sees any kind of underhanded tactic or dirty trick as

the proper way to go about getting things.”30 This concept of (left) ideology as an antidote

to opportunism in the labor movement was elaborated concisely by my mentor, John

Sargent, several times president of 18,000 member USWA Local 1010:

A young fella who becomes active in the union, who hasn't got a broader perspective than just the union, sees the union as a stepping stone to security for himself, either to get a job in the union...or to use the union to get a job with the company, as a foreman, for instance... Unless the guy has a socialist viewpoint, or some kind of broader view-point of what this whole thing means, you're not gonna get good leadership. That's an important part of it.31

“You gotta stand for something, or you’re gonna fall for anything,” is the way Hoosier

rocker John Cougar Mellencamp put it. In striving to walk the yellow line down the

middle of the road between communism and neoliberalism, ACIL’s liberals are at risk of

getting run over in places like Venezuela. More importantly, workers who try to follow

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them along that convoluted, tortuous path are also at grave risk of becoming road kill as

ultra right and left clash over the future of the country. ”God save us always from the

innocent and the good,” as Greene puts it. In reality, the AFL-CIO leadership really does

end up taking sides in situations like this. Unfortunately, as it has for a hundred years,

when push comes to shove, it usually ends up on the wrong side, not the workers’ side.

The twisted ideology of the liberal “third way” and “a pox on both your houses” leads

inevitably to collaboration with the bosses. No one can serve two masters. And the most

alienating situation imaginable for North, South and Central American workers is to have

to wonder of U.S. labor leaders, “Which side are you on?”

Kim Scipes, Tim Shorrock, Fred Hirsch and others argue effectively that the

Sweeney administration needs to “come clean” about AIFLD and ACILS and open the

sealed archives which may reveal even more about the AFL-CIO anti-worker activities

throughout Latin America and the world. But fundamentally, nothing will really change

until labor’s rank and file demand a leadership which clearly understand that in today’s

world, just as in the eighteenth century of Adam Smith, business and labor are on

opposite sides of the class struggle—now indeed a class war. And the role of labor

leadership is to always and in every way be on the side of the workers, not the bosses.

Some concepts are terribly complex. This idea is not. The evidence is all around us, every

day.

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Bibliography

Abel, I. W. Benjamin Fairless Memorial Lectures 1975: Collective Bargaining Labor Relations in Steel: Then and Now. Pp. 38-39

Aguilera, Pilar and Fredes, Ricardo, Eds. Chile: The Other September11. Melbourne: Ocean Press. 2003.

Ancel, Judy. Response I: On Building an International Solidarity Movement. Labor Studies Journal, Vol. 25, No. 2 Summer 2000Pages 26-35

American Federation of Labor & Congress of Industrial Organizations. International Affairs Policy Resolutions, adopted December, 1965 AFL CIO Sixth Constitutional Convention. Washington, D.C.: AFL-CIO. February 1966

Davy, . Interviewed by Ruth Needleman. March 21, 1974. Transcript in author’s possession.

Douglas, William. Interviewed by Ruth Needleman. March 19 &21, 1974. Transcript in author’s possession.

Feingold, Cathy. AFL-CIO International Affairs Dept., phone conversation with author, 4/27/05.

Friedman, Jesse. Interviewed by Ruth Needleman. March 20, 1974. Transcript in author’s possession.

Gooden, Joan. Interviewed by Ruth Needleman. March 20, 1974. Transcript in author’s possession.

Griffith, Neville. Interviewed by Ruth Needleman. March 1, 1974. Transcript in author’s possession.

Hirsch, Fred and Virginia Muir.  1987.  “A Plumber Gets Curious About Exporting McCarthyism” in Ann Fagan Ginger and David Christiano, eds., The Cold War Against Labor (2 volumes).  Berkeley:  Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute:  723-768.

LaFeber, Walter. Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 1993.

Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me. New York: The New Press. 1995.

Meany, George. Clean Democratic Trade Unions. Washington, D.C.: AFL-CIO. Circa 1956.

Morris, George. CIA and American Labor: The Subversion of the AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy. New York: International Publishers. 1967.

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Needlman, Ruth. Taped interviewed by author. April, 2005

O’Grady, John. Interviewed by Ruth Needleman. March 1, March 14, 1974. Transcript in author’s possession.

Olivera, Cochabamba!: Water Rebellion

Parenti, Michael. Against Empire. San Francisco: City Lights Books. 1995.

Radosh, Ronald. American Labor and United States Foreign Policy. New York: Random House. 1969.

Roman, Peter. Peoples Power: Cuba. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2003.

Rosenblum, Jonathan D. Copper Crucible. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. 1995.

Scipes, Kim. It's Time to Come Clean: Open the AFL-CIO Archives on International Labor Operations. Labor Studies Journal, Vol. 25, No. 2 Summer 2000

Silberman, Allen. Interviewed by Ruth Needleman. March 15, 1974. Transcript in author’s possession.

Sims, Beth. Workers of the World Undermined: American Labor’s Role in U.S. Foreign Policy. Boston: South End Press. 1992.

Stebenne, David L. Arthur J. Goldberg, New Deal Liberal. New York: Oxford University Press. 1996 Stephansky, Ben. Interviewed by Ruth Needleman. February 27, 1974. Transcript in author’s possession.

Winn Victims of the Chilean Miracle

McLellan, Andrew. Interviewed by Ruth Needleman. March 28, 1974. Transcript in author’s possession.

Legge, Wallace. Interviewed by Ruth Needleman. March 19 & 29, 1974. Transcript in author’s possession.

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Palisi, Joseph. Interviewed by Ruth Needleman. April 5 & 10, 1974. Transcript in author’s possession.

Martin, Ben. Interviewed by Ruth Needleman. March 1, 1974. Transcript in author’s possession.

Scipes, Kim. Taped interview by author. April, 2005

Internet Sources

“The AFL-CIO and Worker Rights in Venezuela” on the AFL-CIO website. http://www.aflcio.org/issuespolitics/globaleconomy/ns04262002.cfm

AFL-CIO website statement on Venezuela, February 27, 2003 http://www.aflcio.org/aboutaflcio/ecouncil/ec02272003i.cfm   

“AIFLD on the Prowl Along the Border” in BorderLines 8 (Volume 2, Number 4, December 1994) Americas Program, A New World of Ideas, Analysis and Policy Options.http://www.americaspolicy.org/borderlines/1994/bl8/bl8aifld.html

Davis, Robert Gorham . “In Our Time No Man is a Neutral,” New York Times, March 11, 1956 in www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-quiet.html

Finn, Janet “Intimate Strangers: The Interlocking Histories of Butte, Montana and Chuquicamata, Chile,” article excerpted from Tracing the Veins of Copper, Culture and Community from Butte to Chuquicamata, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. www.his.state.mt.us/education/cirguides/buttearticfinn.asp

Shorrock, Tim. “Labor’s Cold War,” The Nation, May 19, 2003 see www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030519&s=shorrock

USAID Website: http://www.usaid.gov/

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End Notes

15 Needleman argues that this kind of espionage was unnecessary in Chile, since leftist union leaders were well-known to the military and Pinochet’s regime, since they had operated openly under the Allende administration.16 Tim Shorrock, “Labor’s Cold War,” The Nation, May 19, 2003 see www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030519&s=shorrock See also Kim Scipes, “AFL-CIO in Venezuela: Déjà vu All Over Again,” in Labor Notes, April, 2004. 17 Cathy Feingold, AFL-CIO International Affairs Dept., phone conversation with author, 4/27/05. Feingold argues that Chavez’ denunciation of the CTV and legislation against it along with the failing economy and Chavez inability to fix it forced Ortega into an alliance with FEDECAMARAS, an interesting if somewhat convoluted argument somewhat reminiscent of blaming Chile’s Allende for the destruction of the economy even as strikes by right wing “unions” there paralyzed it.

18 Cathy Feingold, phone conversation with author, 4/27/05

19 AFL-CIO website statement on Venezuela, February 27, 2003 http://www.aflcio.org/aboutaflcio/ecouncil/ec02272003i.cfm   

20 Cathy Feingold, phone conversation with author, 4/27/05

21 Kim Scipes, “AFL-CIO Foreign Policy Leaders Help Develop Bush's Foreign Policy, Target Foreign Unions for Political Control ,” Labor Notes, March 2005

22 Kim Scipes, interview by author, April 2005. 19555

23 Cathy Feingold, phone conversation with author, 4/27/05

24 Unfortunately, the 28 page 2003-2004 Solidarity Center Annual Report, to which I was referred by Feingold and which is available on their website, is a slick, well-illustrated document filled with generalities about the center’s work around the world, and with only a one page consolidated summary of its funding. It contains no accounting breakdown for how the money was spent in places like Venezuela.

25 Graham Greene, The Quiet American, New York: Penguin Books 1955. p 37

26 See note 9. Arthur Goldberg and the liberal anti-communist Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) advocated the Swedish “Middle Way” of journalist Marquis Childs in 1948, and would base the post war wages/productivity bargain on its somewhat shaky ideological premise of power-sharing by capital, labor and government.

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27 Greene, quoted by Robert Gorham Davis, “In Our Time No Man is a Neutral,” New York Times, March 11, 1956 in www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-quiet.html

28 Tim Beaty (AFL-CIO International Affairs Dept.) quoted by Kim Scipes in email http://lists.gp-us.org/pipermail/laborgreens/2003-May/000526.html in conversation concerning ACIL work internationally.When Scipes “…asked him about the NED connection, he said something about it’s US taxpayer’s money and we want our share (not a direct quote)” The argument—that as taxpayers AFL-CIO members are entitled to a share of NED money—was reiterated in my phone conversation with Cathy Feingold, who insists there are no strings whatsoever attached to the money.

29 Quotes from statement “The AFL-CIO and Worker Rights in Venezuela” on the AFL-CIO website. http://www.aflcio.org/issuespolitics/globaleconomy/ns04262002.cfm

30 Joseph Palisi, interview by Ruth Needleman, April 10, 1974, transcript in author’s possession. Palisi, who came to AIFLD from Catholic Relief Services, seemed in interviews appalled and frightened at the involvement of AIFLD with the CIA. He detailed death squads (then) operating in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Puerto Rico which used heart attack-inducing cyanide, leukemia-inducing injections, car “accidents”, and similar “black ops” methods to assassinate “problem people and opposition people”

31 John Sargent, taped interview with Mike Olszanski, August 13, 1978.