Abstract
The general worldview that guided mainstream US labor’s foreign policy from the 1930s to the end of the Cold War remained remarkably consistent. Among the key leaders and policymakers navigating labor’s international relations, all shared a general devotion to an ideology they characterized as “free trade unionism,” an outlook that emphasized steadfast commitment to internationalism, trade union autonomy, and anticommunism. American labor strove to cultivate anti-Communist, independent trade unions throughout the world and to quarantine so-called fake unions emanating from behind the Iron Curtain. Not all US trade unionists shared this outlook. Some sought flexibility while accepting the basic tenets of free trade unionism; a few rejected it entirely, calling instead for reconciliation between East and West and closer labor-state relations under a Socialist system. These voices, however, remained always a distinct minority. Labor leaders and their membership overwhelmingly supported the free trade union agenda.
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Notes
Sidney Lens, Radicalism in America (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, updated ed., 1969), 183.
Frank Wu, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 15;
Julie Greene, Pure and Simple Politics: The APL and Political Activism, 1881–1917 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 41–42.
Andrew Kersten, Labor’s Homefront: The American Federation of Labor During World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 4.
Also see Craig Phelan, William Green: Biography of a Labor Leader (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), 159–160.
Albert Fried, FDR and His Enemies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 162.
Also see John Schacht, Three Faces of Midwestern Isolationism: Gerald P. Nye, Robert Wood, and John L. Lewis (Iowa City, IA: Center for Recent History, 1981).
Anthony Carew, Labour Under the Marshall Plan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 63. The Federation launched the FTUC with an appeal for $1 million from affiliated unions.
Archie Robinson, George Meany and His Times (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 132;
Theodore Liazos, “Big Labor, George Meany, and the Making of the AFL-CIO, 1894–1955” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1998), 283–284.
On Japan, see Christopher Gerteis, “Subjectivity Lost: Labor and the Cold War in Occupied Japan,” in Labor’s Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context, ed., Shelton Stromquist (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008); and Howard Schonberger, “American Labor’s Cold War in Occupied Japan,” Diplomatic History 3 (1979).
Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 345.
Richard Melanson, “Human Rights and the American Withdrawal from the I.L.O.,” Universal Human Rights 1 (1979): 54.
“The ILO Front Line for Workers, ” American Federationist, November 1961. On the “universalist” human rights philosophy that contributed to the Philadelphia Declaration, see Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001), 230. Glendon describes Eleanor Roosevelt and other advocates of human rights at the time as, “Universalists in the sense that they believed that human nature was everywhere the same and that the processes of experiencing, understanding and judging were capable of leading” to a better world.
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© 2013 Robert Anthony Waters, Jr. and Geert van Goethem
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Wehrle, E.F. (2013). “Free Labor versus Slave Labor”: Free Trade Unionism and the Challenge of War-Torn Asia. In: Waters, R.A., van Goethem, G. (eds) American Labor’s Global Ambassadors. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137360229_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137360229_15
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