Table Of ContentAFL-CIO’s Secret War against
Developing Country Workers
AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country
Workers
Solidarity or Sabotage?
Kim Scipes
Published by Lexington Books
A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
http://www.lexingtonbooks.com
Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scipes, Kim.
AFL-CIO’s secret war against developing country workers : solidarity or sabotage? / Kim Scipes.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7391-3501-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Labor unions—United States—History—20th century. 2. Labor unions and international relations—United States—History
—20th century. 3. AFL-CIO—History. I. Title.
HD6508.S343 2010
331.09172'4—dc22 2010022962
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to Fred Hirsch, who has taught me and so many others what it means to be an internationalista in the
labor movement,
AND
To the memory of the late Ka Bel, Crispin Beltran, former National Chairperson, Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) Labor Center
of the Philippines. Mabuhay, Ka Bel!
Table of Contents
Abbreviations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: Business Unionism, Samuel Gompers and AFL Foreign Policy
Chapter 2: One Hundred Years of Reaction: From Gompers to Sweeney
Chapter 3: War Within Labor: The Struggle to Build International Labor Solidarity
Chapter 4: The U.S. Government and Labor
Chapter 5: Conclusions, Some Ramifications, and Effects On Sociological Theory
References
Endnotes
Index
About the Author
Abbreviations
Labor-created “institutes” and where they operate: the first four operated under the AFL-CIO
presidencies of George Meany and Lane Kirkland, and were disbanded by AFL-CIO President
John Sweeney in 1997. Sweeney established ACILS in 1997, which continues to date:
AAFLI Asian American Free Labor Institute, AFL-CIO: Asia
AALC African American Labor Center, AFL-CIO: Africa
American Institute for Free Labor Development, AFL-CIO:
AIFLD
Latin America
FTUI Free Trade Union Institute, AFL-CIO: Southern Europe
American Center for International Labor Solidarity, AFL-
ACILS
CIO—also known as the “Solidarity Center”: globally
U.S. Government-created agencies:
Advisory Committee on Labor and Diplomacy to the U.S.
ACLD
Secretary of State
USAID U.S. Agency for International Development
CIA U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
NED National Endowment for Democracy
Preface
This is a book that has been very difficult for me to write. I am a strong believer in collective
action, and especially collective action by working people, so as to improve their wages,
working conditions, and the general conditions of their lives. Also, I am a strong believer in
unions. I currently am a member of a union, the National Writers Union (NWU), and have
previously been a member of the Graphic Communications International Union (GCIU), the
National Education Association (NEA), and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT); each
but the NEA is affiliated with the AFL-CIO.
Yet the subject of this book—the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy program—is a direct threat to
working people, and to labor movements around the globe and in the United States. AFL-CIO
foreign policy leaders support and have worked to extend the U.S. Empire. Besides attacking
workers and unions around the world who challenge U.S. corporate investment and/or their
respective nation’s slavish acceptance of U.S. foreign policy as detailed herein, the AFL-
CIO’s foreign policy program can exist in the United States only by attacking labor democracy
within the U.S. labor movement itself. And working to maintain and extend the U.S. Empire has
meant that the AFL-CIO leaders have been unable to provide effective leadership for unions
and workers in this country, which have been under escalating attack by corporations and the
U.S. Government since the early 1970s.
Labor’s foreign policy program began almost one hundred years ago, although its
operations have varied over time, often with vagaries within the labor movement. Yet in all
that time, Labor’s foreign policy leaders—including the top elected officials in the labor
movement—have never given an honest report to their members of what they have been doing
around the world and why they have been doing it. In fact, they not only have failed to report
these projects, but they have actively resisted efforts to understand them when members have
gotten curious—and they have resisted “opening the books” even when formally requested by
their largest State affiliate, the California State AFL-CIO.
I have been studying AFL-CIO foreign policy off and on since I first learned about it in
the Fall of 1983—and my closest compañero, Fred Hirsch, has been doing so since at least
1974—and yet there is still much not known about AFL-CIO operations around the world: only
a small part of their operations have been uncovered. However, when we know for certain that
AFL-CIO foreign policy leaders collaborated in laying the groundwork to overthrow
democratically-elected governments in countries such as Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964) and
Chile (1973)—in each case, leading to decades of rule by dictatorship, oppression of entire
societies, and deaths of thousands of human beings—then we know that, despite any small
efforts that might assist workers here or there, the overall project is toxic, and must be dug out
root and branch, and replaced by a genuine program of international labor solidarity.
Unfortunately, however, laying the groundwork to help overthrow democratically-elected
governments is only the tip of the iceberg. The AFL-CIO foreign policy leadership has also
consciously supported labor movements that were set up by dictatorships—in Brazil, Chile,
Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa, and South Korea—to ensure that the workers, along
with the rest of civil society, would never be able to coalesce and restore popular democracy
in these particular countries. We also know for certain that in at least one case—that of the
largest affiliate of Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP), itself affiliated with the
AFL-CIO’s Asian American Free Labor Institute (AAFLI)—leaders literally joined with a
death squad against an opposing union to try to get their way; and this, as shown in chapter 2, is
not an exaggeration.
And we know that the AFL-CIO has joined with the Reagan-initiated but U.S. Congress-
financed National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an organization that is the antithesis, the
opposite, of what it claims to be: it works semi-independently of the U.S. Government, yet in
collaboration, to ensure the continued domination of the U.S. Empire. The AFL-CIO helped
establish the organization, and has worked with it since its founding in 1983. Other “core
institutes” of the NED, besides the AFL-CIO’s “Solidarity Center,” include the National
Democratic Institute (the international wing of the Democratic Party—currently headed by
former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright), the International Republican Institute
(international wing of the Republican Party—currently headed by U.S. Senator John McCain),
and the Center for Private Enterprise (the international wing of the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce). We know for certain that the NED was deeply involved in helping to lay the
groundwork for the attempted coup against democratically-elected Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez in April 2002, and that the AFL-CIO’s so-called Solidarity Center itself was involved
with the right-wing labor leadership of the CTV (Confederación de Trabajadores
Venezolanos), a key leader of the coup attempt itself before it got betrayed by political and
military leaders of the coup.
Unfortunately, the story of the AFL-CIO foreign policy program is even worse, although it
is told as completely as possible at this time in this book. Yet, as is also known, our story is
only the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully, however, this will encourage researchers and writers
around the world to delve even deeper to expose and end these operations.
It is also believed, though, that most American trade unionists will be aghast to learn of
this abhorrent story, especially with it being done “in our name” but without our informed
consent—or even uninformed consent. These operations are a direct dagger at the heart of
trade union democracy, and that means that members are unable to control their very own
organizations. In fact, it is a threat to popular democracy in the United States itself.
It is argued that if American trade unions are ever going to be able to represent working
people in this country in a real sense, then they must destroy this cancer eating at their very
essence. Members must rise up within every union, and be persistent and determined enough to
demand an immediate end to the AFL-CIO foreign policy program—and we have to make it
happen.
However, the struggle is even larger than this: the very understanding of trade unionism in
this country must be transformed. Our current form of trade unionism must be changed from one
that basically only advances members’ interests, even at the possible expense of other working
people, to one where the unions fight for the interests of all working people, in the U.S. and
around the globe.
Thus, while it makes me sad to have to write about the treachery of top level AFL-CIO
foreign policy leaders, I hope that this will inspire workers across the United States to fight for
what is right, radically reform our trade union movement, and work to join the growing global
movement for social and economic justice.
Chicago, 2010.
