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Blue-Collar Empire:The Untold Story of US Labor's Global Anticommunist Crusade
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The secret history of how the CIA used American unions to undermine working class militancy at home and abroad during the Cold War.
There is power in a union. Not only the power to secure pay raises and employee benefits, but the power to bring economies to a screeching halt and overthrow governments. Recognizing this, in the late twentieth century, the US government sought to control labor movements abroad as part of the Cold War contest for worldwide supremacy.
To subvert overseas unions, Washington found an enthusiastic partner in the AFL-CIO’s anticommunist officials, who for decades expended incredible energy trying to block revolutionary ideologies and militant class consciousness from taking hold in the workers’ movements of Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Blue-Collar Empire tells the sweeping story of the AFL-CIO’s global anticommunist crusade—and the devastating consequences for workers at home and abroad.
Reviews
In this comprehensive and consequential study, Jeff Schuhrke sheds light on the often nefarious international agenda of the AFL-CIO. During the Cold War, as Schuhrke documents, the top leaders of the U.S. labor establishment, driven by fervent and indiscriminate anti-communism, helped sabotage nascent union movements in countries across the globe. In doing so, the AFL-CIO undermined cross-border working class unity and bolstered multinational corporate power. Blue-Collar Empire thus offers much vital information and insight, both for scholars seeking to understand the rise and decline of the 20th century labor movement, and for union activists working today to build (or re-build) international networks of solidarity.
In this highly readable and engaging book, Jeff Schuhrke explores the disastrous history of American labor's role bolstering U.S. imperialism in Latin America and elsewhere. He explains that Cold War anti-Communism was not the only key to the AFL-CIO's own "foreign policy." Equally crucial were the ideological linkages that put a liberal brand of industrial pluralism close to the heart of the modernization theory celebrated by the State Department and the CIA. Thus, in trying to transplant a North American version of "free" collective bargaining to the oligarchic regimes of Latin America, U.S. trade unions, whether funded by the CIA or not, found themselves complicit with repressive elites that could tolerate neither left wing insurgencies nor conservative enterprise-based trade unionism.
For too many years, too many unions followed the State Department like sheep, supporting lethal, union-member-killing anti-communist policies abroad in the hope of keeping at least a small seat at the table. Jeff Schuhrke’s eye-opening new book, Blue-Collar Empire, is an indispensable history of this devil’s bargain, a chilling lesson why, as a new, different kind of labor movement awakens, unions must never fight for economic justice at home while denying it to those abroad.