The birth of the Communist World Federation of Trade Unions dates back to 1945, “after a rift began over the US-backed Marshal Plan” (Carew, Dreyfus, Van Goethem, Gumbrell-McCormick, and Van der Linden 2000 qtd. McCallum 2013: 21). Over the following years, the ideological and material conflicts of the Cold War intensified and spilled over into the Internationals. The ITSs held strong to Social Democratic/Socialist ideals, mainly from the functionaries, were confronted with WFTU’s policies that denied them autonomy and influence. In 1948, WFTU-ITS failure in negotiating led to the creation of small trade secretariats (i.e. the Tobacco Workers International, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ Union, and the International Union of Shoe and Leather Workers). Lack of negotiations also exacerbated prejudice in organizing central and Eastern Europe, and the Third World (Rutters 2001: 14). As we see the rifts, disagreements, and political differences that led to the fragmentation of international labor unionism under the Cold War were not a coincidence but were a direct result of the geopolitical climate the Cold War produced.
In 1949, the emergence of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) – known as the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) – was also a side effect of the Cold War. It’s worth mentioning that “free” unionism was a euphemism for “global business unionism” (Hodkinson 2005: 59 qtd. Webster 195). As a matter of fact, the ICFTU’s international campaign for the promotion of five core labour standards lead dissidents the foundation of the Christian World Confederation of Labour. Nowadays, the organization lays out in “new symbolic orientation to alliance- building and membership mobilization [as] a largely strategic manoeuvre to cope its weakened status within both the international corridors of power and the radical contours of the global justice movements’ (Hodkinson 2005: 36; see also Jakobsen 2001, both qtd. in Webster, Lambert and Bezuidenhout 2008: 196). Therefore, international labor organizations under the Cold War climate took up opposing sides of conflict that reverberate contemporarily: “international trade union movement lined up
behind their respective country interests to take sides for the ‘democratic’ West or the ‘communist’ East” (McCallum 2013: 22).
All these organizations, international in scope, remain in existence in today’s international unionism. As we shall see, in terms of international labor organizations, these as well as the Global Unions are more like corporatist labor associations. Waterman (1998 and 2002) argues that, independently of ideology, WFTU, ICFTU- ITUC and the WCL share some common characteristics:
detachment between leaders and the rank and file, requiem from Cold War ideologies, tendency to the reproduction of the Nation-state and international agencies logic, dependency of the “North” unionism; inspiration of North- American and European ideologies from the XIX and the first half of the XX centuries (i.e. social democracy, Communism, business unionism, social Christianism, reduction of the complex reality of the world working population to the model of the male and unionized worker, and etc. (Waterman, 1998:112- 113; 2002:34-40, my translation)47
The organization of the U.S. labor movement during the Cold War fell victim to the involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). For instance, Jay Lovestone, leader of the US Communist Party, became a CIA agent.
For some organizations and leaders, the new “free” unionism was not free enough. In the U.S., from 1955 on, after the merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (resulting in the AFL-CIO), the North-American labor movement became more aggressive in its defense of “free trade unionism”. The American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) became closely aligned with Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress48 and “dedicated itself to the task of
47 Original text: “distanciamento entre lideranças e bases sindicais; persistência das influências
decorrentes do contexto de Guerra Fria; tendência para a reprodução da estrutura e comportamento do Estado-nação e das agências inter-estatais; demasiado dependência dos princípios de um sindicalismo sediado no “Norte”; inspiração nas estratégias e ideologias europeias e norte-americanas vindas do século XIX e da primeira metade do século XX, i. e., social democracia, comunismo, sindicalismo de negócios e cris- tianismo social; redução da complexa realidade da população trabalhadora mundial ao modelo do trabalhador sindicalizado e masculino; etc.”.
48 John F. Kennedy’s paternalistic speeches in favor of the Alliance for Progress were narrative
recurrences for justifying political alliance with Latin American countries to actually “preventing and resisting subversive insurgency” (National Security Action Memorandum no. 124 1962). Latin America has been, in fact, so unimportant for the US that at that time, under a government often considered progressive, that the ambassador Lincoln Gordon articulated the US support for the coup d’état over the
suppressing radical leftist forces within the international trade unions” (Sim 1999: 56 apud McCallum 2013: 22) in Latin America, and other regions, such as Asia, that “created further divisions [in the labor movement] that shape today’s labour map” (Webster, Lambert and Bezuidenhout 2008: 190). At this time, the Internationals started to increase in importance with the increased flow of capital transnationalism. During the Cold War, US interventions greatly influenced the configurations of the world labor movement and fostered a growth in business unionism.
During this period, another prominent figure was establishing known practices and norms of international unionism. Charles Levinson, head of the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM) is considered the “progenitor of the governance struggle” (McCallum 2013: 23). His way of unionizing is considered “Eurocentric, drawn from a vision of the evolution of industrial democracy and its extension to the international sphere” (Lambert and Webster 2006: 282).
Also in 1955, countries from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East met at Bandung, Indonesia (Encyclopædia Britannica 2016) to discuss a new Southern agenda to combat the hegemonic East-West divide. These newly-independent countries discussed colonialism, non-alignment, their proximity to power players in the global economy, recognition of all nations (large or small), reinforcing principles in the United Nations’ charter, and how to achieve economic and political independence from industrial nations (Jayaprakash 2005). This anti-colonialist meeting during the Cold War could of course not escape the hegemons: the U.S. kept a watchful eye on its aftermath and tried to respond to its leaders by creating working groups. Afraid of a possible rise in Chinese regional power, the Conference legitimized UN’s principles, based on western values (Parker 2006). So although the Bandung Conference was invested in an anti-colonial perspective – launching important efforts to combat the Western powers
democratically elected president Joao Goulart (“Jango”) in 1964. Kennedy sent the US Navy to the
Brazilian coast and recognized the military government one day after the coup. Jango was still in the country. It’s hard to imagine something worse from a “conservative” government, as Nixon’s, could do.
such as the Non-Aligned Movement and furthered an analysis of the North-South Divide– it still fell into the trap of relying on powerful hegemonic institutions.
The end of the Cold War brought new struggles and opportunities to the global labor movement and, with it, new ways to connect workers to the plethora of ways to build alliances, for instance, many in newly independent countries were involved in the effort to build democratic processes. One of the most successful campaigns was linked to the fight against apartheid in South Africa, in which Trumka’s United Mine Workers of Africa built a coalition with National Union of Mineworkers of South Africa to pressure Royal Dutch/ Shell to boycott the nation for its treatment of Black South Africans. It’s “perhaps the most effective example of cross-border solidarity of labor and its allies in history” (Bronfenbrenner 2007) that “rekindled the 1st
International” (Munck 2002 qtd. McCallum 2013: 24).
By the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall formally ending the Cold War, the international labor movement had experienced nationalism, capitalism, communism, anarchism, anti-communism, Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, business unionism, Catholicism, and dictatorships. At this time, three of these ideologies came to be the most prominent theoretical camps for labor internationalism – Communism, business unionism, and (mainly) social democracy – and all of them were prevalent (and hegemonic) within the international labor scene. The deepening of capitalist apparatuses would redesign a little further the manners in which international labor struggles would be institutionalized.