1945-1960 : Cold-War Labor
A new world labor federation created as a democratic rival of the Communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) was formally established at the international conference of trade unions held in London, November 28–December 1949. The new organization, which is to be called the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) is the outgrowth of the split of democratic unions from the WFTU almost a year earlier.
Cooperation between the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations was impressive throughout the Congress. Many delegates from other countries were under the impression that there were real differences between the “conservative” AFL and the “radical” CIO, and were surprised to find both organizations condemning Communism, Franco Spain, and imperialism in the strongest terms. Both groups also declared themselves for the European Recovery Program, the Atlantic Pact, and Point Four. The AFL and the CIO both sent top men to represent them at this meeting and wielded a strong influence. There were some accusations, especially from the British, that US delegates tried to dominate the meeting, but for the most part, foreign delegates were really given an education in the American labor movement and reacted warmly.
George Meany was the AFL-CIO president from 1955 to 1979. Meany adhered to and greatly expanded labor’s strong tradition of worker internationalism. The American Federation of Labor (AFL)’s first leader, Samuel Gompers, had played a key role in forming the International Labor Organization in 1919 and in making worker rights standards an integral part of international law. His successor, William Green, backed efforts to save Jewish and other trade unionists from fascist and communist repression.
After World War II, as Green’s secretary-treasurer and then as his successor, George Meany presided over the American labor movement’s extensive international operation, which was fundamentally responsible for the reconstruction of Europe’s free trade union movement and for providing sustained support to free trade unions in the developing world.
After the 1955 merger of the AFL and the Congress of Industrial Organizations to form the AFL-CIO, Meany, as president of the merged organization, expanded labor’s international reach with the creation of three regional institutes aimed at fostering free trade unions around the world: the African American Labor Center, American Institute for Free Labor Development, and Asian American Free Labor Institute. For Meany and his predecessors, worker rights were as indispensable to democracy as free markets were to capitalism in the eyes of businessmen.
Towards the end of 1956 President Meany of the AFL–CIO with a party of other important US labor leaders visited Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Peru and Panama to meet labor leaders and government officials. The trip was everywhere a success from a public relations point of view and attracted considerable sympathetic notice for the US labor movement.
During the late 1960s George Meany became increasingly disenchanted with the International Labor Organization. His disenchantment had to do with the compromise of the ILO’s tripartite nature (government–business–labor) in the interest of facilitating Soviet participation. Over the years, these attempts at accommodation have resulted, in fact, in some rather peculiar things. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the publication in the ILO magazine of a blatantly propagandistic piece about Soviet "trade unions", and the appointment of a Russian as an Assistant Director General of the ILO.
In regard to American labor's attitude toward the economy of the Nation, AFI-CIO President George Meany, in his address of October 17, 1957, before the International Industrial Development Conference, made it clear that: "American labor believes private enterprise has been and can be a great force for economic and social progress. Nor do we rule out Government intervention, regulation, or enterprise when the people think conditions require it. Private and public enterprise can get along together well in a free society. While we take the position that labor has a vital interest in the preservation of our free enterprise system, we do not seek to impose American economic forms on any other country * * *.
"We point to the fact that without benefit of dogmas or cliches, without a political party of our own, we of American labor have steadily reduced the gap between the great productive capacity of our country and the economic capacity (purchasing power) of our working-people. We take pride also in the fact that our trade union movement has played a major role in assuring that improvement of the economic conditions of the people should keep pace with * * * industrial development, technical progress, and higher productivity"
The AFL-CIO, through the Institute for Free Labor Development, headed by Jay Lovestone, under its strongly anti-Communist president George Meany, had been implicated in right-wing and anti-communist activities. Lovestone was a former Trotskyite and a wild man against all trade with Communists.
A Lithuanian immigrant who came to the United States in 1897, Lovestone rose to leadership in the Communist Party of America, only to fall out with Moscow and join the anti-Communist establishment after the Second World War. He became one of the leading strategists of the Cold War, and was once described as "one of the five most important men in the hidden power structure of America."
Lovestone's career in the faction-riven world of American Communism came to an end when he was spirited out of Moscow in 1929 after Stalin publicly attacked him for doctrinal unorthodoxy. As Lovestone veered away from Moscow, he came to work for the American Federation of Labor, managing a separate union foreign policy.
After World War II, Lovestone founded the Free Trade Union Commission, an AFL-backed movement that organized noncommunist labor unions outside of the United States. He also developed an intelligence-gathering unit within the organization that traded information with the CIA until the mid-1960s. Lovestone lived a fairly reclusive life, shunning the spotlight that some of his more colorful colleagues and coconspirators, such as James Jesus Angleton and George Meany, craved. Jay Lovestone was the only person who ever told Stalin to "go to hell" and lived to tell about it.
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