Upstream - Us Labor Imperialism Pt 1 The War Against Communism W Jeff Schuhrke

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

In this episode, part 1 of a 2-part miniseries on US labor and imperialism, Jeff Schuhrke joins us for a conversation on how US labor aided and at times even led the US's global fight against communism throughout much of the 20th century. Jeff Schuhrke is a labor historian, journalist, union activist, and assistant professor at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr School of Labor Studies, SUNY Empire State University. He's the author of Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor's Global Anticommunist Crusade, and No Neutrals There: US Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine. In this conversation we take a deep dive into Jeff's book Blue-Collar Empire, exploring US labor's role in fighting global communism during the 20th century. The conversation opens with a history of the early US labor movement, anchored by the AFL, the CIO, and the IWW which all presented different approaches and ideological orientations towards labor and capital. We then look at how labor was systematically deradicalized over the course of the first half the 21st century, leading to a mostly anticommunist, class-collaborationist labor movement by the post-WWII era. We then look at how the AFL-CIO and its various arms participated and at times led the global war against communism abroad, participating in sabotage campaigns and in outright regime change operations led by the CIA and the State Department—from France to Guyana to Brazil to Chile to Vietnam to the USSR. Finally, we explore how US labor's anticommunist, pro-imperialist positions throughout the 20th century impacted the US proletariat and the international working class more broadly.  Part 2 of this miniseries will take a deep dive into Jeff's book No Neutrals There, looking at US labor's role in supporting Zionism and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.  Further resources: Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor's Global Anticommunist Crusade No Neutrals There: US Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine Allaince for Global Justice Related episodes:  From the Frontlines: Organizing Against Amazon w/ Chris Smalls and Mars Verrone Black Scare / Red Scare with Charisse Burden-Stelly Third Worldism and the Bandung Spirit w/ Pranay Somayajula Walter Rodney, Marxism, and Underdevelopment with D. Musa Springer and Charisse Burden-Stelly A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations w/ Vijay Prashad Socialism Betrayed w/ Roger Keeran and Joe Jamison What Is To Be Done? with Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante Our ongoing Patreon series on Venezuela  Intermission music: "Only Got One Body" by Shiv and the Carvers Cover art: Berwyn Mure Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants—just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for Upstream stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going—socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. patreon.com/upstreampodcast For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

In some ways, you can say the labor movement in the U.S. was a victim of the Cold War. But as I argue throughout the book, the U.S. labor movement, the U.S. labor officialdom, we should more precisely say, was actually driving the Cold War. The Cold War didn't happen to unions. Unions and union leaders were pushing it and encouraging it, the fact that the AFL-CIO was working so hard to defang labor movements around the world, to take away those more militant, class-struggle-oriented traditions and replace them with this kind of class collaboration.

play it safe, be friendly with the government and that style of trade unionism, really set up worker movements all over the world to be taken advantage of by capital. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you.

I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Throughout much of the 20th century, the United States devoted an unimaginable amount of resources and energy towards fighting communism globally. These efforts have taken many shapes, from outright wars to coups to economic sabotage. But one specific tactic, which has remained largely unknown, is how the United States has used organized labor federations like the AFL-CIO in this anti-communist crusade. The term AFL-CIA isn't just a hyperbolic jab. Organized labor in the United States has actually worked quite closely with the CIA

and the State Department throughout much of the 20th century to sabotage left-leading administrations globally in a variety of jaw-dropping ways. In fact, it often led these efforts. Today we'll be joined by Jeff Shirky to discuss all of this and more. Jeff is a labor historian, journalist, union activist, and assistant professor at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies, Sunni Empire State University. He's also the author of Blue Collar Empire, the untold story of U.S. labor's global anti-communist crusade, which is what we're focusing on today. as well as no neutrals there, U.S. labor, Zionism, and the struggle for Palestine. Today's episode is the first of a two-part series with Jeff.

Part two will focus on his most recent book on U.S. labor support for Zionism. And before we get started, Upstream is entirely listener-funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We could not keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through this support, you'll be helping keep upstream sustainable

and helping keep this whole project going. Post-capitalist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now here's Robert in conversation with Jeff Shirky. Jeff, it is great to have you on the show. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, of course.

I'd love to start with an introduction, actually, if you could maybe introduce yourself for our listeners and just tell us a little bit, give us a sense of how you became interested in this topic of the U.S. labor movement. Well, my name's Jeff Shirky. I did a lot of random things in my 20s, different types of jobs. And long story short, I started working after the Great Recession. I was pretty angry with, you know, the whole state of capitalism.

And ended up working as an organizer in Chicago on a campaign funded by SCIU, the Service Employees International Union, to kind of clandestinely, quietly organize, fast food and retail workers in downtown Chicago around trying to get them interested in demanding a higher minimum wage. And then this kind of evolved into demanding also the right to be able to form a union. And it eventually became, when it finally went public in late 2012, it was the fight for 15 campaign, which then spread to other cities around the country of these short like one-day strikes of fast food workers demanding a $15 an hour minimum wage

and the right to be able to form a union. And so I was organizing on that campaign in the early days before it went public and got really interested in the labor movement. I had worked for a lot of nonprofits and stuff like that in the past. I became kind of frustrated with that. And I really liked the idea of unions being of, by, and four working class people and, you know, directly challenging corporate power and capitalism in the workplace. And I, you know, gravitated towards academia for various reasons and did a master's in labor studies

at the UMass Amherst Labor Center. And while I was there, I was a member of the UAW, United Auto Workers, which represents the grad workers at the University of Massachusetts. I was working as a research assistant. And, yeah, I did a lot of organizing within my own union, and that was great. you know, a different experience from being a union staff person trying to, you know, as an outsider, organizing within your own union was good. And then from there I ended up deciding to do a PhD in history with a focus on labor history because of these experiences I had had at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and again was part of the grad worker union there, the graduate employees organization, part of the AFT, American Federation of Teachers. And there I was, you know, had,

various roles in that union as a steward for the history department, the grievance officer handling grievances for fellow members. I was on the bargaining committee. I was eventually the co-president of the union local. And then we, while we were negotiating a new contract in between 2018, 2019, we ended up going on strike. The first strike in the union's history in 2019 that I got to be part of. Yeah, so that was also great experiences. Along the way, I worked with the United Electrical Workers a little bit, doing some research for them in Chicago. And as I had learned things about the labor movement and labor history and read labor history books, I would repeatedly see these references to unions, particularly within the AFL-CIO, working with the CIA or the

State Department on these notorious coups in Latin America during the Cold War. And in a lot of books, we're just sort of mentioned that and then just going to, and anyway, you know, moving on. And I would always be like, wait, what? Like, that's insane. I need to know more about this because I very much believe in the labor movement and in unions. And it seems like a huge betrayal for them to be working with the U.S. government in toppling foreign governments and making life worse for working class people.

and other parts of the world in service to U.S. imperialism. So that was what I decided to really focus on with my research as I was doing my PhD, and that eventually led to this book, Blue Color Empire. Little did you know that the connections with the CIA were just one slice of the pie of the labor movement's involvement in imperialism. So today we will be spending our time together talking about the book that you wrote, Blue Collar Empire, the Untold Story of of U.S. Labor's Global Anti-Communist Crusade, which it sounds like really began quite early

as you were looking into your research and noticing these ties with the CIA. And this was going to be the first part of a two-part miniseries on U.S. labor with you. I had originally reached out to you and asked if you wanted to do like a two-part single episode on this book and then your most recent book. And then I started Blue Collar Empire and I was like, okay, there's no way that we can cram all of that into one episode. So it's going to be a two-part series. The next series will be on your book,

which I just finished reading, No Neutrals There, which is on the U.S. labor's involvement in Zionism and in Palestine specifically in its connections to Israel. So that's also a fascinating journey into some, U.S. labor movements, imperialistic ambitions. But today we're just going to be focusing on the first book. And maybe to get us started, I could just ask you to do a quick overview of Blue Collar Empire

just to kind of zoom out and give us a sense of what the book is about. And really importantly to like why you felt like this book was so important to write now, or I guess, you know, when you wrote it a year or so ago. Yeah. When it was published. When it was published, right. I was writing it many years ago. Yeah, the book is an overview of the AFL-CIO,

which is the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. It's the major trade union federation in the United States and has been since it was first formed 70 years ago, December, 1955, from the merger of the AFL and CIA. And on the one hand, the book is like an institutional history of the AFL-CIO, and it's top of leaders, its top officials. It's a very top-down kind of history. A lot of labor histories, rightfully so, are from the point of view of rank-and-file workers in their struggles. And this is not necessarily that.

This is more about these high-ranking politically involved labor officials, and particularly their heavy involvement in U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War period. Now, I should say the U.S. labor movement has been involved in foreign activities and international politics for longer than the Cold War. You could go back at least to the 18, well, you could go back to the Knights of Labor in the 1880s, you know, and beyond. But this book is focused on the period from roughly the mid-1940s, right after World War II, up until about the early 1990s around the end of the Cold War and the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. So the latter half of the 20th century, and it follows, you know, it's kind of a history of U.S. imperial interventions in the name of anti-communism and Cold War containment in all over the world, especially Latin America, of course, but also in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, and the role that the AFLCIO and its affiliated unions and its various international arms played in all of these notorious U.S. interventions.

So yeah, it is a very fascinating insight reading your book into just how deep the connections between the AFL and the CIO, which we'll get into this in a second. They started as separate federations and then they joined. Actually, one came out of the other and it's a little bit complicated. We'll spell that all out in a second. But yeah, it is just such a fascinating read. And there's going to be so much that we're not going to be able to get. into that's in the book. It's so packed densely and richly with so many examples, just jaw-dropping examples of what you just laid out for us briefly. But I think, yeah, like I just said,

let's start with a little bit of a history of the AFL and the CIO going before, like, before they joined. Let's start with like how they formed and then maybe take us into World War II or the period just after World War II for folks who may not really know anything about the history. of these two labor federations. So like give us a sense of how they were formed, their basic orientations, I think importantly for this conversation towards socialism and communism. And anything else that you think is important to help set us up with like a basic understanding of these organizations and the role they played historically in the U.S.

labor movement, kind of leading us into this post-World War II era. Okay, so let's start with the AFL, which again is the American Federation of Labor. It was founded in the 1880s. And in this time period, the 1880s, this was the period of the Industrial Revolution, the Gilded Age, you know, the robber barons, these very wealthy industrialists, people like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. And it really intense class conflict going on with this rapidly industrializing economy, more and more people becoming wage workers working for these huge industrial corporations,

the railroads, coal mines, steel mills, textile mills, big factories and so on. And, you know, large numbers of immigrant workers, especially coming from Europe and on the West Coast coming from Asia, from China in particular. There was a lot of radical politics in the air, socialism, anarchism, influencing a lot of these working class union organizers and activists, labor reformers, different theories of reform of abolishing the wage system altogether or destroying the state and all kinds of stuff. And the common thread, though, was that all these different strands of the labor movement in the late 19th century faced intense repression from the government and from employers.

I mean, really ruthless, brutal workers on strike getting shot and killed by the National Guard, by the U.S. Army, by police, by the notorious Pinkerton private security forces that were hired by the employers. And so out of this, the AFL was founded to be kind of what they would call leaders of the AFL, like Samuel Gomper's, who was the first president of the AFL and stayed in that position for many decades. They called it pure and simple trade unionism, meaning they wanted to avoid these sort of like radical ideologies and these big visions of broad social transformation they wanted to avoid all of that and just stick to shorter hours, better wages, better conditions for the workers they represented.

And it didn't necessarily mean that they weren't militant. They were willing to go on strike. I mean, they wanted their strikes to be strategic and well planned, but they weren't afraid to go on strike and withhold their labor. and they were very well organized, which is a benefit. They weren't just like a rag-tag group of workers who were saying, like, we're pissed off, we're just going to go on strike with no plan or strategy. They very much focused on being well-organized.

But the tendency was towards bureaucratization, conservatism, and distancing themselves from more radical workers until they eventually, by like the early 1900s, were just drastically opposed to any kind of radical. left-wing ideas or politics within the labor movement. And another important aspect of the AFL was that its whole focus, or its whole model of organizing was craft unionism, meaning organizing workers based on their particular skill, their particular craft or trade within a larger industry. So for example, like in the construction industry, like even still today we have craft unions.

And instead of one big union for all the construction workers, there's a union for the carpenters, a union for the plumbers, a union for the iron workers, a union for the electricians, and so on. Or similarly with the railroads, you know, there's multiple craft unions instead of just one big railroad union for the whole industry. That was how the AFL wanted to organize. It was based on these old kind of artisan craft culture. And they were really only interested in organizing the most highly skilled workers, particularly white men or men from northern Europe, you know, northern and western European origin because even like, you know, Italian or Eastern European Southern European men were not even considered white back then and considered unskilled and so on.

So it was very exclusive to just the most kind of most privileged strata of the working class at the time. And meanwhile, though, going into the 20th century, there still were these radical currents within the labor movement that, at least in the first two decades of the 20th century, were most represented by the IWW, the industrial workers of the world, which I'm sure a lot of people have heard of. The wobblies. The wobblies, exactly. And the wobblies kind of positioned themselves as the antithesis to the AFL saying, we're not

going to be all conservative. We're not just focused on a few dollars more here and there, you know, a fair days pay for a fair day's work. We're interested in class conflict, class struggle, and overthrowing. capitalism and abolishing wage slavery, as they called it, and bringing in immigrant workers and so-called unskilled workers and black workers and workers of different languages or cultures, religions, and being much more radical than the AFL. But the big thing, again, with the IWW's form of organizing was industrial unionism, saying we want to organize workers in entire industries,

wall-to-wall, regardless of their skill level or their craft, and bring them all together, because that way we have more power. The same way the corporations were becoming more concentrated into monopolies, they said workers need to be more concentrated into eventually, like, one big union of all, of the whole working class united. So after World War I, and there's a whole, you know, a lot of history here, that we'll just skip over, but after World War I, the U.S. was in World War I between 1917 and 1918, the IWW strongly opposed the war and we're speaking out against it and trying to

organize, you know, convince workers not to go and fight in the war and to obstruct the war machine in the workplace itself. So the IWW faced an intense crackdown again, this government repression. Many IWW leaders arrested, imprisoned, the union offices raided. Whereas the AFL, under the leadership of Gompers, supported U.S. entry into the war and tried to get the working class on the side of the war effort to make sure production, wartime production would continue going smoothly and so on. And this is kind of the beginning of the AFL trying to partner with the U.S. government on questions of foreign policy and militarism, saying, yeah, we need to go along with this, go along with this sort of broad imperial agenda because it's going to be good for

the working class here in the U.S. going to be good for our members and our unions. And the IWW took a more principled stance and faced the consequences of getting very much crushed. So then after the IWW became much weaker and after this all this repression, the new flag bearer of, and by the way, the Socialist Party of America also was a hugely popular kind of left-wing current in labor politics in the early, the first two decades of the 20th century and also faced a lot of repression for not going along with World War I, at least some socialist like Eugene Debs, a famous leader of the Socialist Party, ran for president many times, was sent to prison for simply for giving an anti-war speech.

So in the 1920s then, this is after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, you had the beginnings of the Communist Party USA, and that became the new like standard bearer for left-wing radicalism in the United States and particularly among the working class. and the communists wanted to well particularly william z foster wanted to work within the afl to kind of pull it to the left and and to have these craft unions amalgamy to merge together into industrial unions which was different from the approach of the iw which had been a separate you know dual unionism and say we're going to have our own unions outside of the afl the communists in the 20s were through the trade union educational league they called it it it was just like network of radical unionists. We're trying to work, they called it boring from within, working inside the existing AFL unions, running for union office, and trying to do political education of the members and so on. So then you get to the Great Depression in the 30s and the New Deal. And, you know, these important legal reforms passed by the Franklin Roosevelt

administration and making it easier for workers to be able to form unions, providing a sort of legal pathway to unionization and workers because of the depression, because of the groundwork that had been laid by the IWW, by the Socialist Party, by the Communist Party over many decades, much of the working class was energized and had all this experience organizing and they were kind of ready to seize the moment and organize these massive companies and massive industries that up until that time in the 30s were still completely non-union, like the auto industry. of the big automakers, General Motors, and Ford, Chrysler at the time, or the United, sorry, U.S. Steel Corporation, or General Electric, these huge corporations and huge parts of the economy that were completely non-union, many in the labor movement felt like with the New Deal, with this kind of upsurge of workers ready to fight and organize, that this was the ideal moment to seize the moment to organize these mass industry. that were totally non-union.

And the AFL leadership, still pretty conservative and still dedicated to craft unionism, said, no, we're not going to do that. And this is what led to the creation of the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1935, which started off as just a committee of union presidents within the AFL, trying to urge the AFL to embrace industrial union organizing, to organize the steel industry, the auto industry, and other. big, you know, mass industries that were non-unionized. And the AFL leadership, William Green was the president of the AFL at the time, didn't want to do that.

So the CIO, starting off as a committee, then broke from the AFL and became its own federation, led by John L. Lewis, who was president of the United Mine Workers. And Lewis was, you know, he's interesting because he was not a radical at all. In fact, he was a vehement anti-communist, but he was a very, militant unionists and very dedicated to organizing the unorganized. Didn't believe in democratic unionism either. He was very top-down or autocratic style of leadership. But he was willing to welcome in or at least tolerate, maybe not welcome, but tolerate leftists,

including particularly communist organizers within the CIO because he knew these were dedicated, good, solid organizers who were going to go out there and be able to organize these millions of workers in these big industries, like I said, auto and steel and rubber and the electrical appliance industry. And the CIO was pretty successful in the late 1930s through these epic, you know, the Flint sit down strike at General Motors and other big struggles in organizing millions of hitherto unorganized workers in these major industries that, you know, it's the equivalent of like, if we imagine today, you think about Amazon, Walmart, McDonald, and these huge corporations that employ huge amounts of workers that they're totally non-union.

And imagine if within the span of just a couple years, they became totally unionized, that's what was happening in the 30s with these companies like the Big Three automakers and U.S. Steel and General Electric and others. And the CIO kind of leading the way. So the CIO, because it welcomed in leftists, some of the CIO's affiliated unions did have a much more progressive, radical, inclusive kind of style of unionism. And yeah, they were not based on crap. They weren't trying to exclude people because of their skill level or their race or their national origin or gender. At the same time, there was still this conservative element in some of the leadership of the CIA, people like John L. Lewis and in his right-hand man, Philip Murray, who succeeded Lewis

in 1940 as the head of the CIA. And that's important for what would come. you know, after World War II. So then World War II happens. You have these two powerful, and by the way, the AFL, in order to stay relevant, started, you know, finally abandoned, once the CIA started achieving some success, the AFL finally abandoned its own, you know, addiction to craft unionism, and also started organizing an industrial basis. And you had these two federations kind of competing with who could organize the most workers. And you had a pretty relatively friendly administration in the Roosevelt administration and the National Labor Relations Board at the time in the late 30s was very much geared towards helping workers unionize and making

it as easy as possible for them, even though there was still a lot of employer resistance. So a lot of success for the labor movement, two big federations, and then World War II happens. And again, there's a need for uninterrupted industrial production for the war machine. and World War II was not nearly as controversial as World War I because, number one, the enemy was clear of fascism. And two, it was easier to be, I think, patriotic if you're a working class American, seeing the changes in advances of the New Deal, the Social Security, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, abolition of child labor, the 40-hour work week, all of these things being the government doing. if you're a working class person in that period, it could make you much more willing to buy into patriotism and say, yeah, we should support our country and fight in this war. And again, because also the enemy was fascism.

So the unions, both the AFL and CIA and their affiliated unions, were pretty much on board with the war effort. And because of the New Deal infrastructure that had been built in the 30s, many high-ranking union officials from both the AFL and CIA participated. in government planning for the war effort, and they sat on, you know, prestigious committees, and they were kind of insiders in the halls of Washington. And some of them started to think, yeah, this is how we make progress, by having a seat at the table in the halls of power and kind of forgetting about shop floor militancy to some extent.

And communist trade unionists being the energizing force in continuing to organize you and organized, to press for, you know, expansions on the new deal. So not just stop with the new deal, but does demand other things like single-payer health insurance and other kinds of improvements and more government planning and more government regulation of the capitalist economy. And, yeah, World War II ends, and then you have the Cold War and it kind of ruins everything. So that's maybe where we could go. We could go next. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much. That was a really helpful, like, potted history of the early labor movement in the United States, anchored by the AFL and the CIO, and then also the wobblies,

the IWW as like a counter in a sense to those two federations. So yeah, you brought us up to the immediate post-World War II period where the red scare and that sort of anti-communist hysteria is really going to begin taking over U.S. politics and kind of. kind of an all-encompassing way. And this movement towards anti-communism in the labor movement is very much related to this eventual transformation of the labor movement into an outright tool for imperialism. But the anti-communism at home was sort of a precursor in a sense and its own separate, albeit related phenomenon. So how exactly did the mainstream of the U.S. labor movement, which was never necessarily super radical, but like you said, the CIA was sympathetic,

at least to having more radical elements of the left as part of its ranks. How did the U.S. labor movement really become fully de-radicalized, at least in its leadership and its ideology, and then eventually anti-communist over the decades? Like what are some of the key drivers and causes of that. Right. So if we again look at the AFL and CIA differently, the AFL was never particularly, at least the national leadership of the AFL was never really radical at all, right? They kind of this idea of pure and simple trade unionism. We're not going to challenge capitalism. We just want a slightly better deal for the most highly skilled workers. But there were within the AFL some radical affiliated unions and central labor councils and certainly activist members. The CIA, though,

again founded in the 1930s during the New Deal, the Depression, and kind of as a breakaway from the AFL. Yeah, some of the, not only were communist, socialist, other leftists, part of the ranks of the CIAO, but they came into the leadership of some of the CIA's major unions, including the UE, United Electrical Workers, which was the third largest union within the CIO. and to some extent the UAW United Auto Workers, which was I think either the first or second largest union in the CIA, it had a large communist faction and a lot of socialists as well. And several of the others, the International Fur and Leather Workers Union,

the International Union Mine Mill and Smelter Workers, among others had communists or leftists or communist fellow travelers in their actual leadership. And like I said, they were practicing a more progressive, inclusive, of intentionally anti-racist kind of unionism and an anti-sexist kind of unionism, like pushing it, for example, for anti-discrimination clauses in their union contracts or demanding equal pay for equal work in their union contracts, and also pushing the limits of like management's authority in the workplace, being willing to use strikes, quickie strikes to settle grievances on the shop floor instead of like going through a long bureaucratic grievance procedure where you have to wait

weeks or months or even years to see a resolution they would just say we're going to shut down work for the day until the employer makes this right you know this being any kind of you know like a worker being disciplined unfairly or fired or something like that and to undo that and that was sort of what these leftist led communist led unions and the cio were doing and like i said the cio's larger leadership was tolerating them But, yeah, this important turning point for the CIA. So, again, the AFL had always been pretty anti-radical in its national leadership. And after World War I, there had been a kind of, there had been the first Red Scare,

which was really a big crackdown on the IW, on the left-wing socialists and so on. So like through the 1920s, the left had been somewhat dormant. I mean, not really. But it was a very right-wing kind of time period in the 1920s, similar to the 2020s in a lot of ways, actually. But then there was a sort of rebuttal. of the left in the 30s as seen through the CIA, and it's the more progressive parts of the CIA. So, yeah, how it became de-radicalized, you know, the CIA in particular, the second red scare after World War II with the onset of the Cold War. You know, initially, it's important

to, you know, because the book is about international politics, foreign policy. So World War II, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies, right, to fight the Nazis. Not necessarily. Not necessarily the best of friends, right? The U.S. and Soviet Union had Iraqi history, to say the least. But during World War II, allies, before the war was even over, AFL leaders like George Meaney, who was at the time the secretary-treasurer of the AFL, later became president of the AFL and then the AFL-CIO. In 1944, you know, even before World War II was over, George Meany was trashing the Soviet Union publicly, giving these public speeches, denouncing it as a totalitarian state, no different from the Nazi regime.

So there was never any interest from the AFL in like any kind of international cooperation with the Soviet Union. They were always trying to push for a confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviets, even as the Third Reich was still standing. And that matters because at the end of World War II in 1945, trade unions from the allied countries, including the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France and the United States and other countries formed a new international body of unions called the World Federation of Trade Unions, or WFTAU, and the CIA joined to represent U.S.

labor, but the AFL refused to have anything to do with this new international body. It was sort of like a united nations for organized labor, and the AFL had wanted nothing to do with it because it included communist-led unions and unions from this from the USSR. So this was, it would sort of be like if the United States refused to join the UN because it included the Soviet Union in countries that we don't like or something like that. So we're not going to be part of it. We're going to boycott the UN now. That was the AFL's position, whereas the CIO said, we'll go along. We'll join the WFTAU for this, this idea of international labor unity and international peace to not, you know, to not end up with a World War III.

but because of McCarthyism and a lot of corporate America was really pushing this red scare because they could then tie communism and the Soviet Union to the labor movement. And this was like a very convenient way for corporate America and Wall Street to crack down on organized labor by simply painting it all as a big communist conspiracy and fifth column, whatever, to overthrow the United States on behalf of the Soviets. And there was this right-wing shift in the U.S. in the years right after World War II with 1946 Republicans taking control of Congress in the midterm elections. And then 1947, Republicans in Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which amended labor law

to include a lot more anti-union provisions to make it more difficult for workers to be able to form unions to try to bankrupt unions in certain states through. right-to-work laws and things like that. So in this changing environment, and with this right-wing hysteria and this kind of crackdown, legal crackdown on unions, the AFL was, well, the AFL didn't like this Taft-Hartley Act, but they were, you know, they were partly responsible for it by pushing all this anti-communist hysteria themselves. The CIA, its top leadership, started changing. They started to say, well, maybe we shouldn't be so tolerant of communists and other leftists within our ranks because it's making us look bad and we need to go along to get along.

You know, we should finally, we should just get on board with this whole Cold War thing and this McCarthy and distance ourselves from any kind of radical associations. And the kind of key figure of that within the CIO was Walter Ruther, who was president of the United Auto Workers, who was generally kind of a liberal, he had been a socialist, he had been sympathetic to the Soviet Union and his youth. He had spent a couple years living. and working in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and writing these letters home with these glowing reports of proletarian democracy. But he was very ambitious and kind of a cynical and political operator. So he could see which way the winds were blowing by the late 1940s. And Ruther was

advocating for like, we need to push all the communists out of the CIA raid communist-led unions and all this kind of stuff. So between 1949, 1950, the CIA expelled 11 of its leftist-led union affiliates, and then losing about a million members in the process and really shrinking down. And then also the CIA, at the same time, it was expelling its own left-wing communist-friendly unions. The CIA itself pulled out of the World Federation of Trade Unions and joined with the AFL and the other anti-communist union federations of the world to form a rival international body called the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions to rival the WFTAU. And yeah, a lot of that, the momentum of the labor movement, the growth of the labor movement,

really stopped at that point. You know, they'd been growing since the 1930s. And now that kind of came to an end. Like, for example, the CIO had this ambitious plan to organize the South because the South still remained, largely non-union because of the power of Jim Crow, racism, segregation. The CIA called this plan Operation Dixie. And Operation Dixie ended up becoming kind of this failure because they didn't have the leftists who were the ones who had been doing the racial justice organizing all along and building coalitions with black workers all along. Now they were like out.

And this broader right wing anti-communist paranoia was sweeping the country. It just made it very difficult for unions to continue growing. And so the CIA lost a lot of its more radical potential and progressive spirit through these anti-communist splits. And then by 1955, the CIA kind of limping along merged back into the AFL. And they reunited and became what we know of today as the AFL-CIO. Awesome. Thank you for that. And I think that's a lot of really helpful history and context. like set us up for what really is like the meat of the book, which like you said focuses on

this sort of like foreign policy and like imperialism within the labor movement. So I want to start with a quote, a passage actually from the early pages of Blue Collar Empire and then I'm going to ask you a sort of a follow up question on that. So you write, coming out of the crises of the Great Depression in World War II and fearing the growing influence of communism, Washington Plans, built what was intended to be a well-managed international capitalist system backed by U.S. economic and military strength. This system would be protected and expanded through what many scholars call an informal empire,

based not on outright territorial conquest, but on political, economic, and cultural dominance. In administering such an informal empire, where indirect influence rather than explicit control, was often, though hardly always, the modus operandi. The American state would exert power through numerous non-governmental subsidiaries. These included financial institutions, business associations, scholarly societies, news outlets, publishing houses, political parties, private charities, student organizations, and, importantly, trade unions. So we're talking about trade unions here as just one part of this apparatus, right, but a very, very important one, especially for us on the left to really scrutinize.

Let's talk about how and why unions were utilized as an arm of U.S. foreign policy, as a tool of U.S. imperialism during the Cold War more broadly. Let's talk about what this looked like in practice. And I think starting with this, and you mentioned this a second ago, and you're mentioning the name of the organization, this idea of free trade unionism or otherwise known as anti-communist unionism. And so this organization, the FTUC, what was it? You introduced it earlier.

What was it a response to? And how did it shape the U.S. labor movement's involvement? in U.S. imperialism. Yeah, well, so actually earlier I was talking about another long-named organization that had free trade unionism and the international confederation of free trade unions. But the FTUC was the free trade union committee. So, yeah. Yeah, my bad.

There's a lot of different organizations and I was trying to keep track of them all. There's a really helpful like glossary at the beginning. And it's really long, right? Yeah. So my bad. No, no, no, it's, I completely understand that. But, yeah, this, that this term free trade unionism was thrown around all over the place during the Cold War. And, you know, what it ostensibly meant free trade unionism was unionism that was autonomous, not controlled by the state, not controlled by political parties.

It was of by and for the workers themselves, you know, sort of small D democratic trade unionism with a belief in democracy and human rights and all this stuff. And it's like very, sounds really awesome. But what it really meant in practice, when you actually look at the history of what so-called free trade unionism was all about, was simply, it was simply just anti-communism. And anti-communism not, I don't define that as only opposition to actual communists, but opposition to any and all kind of left-of-center anti-imperial or anti-U.S. or types of politics or political movements or labor movements around the world. So, you know, it's in the same way that the United States says, you know, we're going to go to war in Iraq for freedom or we're going to, you know, invade Venezuela now for freedom, you know, and it's like, it's bullshit. We all know that. It's bullshit. It's not about freedom. It's about resources. It's about power. It's about domination. And that's basically what this whole free trade union stuff was about, in my opinion. Because I know. It's probably people might disagree. So, yeah, the AFL leadership. had, I mean, you know, I did cover a lot of this early prehistory, but one thing I didn't really talk about enough was, especially in the 1920s, as communists were trying to sort of do this boring from within strategy of working within the existing AFL unions and trying to pull them

to the left, this was deeply resented by the AFL's more conservative, anti-radical, anti-left leadership. And there were these kind of civil wars within many AFL affiliates, unions, major conflicts where AFL leaders and the more conservative anti-communist union leaders would use heavy-handed undemocratic methods to crush the communists within their own ranks, to push them out of union office, to make sure to expel them from their unions. And so coming out of that then, jumping into the period of the early Cold War, a lot of these AFL officials were veterans from these internal conflicts within their own unions and they saw themselves as like the real experts on how to fight communists because they had

done it within their own union ranks and at the same time the u.s government the state department and the early cia you know which was only founded around 1947 48 they were like that passage you read from the book they thought you know the cold war was going to be waged through all these different kind of subsidiaries it wasn't going to be this kind of political and ideological battle for hearts and minds, and they were very concerned about working-class movements all around the world. Unions had become an important, powerful, economic, and political force all over the world, especially in Europe and Latin America, but also in Asia and Africa. And many union movements around the world were led by communists or influenced by communists or other leftists.

They were often sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and they could be a really important force in the Cold War, or an important factor in the Cold War in determining which side, you know, because, of course, the U.S. government was all about which side are you going to be on, or you're going to be with the free world of the United States or the totalitarian world, so-called, led by the Soviet Union. And labor movements could play an important role in determining which side countries, different countries of the world would fall on. And so they were CIA, State Department, we were very eager and, and, and, and, and,

anxious about how do we gain influence over unions around the world. And the AFL leadership basically stepped forward and raises their hands, said, hey, we can help you because we know all about fighting communists, you know, in the unions. That's what we've, that's our specialty. That's what we've been doing here in our own unions in the U.S. We want to export this model. We'll call it, we package it as free trade unionism. And so the AFL created an international arm in 19, late 144, before World War II was even over, called the Free Trade Union Committee or FTUC, to send representatives to other countries, especially in Western Europe early on, to try to divide their labor movements into basically create anti-communist splinter movements

within existing labor movements that would be against the Soviets, against communism, and pro-US. And this was important because in countries like France and Italy, their labor movements were pretty powerful, and they were largely led by communists, because the communists had been at the center of the anti-fascist resistance during the war years. They were very popular with the working class, and this terrified not only the U.S. government, but also the AFL. So the Free Trade Union Committee was active in trying to basically just sow divisions. In Europe, in France in particular, the representative was this guy Irving Brown.

But his boss, who he answered to, the head of the Free Trade Union Committee, wasn't even more fascinating and unsavory character named Jay Lovestone. And Lovestone had been a leading figure in the Communist Party USA in the 1920s before he had these ideological doctrinal differences with Stalin. He got expelled from the party. He tried to create his own independent communist movement called the Lovestoneites throughout the 1930s and had these like loyalists, it's kind of a cult in a way, these loyal followers, many of them within the labor movement. And then by the 40, early 1940s, Lovestone just made a full

break with communism and leftist politics altogether, just fully embraced anti-communism. And because of his years of experience within the Communist Party and, you know, leftist movements, he was seen as a real valuable asset by the AFL's more conservative leaders. because they said, this guy knows all the secrets of our enemies. And Lovestone himself presented himself as a valuable asset to the CIA. And he said, I want to work with you. I want to help you out in crushing communism all around the world. So Lovestone became the head of the Free Trade Union Committee.

Again, the Free Trade Union Committee, FTUC, was part of the AFL at this time. And then by 1949, as the CIA got up and running, they looked to the Free Trade Union Committee, FTCC, was part of the Free Trade Union Committee and the work it was doing in splitting like the, particularly the CGT or Ceté in France, which was the major, is the major labor federation in France. And it had been, it was led by, in the 40s, led by communists and Irving Brown, who was sent to France by Jay Lovestone on behalf of the AFL, helped to divide the CGT and help to create this splinter organization called Forcivriere as like an anti-communist pro-U.S. rival. And doing similar work, in Italy and elsewhere in Western Europe, the CIA was really, really liked this work.

And they said, hey, we will fund you. We'll give you lots of money to keep doing this work all over the world. And in return, the AFL via Jay Lovestone and his free trade union committee could provide information and intelligence to the CIA about foreign labor movements and different leaders of different unions all in the countries all around the world and let the CIA know what the different labor leaders around the world, what the different labor leaders around the world, what their political orientations were, whether they could be seen as allies or whether they should be trusted or not, whether they were pro-communist or whatever. So this relationship

between the AFL and CIA kind of really first started basically in 1949 and further developed in the 50s and beyond. So during that sort of early era of the Red Scare, you mentioned that the U.S. labor movement, the leadership, and through the FTC, were involved in fracturing the French and Italian labor movements in the late 1940s. There were similar attempts in Argentina. They meddled in Chile, Peru, Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico. They actually dissolved the more radical confederation of Latin America and workers, the C-T-A-L, and created their own anti-communist rival to that. They were involved somewhat in Indonesia. So you go into more details in the book about all of those different cases, but I just wanted to outline that just getting started here, there was a lot

of meddling and splintering. I want to jump back into the history in a second, but I also want to talk a little bit about the ideology, shaping and guiding labor support of U.S. imperialism. You've touched on it a little bit. There's a really great passage in the book. that I want to share here. So you write, as Walter Ruther, who you mentioned earlier is the president of the UAW, as Walter Ruther put it in 1946, so now we're quoting Walter Ruther, labor is not fighting for a larger slice of the national pie. Labor is fighting for a larger pie. And so that's the end of his quote. And so you go on to write, the way to get a quote larger pie was through economic imperialism, the continued expansion of the U.S. managed capitalist order around the globe,

with American workers getting their share of the spoils through a stable system of collective bargaining, could serve as a substitute for class struggle. In a similar way, labor officials lent their support to the rapidly growing military industrial complex, believing that substantial federal spending in defense industries would be essential to maintaining high employment and preventing recessions. After all, it was defense industry spending during World War II that had finally ended the Great Depression and helped unions grow to unprecedented heights. So talk a little bit about the emergence of a labor aristocracy and what this meant for international solidarity and the vision of a united international proletariat that federations like the IWW were really promoting in sort of the

more communist or socialist vision of the working class. And we'll kind of see how this shift in the U.S. labor movement came to bite the U.S. proletariat in the ass eventually. Yeah. And this part really matters for understanding why some of the more liberal or progressive unionists within the CIO, like Walter Ruther, went along, you know, it basically embraced anti-communism and embraced the Cold War. Because with the AFL, it's a bit easier. to understand because they were always pretty anti-radical from the beginning and had been fighting leftists, communists, and anarchists and so on, within their own ranks for a long time. And they were, like I said, even before World War II was over, AFL leaders were already trashing the Soviet Union

and calling for a confrontation. But the CIA had been different, right? And the Ruthra quote, was important because he was one of these people who, I don't want to lump him in with a lot of the AFL leaders like George Meany or Samuel Gompers before him, he was a little different, but he still went along with all this, as did a lot of otherwise, or at least formerly, like left-wing or socialist union figures, went along with U.S. imperialism and anti-communism. Yeah, and it's important to remember in the post-war period, in the first, you know, roughly between the late 1940s to the late 1960s, this was like, the so-called golden age of U.S. capitalism, when the economy was booming, largely because the U.S.

was now the manufacturer to the whole world, because the other major industrial countries in Western Europe and Japan had been decimated by World War II. Most of their infrastructure bombed and destroyed huge amounts of their population, young population working age people were killed in the war, and the U.S. had remained relatively unscathed and now could dominate the global. economy, for that reason, lack of global competition and coming out of the New Deal in World War II, a growth in union membership. One third of all non-agricultural workers in the U.S. were unionized, working under collective bargaining agreements. And they had managed to, like I said, unionized the largest corporations in the country and in the world. Like I said, the equivalent

of today unionizing Amazon and Walmarts and McDonald's and companies like that. And for many U.S. workers, especially the industrial workers, who were largely white men, but not exclusively, they had seen dramatic improvement in their material lives, in their material conditions. Going from, to keep this comparison to like the present day, if you imagine someone who works at McDonald's and that's their full-time job and they're making minimum wage, shitty conditions and random hours and no real economic security. They're struggling to keep up with the rent and their bills, et cetera. Then imagine they, you know, almost overnight.

They unionize. They get good, solid raises. They get paid time off and paid sick leave and medical insurance and a pension so they can retire. And they're able to buy a house and they're able to send their kids to college, you know, debt free and, you know, all this type of stuff. I mean, this was, that would be amazing for, and it had happening to millions and millions of people. So imagine something like that today.

That would be pretty incredible. That's what had happened to millions of industrial workers. They had gone from what were these very crappy, low-wage, insecure, precarious kinds of jobs in the factories to now good, stable livelihoods. I mean, the work itself still sucked. But they had the union and they had all the protections and benefits. that came from it and from this growing economy. So that became an important part of the justification because the idea was, well, as long as the U.S. is number one in the world, number one in the world economy and is the manufacturer

to the rest of the world and the U.S. economy is benefiting from U.S. global dominance. And workers are actually, like I said, getting their share, like you said, and reading from the passage, workers are getting their share of the spoils through collective bargaining and a relatively more kind of pro-worker economic arrangements than what had come before and what would come after, as we know, that was important to them. So in a way, you could say, okay, from the 1950s and 60s, at least for industrial workers in the core of the U.S. economy, U.S. imperialism and Cold War geopolitics was kind of working for them.

You can't say that about the service sector workers, farm workers, domestic workers, largely black and brown workers, women workers, were not benefiting so much from this arrangement. But they were kind of at the margins of organized labor at that time. The center of organized labor was these industrial manufacturing workers who really were benefiting from this stuff. But like you said, that would change. That would change. And yet the leadership of the labor movement, their support for U.S. Empire wouldn't change,

which is the interesting thing. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Jeff Shirky. We'll be right back. That was Only Got One Body Got One Body by Shiv and the Carvers. Now back to our conversation with Jeff Shirky. So tell us a little bit more about how the CIA got involved with U.S. labor, like what that relationship looked like. You kind of set the stage for that. And then also, starting in the 1960s, the U.S.'s global sort of crusade against anything that even hinted towards communism shifted.

And the tactics for disruption and propaganda really evolved. And it was during this period that the focus really shifted sort of from mostly on Europe to the third world. And like utilizing propaganda that was masquerading as education to influence trade unions. and trade union efforts abroad. So, yeah, but it also wasn't always just that simple. So you write in the book, here's another passage that I wanted to pull out, like their allies in the U.S. government, whenever faced with the problem of how to promote political stability

and economic development, while simultaneously living up to their professed democratic pluralist ideals, the AFL-CIO's cold warriors did not hesitate to sacrifice the latter, as long as the defeat of leftists was assured. In the third world, particularly in the Western Hemisphere, this sometimes took the form of the AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development, the AIFLD, actively undermining a democratic government

if Washington deemed it untrustworthy. So here we're really getting into like situations where the AFL-CIO is involved in, like, regime change operations and, like, wild shit like that that you would never imagine, you know, just thinking about, like, a labor federation to be involved with. So tell us a little bit about the American Institute for Free Labor Development and what it was up to during this period with the help of the CIA. Yeah, so we've covered that early Cold War period. And then you get to 1959, the Cuban Revolution. And for U.S. Cold Warriors, both in the government and in the AFLCAO, the attention

really shifted to Latin America. And then around the same time, you had increasing decolonization in Africa and Asia, more and more countries that had been under European colonial domination for decades, we're now becoming independent states. And referring to themselves as the third world, meaning they're not part of the capitalist world or the communist world, kind of trying to chart an independent course and those countries being seen as a prize to be one, you know, of which side they're going to go along with or which camp in the Cold War they're going to join. So, but Latin America was especially a big focus because of the Cuban Revolution and this fear that there would be other Castro's and other Cuban revolutions and it would spread,

you know, this idea of the domino effect that later was so important for the, for the Vietnam war in Southeast Asia. So 1959 Cuban Revolution, 1960, John F. Kennedy gets elected as president. And Kennedy wanted to wage a kind of, you know, smarter, more intellectual kind of cold war of winning hearts and minds and promising countries in Latin America in African Asia, the promise of economic development and freedom and democracy. And, you know, you can have it all and creates the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID. At the same time, the AFL-CIO, around 1961, 62, creates a new international arm. Because importantly, the Free Trade Union Committee actually was shut down in 1958 due to various, you know,

there's a whole other. We talked about Jay Lovestone and Walter Ruther, and these guys actually hated each other. And some of their infighting with each other led to the Free Trade Union Committee being shut down in 1950. 58. But now, just a couple years later, the AFLCO creates a new international arm to particularly focus on Latin America called the American Institute for Free Labor Development, or usually pronounced A-field. And A-field, again, with the F, the free, just like free trade unionism, free labor, it modeled itself as primarily an educational initiative to provide trainings for union members in Latin America, but these trainings were actually, you know, they talked about things like collective bargaining

and union administration and labor laws and labor history, but a major emphasis of these trainings was how to combat leftists within your own unions, how to counter left-wing arguments and not even just leftist arguments, but like anti-imperial, anti-Yanky sentiment within your own unions and talk about how great the United States was and what a great friend the U.S. was and how we don't need Castroism in our countries and our unions. That was what a lot of the A-Field training was about. And A-Field got huge amounts of its funding in those days and continuing, not just in those days,

from the newly created U.S. Agency for International Development. That was the bulk of their money was coming from the USAID. Right. So I'm sure it was tied. A-Field was tied to the CIA as well, but it didn't have to worry so much about the kind of covert funding from the CIA. It was like overt funding from U.S. ID and this idea that, well, we're not doing anything sketchy. We're just promoting education

and training. And they would bring Latin American union leaders to Washington for these trainings and then tour the United States and go visit union halls and factories in the U.S. They eventually set up a big training center in Front Royal Virginia, where they would bring Latin American labor leaders who were participating in these union education, so-called education projects, but you might call them like brainwashing kind of projects. And, you know, in the book, I sort of compare it A-field and its training complex in Front Royal Virginia. I compare it a little bit to the School of the Americas, which was, you know, this notorious place where Latin American military officers would learn the tactics of counterinsurgency, including torture and all kinds of horrible things like that. Now, I'm not suggesting that A-field was teaching union officials how to torture people or anything like that.

But it was the same idea of like, how do we do a counterinsurgency within our own unions and keep out the leftists, keep out the troublemakers. At the same time, A-field expanded beyond just education to like these small-scale kind of community development projects and particularly building worker housing complexes using money from USCID and from some of the AFLCA's affiliated unions in major city, Mexico City, you know, Monte Video and Buenos Aires. iras and elsewhere, they were building these big worker housing units for members of pro-US anti-communist unions. It was like one of the benefits, one of the perks you could get from being part. If you joined the leftist anti-imperialist or communist union, you wouldn't get all the perks. You wouldn't get the nice house or a nice apartment or whatever. But when you join the anti-communist pro-U.S. unions, that was something you could get because Afield was building those things. But it goes beyond that, right? Because then you talk about some of these notorious

interventions and destabilization campaigns and coups in Latin America throughout the 60s and beyond carried out by the U.S. government with the AFL-CIO and its American Institute for Free Labor Development playing an important supporting role. And so I offer some examples in the book. one is British Guyana, which is not really Latin America, but in South America, today it's the independent country, Guyana, but in the early 60s it was still a British colony called British Guiana, and it was on this planned transition towards independence, and it had a semi-autonomous government, which was a democratically elected government led by a Marxist in the early 60s named Chetty Jagan, and Joggin was poised to be the country's first post-independence

prime minister and he hoped to, you know, nationalize some of the, like the sugar industry and promote socialist reforms in the country once it became independent. And for John F. Kennedy and his administration, this was completely intolerable. They were convinced he was going to be another Castro and causing all kinds of trouble. And they, you know, they didn't want to have another leftist regime in the Western Hemisphere. And so the Kennedy administration, the CIA, working hand in hand with the AFL-CIO, and again, particularly this organization institute, A-field, was active in trying to destabilize Joggin before the country became independent, working with his political opponents. And the political differences in Guyana were highly racialized

because the population is roughly half black, Afro-Gihanes, and the other half East Indian, Indo-Gihanes. And Joggan is Indo-Gihanes. And so, His main political rival, Forbes Burnham, was Afro-Gihanes. And so these different political factions had their own unions connected to them. And so the anti-Jogun political forces and their unions with help and money from the CIA funneled through the AFL-CIO and the A-Field led a general strike against Joggins government, I think around 1963 that lasted for a couple months, really kind of tarnished his reputation and he was voted out of office not long later in a election campaign where again the CIA was meddling and he was

basically pushed out of office replaced by Forbes Burnham, his rival who then became the first head of independent Guyana and remained in power as this kind of autocratic dictator for many years. And just a quick aside there was also implicated. I think through official inquiries as being behind the orchestration of the assassination of Walter Rodney, who we had an episode on Walter Rodney not too long ago, so listeners of the show might make that connection. So labor movement was involved in that indirectly. Anyways, I just wanted to bring that in. Yeah, no, Rodney actually found that when this 1963 General Strike, sponsored by the CIA,

when people hear General Strike, the leftists hear General Strike, we usually think that's a good thing. But this was like an anti-left as destabilization. CIA funded general strike in 1963. But when this happened, Walter Rodney actually was, I think, in Jamaica and England, and he was a student. And from what I understand, he actually didn't, because of the racial tensions that were fueled by the CIA, by the AFL-CIO, with this political differences coming down on between the Afro-Gihanese and Indo-Gihanes, Walter Rodney said that,

Our political choices were fundamentally dictated, not by any class position, but by the ongoing race conflict. It was extremely difficult for any progressives, African or Indian, to intervene in the Guyanese situation because it was already so formed from that moment, one intervened. One was doing so in a ready-made context of Indian versus African. And so I think Rodney, as I understand it, avoided going back to Guiana for many years because it was just impossible to do the kind of class-based politics that he wanted to do. And this was a direct result of the AFL-CIO's campaign to destabilize Chetty Joggan.

And then another various other example, one other big one, 1964, Brazil military coup that ousted Joao Goulard, who was left-leaning pro-union, pro-labor, and kind of communist-friendly president of Brazil. this was another notorious military coup sponsored by the CIA, and graduates of Afield, the AFLCAO's training program, were involved in making sure, trying to basically stopping a, preventing a strike against the military coup because some of the leftists in Brazil's labor movement were saying, as the coup was unfolding, they were saying we can put a stop to this if we have a general strike against the coup and preserving constitutional order.

and some of the A-field graduates who had gone to Washington, D.C., and learned, you know, taken this training course provided by the AFL-CIO and paid for by USAID, they said, no, don't go on strike. We don't, you know, they prevented this from happening, allowed the coup to go through smoothly. And then afterwards, again, some of these A-field graduates were appointed by the coup regime to be so-called interveners to basically go in and take control of some of the, leftist unions in Brazil and purged them of all left-wing unionists and Goulart sympathizers. And one of the high-ranking figures in the A-field, a guy named Bill Doherty, he bragged not long after the coup, saying, yeah, some of our graduates were involved in the coup, and they were involved in the covert action.

And so, and then another one, of course, 1973 in She-Lay, one of the most notorious coups ever against Allende. in the buildup to that, there were several work stoppages by the Gramios, like these kind of, not exactly trade unions, but like guilds of professional and more like middle class and upper class professions, including truck owner operators and engineers in some of the mines, copper mines, and doctors and others who had these debilitating strikes to destabilize Chile's economy, and they too were being subsidized and organized by A-Field on behalf of the AFL-CIO, funneling money from USAID and, of course, the CIA.

And again, strikes that were not like pro-worker or progressive kind of strikes, but strikes as a pretext for a coup. So, yeah, this is, and I think A-Field, American Institute for Free Labor Development, was, it's really one of the biggest parts of the book because it was really the most well-funded and longest-lasting international arm of the AFL-CIO during the Cold War, active primarily in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Western Hemisphere, from when it was founded in 19, I mean, went into operation in 1962 and was shut down or at least reorganized in 1997, so over 30 years.

And then similar types of institutes were created by the AFL-CIO in the later 60s in Africa, the African-American labor center, and then in Asia, the Asian-American Free Labor Institute. And these also have long abbreviations, and it's so easy to get it all mixed up. And these were also funded by USAID and linked to the CIA and doing the same kind of work that A-Field had been doing in Latin America. So replicating the A-Field model in Africa and Asia. For anybody who I want to dive a little bit deeper specifically into the example of Chile and Allende, we had to be J. Prashad on the show not too long ago to talk about Washington bullets

in the manual for regime change, how these kinds of economic disruptions play a role in the U.S. as long and storied history of regime change in Latin America and all over the world. And this is a really interesting insight we're getting right now into the very, like, granular machinations and how labor is utilized in this way as well. You write in the book that between 20 and 25% of the AFL-CIO's annual budget was devoted to foreign activities throughout the 1960s, which is insane. And that is not including the millions in USAID funds that it was spending. And you go on to say this was all happening while organizing the unorganized at home was barely on the radar. There's a really powerful scene that you recount during the Vietnam War era, where United States,

auto workers president, Walter Ruther, was at a dinner with friends and a student activist who was present confronted him about supporting the Johnson administration's war in Vietnam because he wanted to stay close to the Democratic Party and not rock the boat, relying on, as you write, quote, the same strategic wager he had made during World War II of relying on access to Washington's power center to allow organized labor to thrive, end quote. So here's the passage that I want to read. So instead of paying deference to the powerful 59-year-old labor leader, Leslie Woodcock surprised everyone by unloading on Ruther.

So she says, you really said that, didn't you? She asked rhetorically, what are you trying to do? Maybe get 80 cents an hour in the pay envelope, five cents here, five cents there. You're telling me that you're unwilling to make a statement that may say, 50,000 lives or 100,000 lives or maybe a million lives because you want to get 50 more cents in your goddamn fucking contract. That's the most inhumane thing I have ever heard in my life, end quote. And I just thought that was just such a really, really powerful passage that you were able to pull out. And to me, it's like really demonstrates the entire thing. So

Sinsinkly, like it's a deal with the devil, you know, so to speak. And so I would, I'd love it if you could tell us a little bit more about like this period and the AFL-CIO's machinations in Vietnam and how that really shaped the U.S. labor movement during that era and moving forward. Yeah, the Vietnam War is such a crucial turning point in the history of the Cold War and particularly, you know, for the way the U.S. public looked at U.S. foreign policy and looked at U.S. anti-communist interventions around the world. Before Vietnam, between the second Red Scare McCarthyism in the late 40s and the Vietnam anti-war movement, there hadn't been a whole lot of

very visible dissent. I mean, yes, there was dissent around, but people were kind of afraid to speak out or criticize the Cold War, including within the ranks of organized labor. And so the AFL-CIO leadership was doing all this stuff, working with the CIA and the State Department and all these interventions that we've been talking about without much pushback from the ranks of organized labor. But that really changed because of and during the Vietnam War. But for one thing, the AFLCAO's top leadership, and particularly it's President George Meena, who was an arch anti-communist and a really major figure in the book. Meany was 100 percent behind the war, claiming to speak on behalf of millions and millions of union

members. And again, this is a time period when organized labor in the U.S. very powerful, had a lot of economic and political influence. He was saying, we support the war, telling, you know, Lyndon Johnson and then also Richard Nixon, we want to see it through to full victory with the communists in Vietnam completely defeated, no like peace talks or no negotiated solution. We want to see it through till total of victory. But beyond that, beyond giving that sort of political backing and sort of in a way legitimizing the war. Also, the AFL-CIO was active on the ground in South Vietnam propping up the Vietnamese Confederation of Labor, which was the anti-communist pro-U.S. Labor Federation led by this guy, Tran Kwok-Boo, who was corrupt CIA-linked union

bureaucrat who became very powerful in South Vietnam. And again, it's part of the broader Cold War. The idea was winning over the working class to the side of the capitalists and to the side of the imperialists and not having them go towards the side of the communists. And that's a pretty difficult thing to do. But when you have actual union officials saying, no, no, the U.S. is, we want to be on the side of the U.S. This is the way forward. Capitalism is the way towards freedom and economic development, et cetera. those are important allies to have in the Cold War, and that's what Tranquok-Boo and his Vietnamese

Confederation of Labor were. And so the FLCAO was using USCID money to prop up this anti-communist Vietnamese labor confederation and part of this battle for hearts and minds, and even toying with the idea and eventually I think pushing forward this idea that these anti-communist Vietnamese trade unionists could serve as like a paramilitary force to fight the National Liberation Front, so-called Viet Cong. And yeah, so we're very involved both in the halls of Washington and the sort of political fights over the war in the U.S. itself and then on the ground in South Vietnam.

And Walter Ruther, having been a more tradition, a more kind of liberal labor leader and not, you know, he was anti-communist as kind of this political calculation. He was very reluctant. He didn't, you know, some other high-ranking leaders in the UAW, including his own brother, Victor Ruther, were outspoken critics of the war. They saw it as, you know, immoral and unwinnable. And they were speaking out against it. But Walter Ruther himself didn't want to say anything, especially while Lyndon Johnson was president, because Lyndon Johnson was a Democrat, was pro-labor, you know, a friend and an ally of Ruther's. And Ruther knew if he spoke out against the war.

or Lyndon Johnson would cut him off and he'd lose access to the White House. And that's what sets the scene for the passage you read. He's at a Passover dinner. And Leslie Woodcock, the daughter of Leonard Woodcock, another high-ranking UAW official, kind of confronted Ruther. And, yeah, because Ruther's saying, well, I can't really say anything about it. I need to stay out of it. We'll get in trouble.

And she's kind of saying, you know, that's the most inhumane thing I've ever heard. because you are, he was a very influential figure. This is another important thing for people to understand. Today, union presidents are not necessarily the most important, powerful figures in the country. Although, you know, Sean Fane arguably is a pretty, you know, and Sarah Nelson are, you know, important, famous people, especially in the Democratic Party. But back then, someone like Walter Ruther, I mean, he carried a lot of weight, a household name. And so he did eventually, after Johnson decided. not to run for re-election because he knew he would lose because of how unpopular he was from the war,

that's when Walter Ruther finally started speaking out against the war in Vietnam. And this led to friction between Ruther and George Meany, Meany, the president of the AFLCAO, and actually due to a number of other disagreements, the UAW actually pulled out of the AFLCAO, withdrew from it altogether in, I think, 1968, 69, in the middle of the war. So like the same kind of splits that the AFLCAO had been supporting and promoting around the world over the Cold War were now coming home now happening in the U.S. because the UAW at that time was the largest and most powerful affiliate in the AFLCAO. And it pulled out of the AFLCIO at this point. It later rejoined in the early 80s.

But yeah, a lot of intense divisions in the labor movement over Vietnam and the opening for serious rank and file criticism of, the AFLCIRO's Cold War foreign policy criticism of its support for the Vietnam War, which, you know, many on the new left who were opposing the war, they basically saw organized labor as just part of the establishment and kind of hopeless, you know, and moving away from trying to organize within unions and organize the working class and focusing more on like, you know, campus activism and that kind of thing. And so there were divides in the left and, and divide in the broader New Deal political coalition. And this is when that strategic wager of like, you know,

U.S. labor supporting U.S. empire and global domination because it would, you know, help the industrial working class. That started to break down because also in this period of the Vietnam War, the economies of Western Europe and Japan recovered. They rebuilt. And now there was the U.S. industrial corporations actually had global competition now, and they weren't keeping up with this global competition. They weren't maintaining their,

they weren't innovating or maintaining their factories. And, you know, think about the auto sector and how going into the early 70s and beyond, the U.S. auto industry was still producing these big clunkers of cars that, you know, gas guzzlers and the Japanese were producing these, you know, smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. And so they were becoming more popular with U.S. consumers. And, you know, and other examples,

of this in other industries, and U.S. industrial corporations increasingly trying to maintain their profits by introducing speedups and more automation and eventually starting to outsource an offshore production and workers and unions in the U.S. taking a beating from this. So no longer, could you even say, well, U.S. industrial workers were benefiting from the Cold War. Now that wasn't even true anymore. So for a lot of reasons, this period of the late 60s, early 70s, with the Vietnam War kind of as a centerpiece, things started to shift with the Cold War in a different direction. So tell us a little bit about the AFL-CIO's alliance with Ronald Reagan and the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy in the 1980s. So like what did that alliance with Reagan

look like that broader lines with the right? And what was the impact on the labor movement more broadly? So, you know, because of the Vietnam War, the broad anti-communist consensus had been shattered in the United States. There was a growing push for detente, you know, negotiation and friendly relations between the U.S. and Soviet Union and this kind of Cold War thaw throughout the 1970s. And George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO and other high-ranking AFL-CIO leaders

hated this. They were like, and then Nixon, you know, went to China, opened up relations with China on, and the Vietnam War came to an end and, you know, with the U.S. losing. And people like Meany,

AFL-CIO, anti-communists, was very angry about this sort of detente and thaw in the Cold War. He blamed all of U.S. laborers declining fortunes in the 1970s on that. When I say declining fortunes of U.S. labor, I'm talking about increasing deindustrialization, stagflation, oil shocks, et cetera.

Rather than the AFL-CIO leadership saying, we need to get out there and organize and organized, and we need to bring back militancy and all of that, they said the problem is we're abandoning the Cold War. We're abandoning anti-communism. That's why everything's going so wrong. Reagan gets elected in 1980 as a very, anti-union, you know, well, ironically, Reagan is the only former union president to become president

of the United States, right? He's president of the Sagan Actors Guild. But, you know, he gets in his first year in office. He fires the air traffic controllers, you know, who went on strike. It's a famous story. I'm sure people are familiar. And wages war on the working class, you know, Reaganomics and tax cuts for the wealthy and cutting the social safety net. And so the AFL CIA was fighting Reagan on domestic politics, but because Reagan was all about reviving the Cold War and trying to, you know, shake off the ghost of the Vietnam War and, and again, project U.S. military power, especially in Latin America, with invading Grenada and funding these counterinsurgency wars in Nicaragua and Guatemala and especially El Salvador and trying of using this belligerent rhetoric against the Soviet Union, calling it an

evil empire. AFL CIO leaders really liked that part of Reagan because they were like, yeah, this is what we've been talking about. We want to revive the Cold War. We want to revive anti-communism, which took such a, suffered a defeat with Vietnam. We want to bring that back. And so in the early 80s, the AFL-CIO worked closely with the Reagan administration to form a new government entity to wage the Cold War overseas,

called the NED National Endowment for Democracy, which is another, basically a pot of money for the U.S. government to give. It's to private organizations around the world, political parties, newspapers, student organizations, and unions that are ostensibly talking about democracy and promoting democracy. But again, it's the same thing as free trade unionism. It's all about anti-communism, anti-left, ideology. theology and bolstering U.S. Empire. It was really trying to revive some of the covert things the CIA

had been doing in the 60s, but after the anti-war movement and then the exposures of the Church Committee, this for Senator Frank Church in the early 1970s, calling out a lot of the underhanded horrible things the CIA had been doing around the world. The National Endowment for Democracy was trying to basically do that stuff, the same stuff, but repackage it as this is all good. good and benign and do it out in the open instead of a covert being overt. And the NED, along with the U.S. Agency for International Development, was funding the AFLCAO's foreign arms like the Arab American Institute for Free Lever Development and the other institutes that it had in Africa and Asia. So, yeah, while battling with Reagan on domestic issues, the AFLCAO was happy to partner with him

on foreign issues. And at this point in time, now the new leader of the AFLCAO, was Lane Kirkland, who replaced George Meany. And Kirkland also was a vehement anti-communist. He went to college at Georgetown School of Foreign Service, and he was way into like foreign policy and diplomacy and stuff, even though he was ostensibly a labor leader and president of the AFL-CIO. So he became, again, he was fighting Reagan on domestic issues while partnering with Reagan on foreign policy and this reviving the Cold War and creating the NED.

we'll hear a lot more about Lane Kirkland in part two when we talk about his Zionism. So I just have a couple more sort of historical questions here, and then I'm happy to just wrap it up and end a little bit on how this all ended up playing out this rabid, like anti-communism and imperialism. So I was very fascinated in the book about the part about U.S. labor's role in toppling the USSR. As we know, the Soviet Union was a huge counter to the United States, not just in the outright Cold War sense that we're all familiar with, but also just in terms of a counterbalance to capitalism on a global stage, which in some ways kept U.S. capitalism in check. that all, of course, ended when the Soviet Union ended. So it's a really, really tragic story and a really important story in explaining why we are where we are now with how we're seeing capitalism function globally. How did U.S. labor play a role in the toppling of the USSR? It largely, you could largely focus on Poland in the 1980s. In Poland, you had the founding and growth of Solidarityno. or solidarity, this trade union movement that was, you know, I believe a genuine worker movement, especially at the beginning, trying to protest for more rights for workers.

They went on this famous strike in the Gdansk shipyards that was started after a popular worker was fired. And they were promote, I think they were trying to promote kind of like democratic socialist reforms within Poland. changes to the economy and changes to political system and civil liberties and stuff like that. But the AFL-CIO kind of got their hooks into this. They said, oh, this is perfect. We can not only, we've been doing Cold War containment,

trying to prevent the spread of communism to other countries, but now we can do rollback. We can go into an actual communist country like Poland and try to push for regime change from within by using Solidarnos as a tool for that. And so the AFLCAO became a major backer, both morally and politically and financially, of Solidarnoche, and was AFLCAO president, Lane Kirkland, was pressuring Reagan to do more to support Solidarnoche and to condemn the Polish government.

You know, Reagan being, you know, himself a Cold War hawk, the Reagan administration wanted to tread carefully because they understood this is like behind the iron curtain. This is in the actual Soviet block itself. We don't want to meddle too much because it could provoke a backlash and could lead to escalating conflict. And so the Reagan administration was actually trying to tread carefully while Lane Kirkland, the FLCAO, were chiding Reagan saying, I thought you were, you said you were an anti-communist. What's going on? You need to sanction, you know, put heavy sanctions on Poland and give lots of money to Sully Darnoche and support them in, you know, just overthrowing the Polish government.

and so the AFLCAO kind of helped convince Reagan to do more to back Soledernos, including having the CIA get in and give millions of dollars. And of course, through the USAID and NED, the AFLCIO was giving a lot of money to Soli Darno. Eventually, by the late 80s, you know, after a series of strikes that were partly financed with help from the U.S. government and AFLCAO, there was an election in Poland, where, for Salé Darnoche representatives won and basically in that sense, you know, overthrew the Communist Party in Poland. And that was sort of the first, you know, you want to talk about the domino theory. This is like the domino's in reverse now. Once Poland went, then other countries

in Eastern Europe and the Eastern Bloc, overthrew their communist governments. And that isolated the Soviet Union. Of course, you know, Gorbachev, his head of the Soviet Union wasn't really doing anything to stop what was happening in Eastern Europe and trying to do all kinds of economic and political reforms in the Soviet Union. And the AFL-CIO was also supporting some strikes of coal miners and whatnot within the Soviet Union. And the NED, this new government arm that had been created in part through lobbying and organizing by the AFL-CIO, the NED was funding a lot of like separatist groups within the Soviet Union. Union trying to, you know, declare independence and break away and form separate countries that

all contributed to finally at the end of 1991, the Soviet Union officially dissolving and breaking apart into 15 separate countries. And, yeah, the AFL-CIO leadership were doing like a victory lap, you know, the eastern block fell, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union was dissolved, and they were taking a lot of the credit because they had been supporting Salé Dernosh all along and it really started with Sully Dyrinoche. But then the outcome, as you kind of alluded to, was this unfettered hyper-capitalism reigning supreme in the world. And of course, this being very bad for workers around the world, including in the United States

and the AFLCI leadership having no plan for how to deal with that outcome. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So just before I ask you the final question, too, I just want to get an update now. So right now, it's sort of the solidarity center, right? that has all of these other sort of foreign arms have coalesced into. So tell us about the Solidarity Center and particularly I was interested. It's not very long, but you did write about its presence in Venezuela. And I think with everything going on right now in terms of the regime change operation against Venezuela

and also in light of our four-part series that we're doing ongoing series, but four parts at this point on Venezuela, our listeners are hopefully like pretty dialed into that current event and the history of Venezuela. So maybe if you could tell us a little bit about the Solidarity Center and its presence in Venezuela. Yeah, so just briefly, the Solidarity Center was founded in 1997. After the Cold War and this really emergence of neoliberalism and labor continuing to take a beating and NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, there was kind of people sometimes call it a palace coup within the AFL-CIO or the Lane Kirkland, the anti-communist, the old guard anti-communist leaders

were kind of pushed out and a new group of union leaders led by John Sweeney took over the AFL-CIO and they were not as rabidly anti-communist or obsessed with foreign policy and stuff as their predecessors. And so they then in 1997 took the American Institute for Free Labor Development and the other similar institutes for Africa and Asia and consolidated them into one single entity called the Solidarity Center. And with the name, Solidarity Center, with the idea that this isn't just about free trade unionism or spreading freedom,

whenever it's about actual worker-to-worker solidarity. And many people believed at the time, like, okay, now the page has been turned on all this anti-communist stuff, and now this is a new generation of leaders, and now it's the Solidarity Center. It's actual going to be different. And to some extent, you know, I think, yeah,

it has been different, but it's still financed by USAID, and the NED. It's still an arm effectively of the U.S. government, even though it's like in the name of the AFL-CIO. And Solidarity Center has been present in, I think, 60 different countries doing all different types of stuff. Ostensibly, you know, good worker-to-worker help or nonprofit type of work

or NGO type of work to support workers' rights. But also has various times and places the funding and activities of the Solidarity Center have mirrored U.S. foreign policy priorities, and that's been especially true. In Venezuela, when there was the short-lived an unsuccessful coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002, the Solidarity Center was implicated because this CTV-V-V-Vuelan Confederation of Workers, which is largely anti-Savez union of more like upper or middle-class professionals, was implicated in the coup and trying to push Chavez out

and the CTV had received a lot of funding from the Solidarity Center. I mean, really from the NED via the Solidarity Center. And there was also a researcher some years back, Nelson Bass, who found that when Chavez was elected in 1999, the Solidarity Center's budget for Venezuela, the money it was getting from the NED, increased dramatically, like the moment Chavez was elected,

So that, you know, that's kind of suspicious. And then it's also been found that, like, through at least until the 2010s, Solidarity Center was still funding and working closely with a lot of, like, anti-chevista groups in Venezuela. Now, as for, like, what's going on right now, I mean, this year, it's been kind of interesting because when Trump came back in this January and he had Elon Musk in charge of the so-called Doge, Department of Government Efficiency, and they were gutting the budget for USAID. and also basically freezing the budget of the NED. The Solidarity Center was effectively shut down earlier this year.

I mean, they were laying off and furlowing most of their employees. And from what I understand, the Solidarity Center basically was just down to like a skeleton crew and its Washington, D.C. office. Even their website was like shut down for a while there. I don't know exactly what's happened in the last few months, but I mean their Solidarity Center's website, it seems to be back up. They're asking for donations from people. which I guess could be a positive thing if it's funded by actual workers and not funded by the U.S. government.

But as far as whether and to what extent the Solidarity Center is currently involved in Venezuela, right now, I don't know. This is one of the mess, you know, the Trump administration is so chaotic and mercurial. You know, he's gutting these instruments of soft imperialism while still doing imperialism and, you know, wanting to clearly wanting to overthrow Maduro and using this ridiculous. pretext of drug trafficking and now he wants to go after Colombia and obviously the big prize is Cuba but also like kneecapping one of the most effective instruments of U.S. imperialism, which is the NED and U.S.AID. So I don't know if Trump knows exactly what he's what he's doing. And I don't,

I guess I don't know exactly what the Solidarity Center's role in this is right now, but there's, you know, the Organization Alliance for Global Justice, which monitors this a lot. They monitor what is happening in Venezuela and the role of the Solidarity Center in the NED. So maybe folks could check out Alliance for Global Justice as a good resource to know, like, what's the latest on all of this? Absolutely. I'll throw that link in the show notes. All right.

So you conclude your book with a really powerful passage that sort of reflects on the sad and sorted history that we just went over. And I'd like to read that passage and then ask you for some final remarks. So you write, ostensibly the voice of American workers, the Federation was also one of the country's most staunchly anti-communist institutions. Instead of uncompromisingly confronting corporate power, organizing against militarism and war, and encouraging genuine union democracy at home and abroad,

top labor officials maintained an unwholesome alliance with Washington's foreign policy apparatus, and occasionally with corporate America as well, to undermine class-conscious militant workers' movements around the world. The result of the AFL-CIO-backed Cold War was a world in which workers would have exceedingly little power, and an increasingly reckless capitalist class would reign supreme. And so, end quote. And then it feels to me like when it comes to like the AFL-CIO, the broader labor movement, leadership and this war against communism by the U.S., the phrase, be careful what you wish for,

could not ring more true. And this alludes back to earlier when I was talking about how all of this really just came back to bite the labor movement in its ass. And so I would like to just maybe ask you for the final remarks here, like, how did U.S. labor's war against communism really shake out for U.S. workers? like looking at the labor landscape right now, these workers that the AFL-CIO were supposed to be representing and also for workers of the world as a whole

because workers all around the world are not doing well right now. And what is the real lesson here in terms of internationalism? Yeah, we can see the results like you were saying right now. I mean, we see the complete, the way that so many millions of people in this country our living paycheck to paycheck, the vast and absurd and obscene wealth inequality in the United States, the absolute power held by billionaires and corporations and control over every aspect of our lives, from the groceries we buy to where we get our news and information and entertainment. And the fact that union density right now in the U.S., you know, it was at 35 percent when the Cold War

started. Now it's down to 9.9 percent. Only one in 10 U.S. workers is in a union. that's despite a recent wave of organizing, it's just continued to go down in many ways because there's more militant, radical, inclusive, class struggle-oriented forms of unionism that had been so powerful and so effective for many decades were really kind of pushed out or silenced or crushed by the Cold War. In some ways, you can say the labor movement in the U.S. was a victim of the Cold War. But as I argue throughout the book, the U.S. Labor movement, the U.S. labor officialdom, we should more precisely say, was actually driving the Cold War. The Cold War didn't happen to unions. Unions or union leaders were pushing it and encouraging it, especially the AFL. And then the CIA

kind of just, rather than resisting, the CIA got on board and threw their leftist comrades under the bus and then proceeded with that model around the world. And by, you know, constantly meddling, and splitting, dividing, weakening labor movements all over the world. I would argue that only made it easier for multinational corporations to simply move production into other countries, wherever they could pay workers the least amount of money and have the fewest amount of regulations. The fact that the AFLCI was working so hard to defang labor movements around the world to take away those more militant class struggle-oriented traditions and replace them with this kind of class collaborationist, play it safe, be friendly with the government, and that style of trade unionism,

really set up worker movements all over the world to be taken advantage of by capital. And, you know, the U.S. labor, the AFLCIO was a really valuable partner to the U.S. government in waging the Cold War successfully. I mean, the U.S. government won, the capitalists won. but what did the U.S. government do for the AFLCAO for the labor movement at the same time? It didn't repeal the Anti-Union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which had made it so much harder for workers to form unions. That law is still in effect, and it's still very, there's still so many ridiculous hoops workers have to jump through just to form a union, and corporations can get away with anything and trying to stop unions from forming.

That's what we've been seeing at the Starbucks, especially. and the federal government by supporting and pushing through so-called free trade agreements like NAFTA only made it easier for corporations to move union jobs out of the country, eliminate those jobs here in this country. So, you know, the labor movement did all this invaluable service on behalf of Washington, and Washington basically gave the middle finger to the labor movement here at home. So I think the lesson is workers' movements. labor movements, they do need to be internationalists. My argument is not for isolationism,

right? Workers all over the world, because capitalist is international and transnational, workers movements need to be internationalists. And when it comes to dealing with international issues and foreign policy, unions, including here in the U.S., need to chart an independent path, not following in the, you know, trying to obey or serve the government's foreign policy, but actually challenging the U.S. government's foreign policy and challenging imperialism. So not just internationalism, but anti-imperialist internationalism and anti-militarist internationalism. And that's, you know, in some ways that sets us up for our next discussion about Palestine, about the need for U.S. labor to be standing in firm solidarity with the Palestinian freedom

struggle. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Jeff Shirky, labor historian, journalist, union activist, and assistant professor at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies, Sunni Empire State University. He's also the author of Blue Collar Empire, The Untold Story of U.S. Labor's Global Anti-Communist Crusade, and No Neutrals There, U.S. labor, Zionism, and The Struggle for Palestine. We'll be taking the week of December 29th off, which means this will be the last public. episode until January 12th, when we'll be presenting part two of this mini-series with Jeff Shirke, exploring his book on the U.S. Labor Movement support for Zionism and Israel. We'll still be doing our Patreon episodes in December and the first week of January, so Patreon subscribers, you won't have any interruption to your upstream programming. Please check the show notes for links to

any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Shiv and the Carvers for the intermission music and to Berwyn Muir for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We could not keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. through this support you'll be helping keep Upstream sustainable and helping keep this whole project going. Post-capitalist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support.

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