Last December, when then President-elect Lula da Silva met with the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO in a celebratory gathering in Washington D.C., Federation President John Sweeney said, “It’s a pleasure to have a president we can all call brother here today” and pledged that the U.S. union movement and workers “will stand side by side” with Lula in his struggle to solve Brazil’s serious economic and social problems.
The AFL-CIO’s embrace of Lula marks an important moment in the U.S. labor movement’s reinvention of itself in the international arena, for over the years the Federation has been criticized for being subservient to U.S. foreign policy and, pre-1990, for fighting the Cold War in the theater of trade unionism. In Latin America, the AFL-CIO set up the notorious American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) which supported unions and federations with the sole intent of pushing back the influence of those unions with a more socialist, social democratic or Social Christian orientation.
This overall policy put U.S. labor on the wrong side of social justice movements in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guyana, and elsewhere. AIFLD and AIFLD-trained personnel also helped destabilize left-wing governments such as Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity in Chile in the early 1970s and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua during the 1980s. Significantly, the Pinochet coup against Allende also constituted the bloody birth of the kind of neoliberal restructuring that would eventually spread across the continent, with devastating consequences for labor.
It’s worth remembering that Lula himself, the AFL-CIO’s guest of honor in 2002, cut his political teeth fighting a dictatorship that was brought into being in 1964 with the blessing and active support of AIFLD. The coup that ousted Brazil’s pro-labor Goulart government resulted in almost 500 unions being shut down by the regime and thousands being thrown in jail.
The victory of John Sweeney’s New Voice slate in the AFL-CIO’s 1995 leadership elections saw the consolidation of a new kind of internationalism for U.S. labor, one driven by the need to respond to corporate globalization and neoliberal policies. AIFLD was closed down and in 1997 the AFL-CIO launched The Solidarity Center, which oversees operations in 27 different countries. The focus is now on organizing, anti-sweatshop work and defense of workers’ rights.
The AFL-CIO’s support for the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), which is playing a key role in the opposition against President Hugo Chávez, has prompted some to wonder if the U.S. government is still setting labor’s overseas agenda, but Chávez has been criticized by a large portion of the world’s labor movement for his attacks on the CTV and freedom of association generally. At the same time, the AFL-CIO has also stated that the “other priorities of the Chávez administration, including agrarian reform and assistance to Cuba, for example, are and should be the sole and sovereign concern of the Venezuelan people and their government.” It’s hard to imagine the AFL-CIO of the Cold War years making a statement like this.
This new internationalism will face some important challenges and opportunities in Latin America in the not-too-distant future. Across the continent, the struggle against neoliberalism is becoming more widespread, more organized and, it seems, more militant. With allies like Lula, and with its still considerable resources and political influence, the AFL-CIO and U.S. labor as a whole are in a position to grow into an even stronger force for global justice, with all the risks and responsibilities that would entail. This more than anything would put the past to rest, and allow a new page—one more consistent with the very best traditions of American trade unionism—to be written in the language of genuine international solidarity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sean Swenery is Director of Labor Studies for Cornell University’s School of Industrial & Labor Relations in New York City He was co-author of Working Against Us: AIFLD and the International Policy of AFL-CIO, NACLA 1988.
