Jeff Schuhrke opens his book with a bang. April 1964 – Jerry Wurf wins election as president of AFSCME (American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees). In ‘the union’s Washington headquarters…he discovered a mysterious group of men, with no apparent ties to the union, working out of the building’s fourth floor in the “International Relations Department”. Wurf made inquiries and learned the men were, in fact, CIA operatives.’ Wurf shut the department down and fired them. This is a good news story. In the end, Wurf ‘would transform AFCSME from a corrupt and lethargic bureaucracy’ into a union which ‘would organise hundreds of thousands of public sector employees – many of them African Americans who had traditionally been excluded from organised labour.’

Most of the central characters in the book, however, spent a lifetime working through the trade unions in the interests of the US state – expelling left wingers, most of whom were the most active defenders of the interests of the working class, collaborating with and taking funding from the CIA and government departments, and splitting trade union movements at home and abroad.

In his introduction Schuhrke expands on the use of the word ‘anticommunist’ in the title of the book, ‘In practice, “anticommunism” did not only mean opposition to actual communists, but also an intolerance – sometimes a violent hatred – for almost any progressive, left-leaning ideas challenging the capitalist status quo and for the people or groups advocating them.’

The three sections of Jeff Schuhrke’s book are entitled, Free Trade Unionism 1945-1960; Free Labor Development 1960-1973; Free Market Revolution 1973-1995. He clarifies the use of the word ‘free’ which features here. ‘To justify their overseas interventions, top labor officials insisted they were promoting “free” and “democratic” unionism around the world. In fact, their anticommunist fixation tended to only make unions more autocratic, both at home and abroad. In the United States and in other countries, worker organisations frequently had large numbers of communists or other leftists. Union democracy allowed such radicals to win leadership positions and gain influence over labor movements. For anticommunists, this was intolerable, and genuine union democracy was therefore unacceptable to them. As the book shows, this served the interests of US capital. ‘With unions around the world rendered docile and undemocratic, and with labor movements divided and weakened, it became far easier for capital to exploit workers both in the United States and overseas.’

Schuhrke puts the responsibility squarely on the leaders of the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organisations) the largest federation of unions in the United States. ‘Additionally, while touting the virtues of autonomous unionism free from state control, the AFL-CIO itself took millions of dollars from Washington to bankroll its foreign programs, while closely collaborating with US government agencies across the globe.’

He describes ‘US officialdom’s quest to control the workers’ movements of Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia between the 1940s and 1990s…Like a roving picket marching from country to country, the AFL-CIO’s international agents carried out their own imperial intrusions, expending incredible energy and resources to block revolutionary ideologies and militant class consciousness from taking hold in foreign labour movements…the AFL-CIO became closely allied with almost the entire US foreign policy apparatus – not only the CIA, but also the State Department, Agency for International Development, and the National Endowment for Democracy…AFL-CIO officials, without consulting the millions of workers they represented, chose to be partners in the making of an unequal international order dominated by capital.’

The book takes us right back to the first trade union organisation in the USA. Separatism started early: the AFL sent a representative to the founding of the Second International in 1889, which declared May 1st – May Day – to be International Workers’ Day. ‘The Federation soon distanced itself from May Day and its radical associations, instead only observing Labor Day in the US on the first Monday of September.’

From the beginning there was a clash between proponents of militant worker action and supporters of ‘pure and simple’ unionism, Samuel Gompers, AFL president from its founding in 1886 to his death in 1924 (with the exception of one year), being a supporter of the latter. Shuhrke describes him as being ‘consistently preoccupied with achieving recognition for organised labor as the legitimate partner of business and government in the maintenance of the capitalist order.’ Gompers exhibited the anticommunism which characterised the AFL leadership during so much of the 20th century. ‘After Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, he opposed US recognition of the Soviet Union, calling the Bolsheviks “pirates” who had raised “the black flag over helpless Russia and declared war upon the established order about which the fabric of civilized life had been woven”. Writing shortly before his death in 1924, the longtime AFL president concluded that “the Soviets have demonstrated beyond question that Socialism is economically unsound, socially wrong, and industrially impossible.”’

Anti-Sovietism was the watchword too of George Meany. On April 5 1945, as the second highest ranking official of the AFL, he addressed a meeting of New York City’s Central Labor Council, two months after Yalta, and three weeks before the founding conference of the United Nations. ‘In international trade union circles, plans were in place to form a kind of United Nations for organized labor to bring together the national union centres of the Allied countries, particularly those of the Soviet Union, Britain, and United States.’ At the meeting, Meany said the AFL would boycott any organisation involving Soviet trade unions, likening the Soviet government to the Nazis as “totalitarians”. By this time the AFL had already founded, in 1944, an organisation named the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC). Meany went on to become the president of the AFL in 1951, the president of the merged AFL-CIO in 1955. He was, in fact, ‘the most powerful figure in the US labour movement from the early 1950s to the late 1970s’.

Jay Lovestone, another key figure in this sorry story, managed the FTUC’s day-to-day operations. Lovestone, Schuhrke says, ‘would come to be identified with the AFL’s Cold War foreign intrigues more than any other individual...at twenty years old he dropped out of law school and helped form the CPUSA (Communist Party of the USA) in 1919’, becoming the editor of its official newspaper. With the CPUSA ‘often operating underground in the 1920s…and roiled by constant infighting, Lovestone became adept at engaging in covert activities.’ He manoeuvred himself into becoming the CPUSA’s executive secretary in 1927. However, on a delegation to Moscow in 1929, he was stripped of his authority by Stalin himself. ‘Calling Lovestone “an adroit and talented factional wire puller”, Stalin said he doubted “very much at this stage that Comrade Lovestone can be a party leader”.’ Thereafter Lovestone and his supporters formed the CP (Opposition), better known as the ‘Lovestoneites’. Rival trade union leader Victor Reuther would later describe Lovestone as one of the “most Machiavellian union splitters ever to prey on the American labor movement”.

The book follows how Lovestone and others went about splitting the trade union movements of Western Europe in the post-war period. As Schuhrke says, ‘The US government…was determined to prevent Western Europe from being absorbed into the Soviet sphere of influence…thanks to the leading role they had played in the wartime antifascist resistance, the communist parties of Western Europe were remarkably strong and popular.’ There was ‘growing unity between communist and non-communist national trade union centres, manifested in the establishment of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU)’. Lovestone published an international newsletter, the Free Trade Union News, in multiple languages. The FTUC kept Force Ouvriere, deliberately set up as a competitor to the CGT, the French TUC, financially afloat. Lovestone’s associate Brown would write to him, “Our work and our propaganda of the last two years in spite of all inadequacies have had their effect.”

In 1949, ‘top officials from the AFL, CIO, British TUC, Force Ouvrière and nearly 60 other non-communist trade union centres from 53 countries assembled in London for the Free World Labor Conference. At that meeting they founded the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) as a direct competitor to the WFTU’. Just one indicator of the success of this move in splitting the trade union movement was that between 1949 and 1958 the French CGT lost half its membership.

The sections in the book on Latin America and the Caribbean highlight the activities of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). ‘AIFLD was the brainchild of Joseph Beirne, president of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and a member of the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council…With funds from the US International Cooperation Administration, a descendant of the Marshall Plan’s Economic Cooperation Administration, Beirne organised a three-month course on “free” trade unionism in 1959.’ AIFLD developed its activities from there. Progressive Chief Minister of Guyana, Cheddi Jagan, was to accuse AIFLD in 1963 of training Guyanese unionists “to overthrow my government”. A US-backed eleven-week general strike cost Guyana an estimated $40 million. In the election the following year, the US and the British colonial administration colluded to ensure that, even though Cheddi Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party (PPP) got the biggest vote, it would not be invited to form the government. Instead Jagan’s opponent Forbes Burnham was invited to form a coalition government excluding the PPP. ‘Under Burnham, the AIFLD graduates who had helped lead the 1963 strike attained high-ranking positions in Guyanese unions.’

The book deals also with the collusion of the US trade unions in the destruction of the socialist countries of Europe. Strikes in the Gdansk Lenin shipyard in Poland began on August 14th, 1980. On August 20th the Executive Committee of the AFL-CIO declared the strike “a profoundly important development for human rights, free trade unionism, and democracy in the communist world”. The strike ended on August 31st, when the Polish government agreed to the workers’ demands. Over the next year, the AFL-CIO’s newly created Polish Workers’ Aid Fund provided Solidarnosc (Solidarity), the new ‘trade union’, with funding for, in the words of Tom Kahn, de facto organiser of the AFL-CIO’s foreign affairs, “the dismantling, by non-nuclear means, of the Communist system”.

Post-1989, these were the results: ‘Taking advice from Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs [he has changed his tune in the meantime!], the Solidarnosc-led government implemented “shock therapy”, transitioning from a socialist economy to a capitalist one practically overnight. State-run industries like mines, factories, and shipyards were quickly sold off to private firms resulting in mass layoffs. In exchange for embracing the “free market”, the International Monetary Fund provided Poland with some debt relief and the White House promised $1 billion in aid. Sachs predicted the rapid privatizations would lead to temporary pain in the Polish economy, followed by a robust recovery. ‘But such a recovery never happened. In the years after shock therapy was introduced, unemployment in Poland soared to 20 per cent (higher for younger workers), poverty increased, and industrial output declined. Under capitalism, the standard of living for many working-class Poles became worse than it had been under communism.’ Those were the years when highly-trained Polish building workers flooded the UK to work for low wages, in insecure conditions, poorly housed. Their loss was the UK building bosses’ gain.

The collusion of the US labor leaders with US imperialism impacted the US working class as well. ‘The US labor movement had already been in decline for at least two decades in the face of unchecked union busting, corporate restructuring and increased capital mobility. The 1980s had been especially bad, with union density falling from 21 percent to 16 percent while real wages stagnated and income inequality skyrocketed.’

As Jeff Schuhrke says in his conclusion, ‘Organised labor around the world should be striving toward the creation of a truly united working-class movement, dependent on its own collective strength, and dedicated to replacing capitalism with socialism, and militarism with peace. While this may seem obvious, it historically has not been the official approach of the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions, which, at their worst, have assisted the US government around the world in dividing workers, suppressing democracy, waging unjust wars, and foiling progressive movements…A labor movement that places class-struggle and anti-imperialism ahead of deference to Washington’s international designs will not come into being unless workers, both within and outside the AFL-CIO, build it themselves.’