아래의 글은 킴 스카입스가 보낸 메일 전문입니다(첨부한 파일은 동일한
내용). 킴은 팀 쇼록의 글 전문을 싣고 꼭 읽어볼 것을 권하고 있습니다.
팀 쇼록은 서울과 동경에서 어린 시절을 보내고 지금까지 20년 이상을 아
시아 문제와 세계화, 금융 문제에 관한 자유기고가로 활동하고 있다고 합
니다. 팀의 글을 더 읽고자 하신다면 www.thenation.com에 가시면 다른 글
들과 함께 한국에 관한 글들도 보실 수 있습니다. 이 글들을 통해서 미국
노동운동의 지금까지의 상황과 더불어 그 반성과 연대에의 모색을 읽을
수 있습니다. 킴은 팀의 글이 남한에서 미국의 AFL-CIO가 냉전의 도구로
기능했음을 지적하는 최초의 문제제기임을 말하고 있습니다만 우리로서는
그다지 새로운 정보라기보다는 하나의 사실확인에 불과할 수도 있겠지요.
그러나 어쨌든 이러한 미국 노동운동 내의 자기비판의 움직임은 우리에게
국제적인 연대라는 문제를 보다 구체적으로 고민하게 하는 계기로써 의미
를 갖을 수 있을 것 같습니다. 오늘부터 영국 Leeds에서 이틀동안
International Trade Unionism in a Network Society: What’s New About
the ‘New Labour Internationalism’?라는 컨퍼런스가 열린다고 하는데
이것은 국제적인 연대라는 문제가 단지 우리들만의 고민은 아니라는 것을
보여주는 것 같습니다. 아래의 글은 그리 어려운 글은 아니니 적어도 팀
의 글 중에서 서론과 결론 그리고 한국관련 부분 정도라도 한번 읽어보시
기를... 그리고 가능하시다면 킴과 팀에게 격려의 이메일이라도 보내신다
면 더할 나위가 없겠지요. ^^
From: "Kim Scipes" <sscipe1@icarus.cc.uic.edu>
Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 02:09:52 -0500
Subject: [GloSoDia] Important: LABOR'S COLD WAR By Tim Shorrock The
Nation May 19, 2003
Chicago, May 1, 2003
Dear Folks--
One of the most despicable aspects of US labor history has been the
foreign operations carried out by the AFL and later the AFL-CIO,
that has helped cause democratically elected governments to be
overthrown by military coups, killed militant trade unionists and
undermined militant unions, and undermined democracy and
transparency within our own labor movement. Tim Shorrock's new
piece, published today in The Nation and which follows below, is the
latest account of that history, focusing on AFL-CIO activities in
Chile, South Korea and Okinawa. While he adds to what is known
about Chile, his material on South Korea and especially Okinawa will
probably be new to almost everyone.
[There has been little published on the AFL-CIO's operation in Asia
between 1967-1996 which was called AAFLI, or Asian-American Free
Labor Institute. One other account, which is the best description
of what AFL-CIO support has meant for trade unionists, is an account
in my book, KMU: Building Genuine Trade Unionism in the Philippines
(Quezon City, Metro Manila: New Day Publishers, 1996--available in
North America via some universities/colleges and inter-library
loans), where I detail how the largest affiliate of the AFL-CIO
supported Trade Union Congress of the Philippines worked with death
squads to try to counter a local union affiliated to the militant
KMU Labor Center in the Atlas Mines in Cebu in 1987-89.]
Shorrock points out that labor's international policies and efforts
since the election of John Sweeney in 1995 have been a big
improvement--and I agree with this point. The AFL-CIO is supporting
some militant unions and their struggles in ways that they would
have never done in the past--this support, however, only goes to a
certain point (it would never challenge US domination of a country,
say like Indonesia)--but there's also been evidence developed that
suggests even this positive support is not all that "clean," that
AFL-CIO efforts play an ambiguous role in union developments. But
there have been major questions raised--some by myself--about AFL-
CIO operations in Venezuela over the past few years that have again
caused activists to question what is going on.
One point that has NOT been sufficiently emphasized is the role of
the AFL-CIO in the development of the National Endowment for
Democracy (sic). The NED is a private, non-governmental agency that
is financially supported by the US Government that basically carried
out US Government foreign policy (read "imperialism") without the
stigma of being a US Government agency (ala CIA, Dept of State,
etc.) To give one quick example of NED's devotion to democracy:
one of its founding members was Henry Kissinger! The AFL-CIO's
American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS) is one of
the four core members of the NED, along with the international
organizations of both the Democratic and Republican parties and the
Chamber of Commerce. (Much more on NED can be found in William
Robinson's excellent 1996 book, PROMOTING POLYARCHY about the
evolution of US foreign policy.) For quick information, go to the
NED web site, and particularly http://www.ned.org/about/about.html.
Two weeks ago, at the annual conference of the United Association
for Labor Education and the AFL-CIO in Bal Harbor, Florida, Tim
Beatty of the International Affairs Department came up to me and
tried to convince me that ACILS was "doing God's work" (his words)
internationally. When I asked him about the NED connection, he said
something, about it's US taxpayers' money and we want our share (or
something along those lines--this is not a direct quote).
However, the AFL-CIO has still yet to "come clean" on its foreign
operations, either in the past or today, and this has never been
democratically discussed, much less ratified by union members.
These foreign operations remain overwhelmingly funded, not by
members' dues after a detailed and open discussion, but by US
Government funds. How can the AFL-CIO take money from the Bush
Administration for work overseas, when the same Bush Administration
is doing everything it can to disembowel the union movement here in
the US??? Hello! And does anybody over the age of, say ten,
believe that this money does not come with a quid pro quo?
I encourage everyone to read this article from the current issue of
The Nation, and spread it widely. I have been told that while this
article has yet to be published on The Nation's web site, it will be
shortly.
Incidentally, for the record, the resolutions that Shorrock talks
about from the West Coast resulted, at least in part, from an
article I published in 2000 titled "It's Time to Come Clean: Open
the AFL-CIO Archives on International Labor Operations." Labor
Studies Journal, Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer 2000: 4-25. [Posted on-
line in English by LabourNet Germany
at.www.labournet.de/diskussion/gewerkschaft/scipes2.html]. (A
response to my article was also published in LSJ by Judy Ancel, and
her response is also on line at the LabourNet Germany web site:
change "scipes2" to "ancel1".) This article also includes a fairly
complete bibliography of material on AFL and AFL-CIO foreign policy
and operations.) See also "scipes1" for a discussion of "Building
International Labor Solidarity One Central Labor Council at a Time,"
which focuses on getting the first of these West Coast union
resolutions passed.
I publicly applaud Tim Shorrock for doing this research and getting
this article published--it will help continue the struggle against
the reactionary aspects of AFL-CIO foreign operations.
In solidarity,
Kim Scipes
Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago
====================================================================
Labor's Cold War
TIM SHORROCK
The Nation - May 19, 2003
http://www.thenation.com/
In the months before President Bush invaded Iraq, thousands of trade
unionists joined the massive protests that filled the nation's
streets. Their ranks swelled when the AFL-CIO, for the first time in
its history, openly challenged a US decision to go to war and
charged that Bush's unilateralist policies had "squandered" the
global solidarity that America enjoyed after September 11, 2001.
Once the invasion began, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney did shift
his antiwar stance, declaring that the federation would "support
fully" Bush's war goals. But he also acknowledged the right
of "people of good conscience and good faith" to express opposition.
Those events, and Sweeney's respectful recognition of the splits in
his ranks, marked a major watershed in US labor history-and could
serve as a long overdue coda to the events of another September 11,
thirty years ago, that still inspire raging debates about labor's
role in US foreign policy. That September 11, in 1973, was the day
Chilean President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a bloody
military coup that ended a brief experiment in democratic socialism
and took the lives of Allende and thousands of Chilean workers,
students and political activists. Today, many trade unionists remain
haunted by the knowledge that their own federation, the AFL-CIO,
played a key role in the US campaign, led by the Nixon
Administration and the Central Intelligence Agency, to destabilize
Chile in the years before the coup.
From 1971 to 1973, the AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor
Development (AIFLD), one of four US-government-funded labor
institutes created during the cold war, channeled millions of
dollars to right-wing unions and political parties opposed to
Allende's socialist agenda. That aid helped finance the revolt by
Chile's professional class and fanned the flames of social unrest
that provided the pretext for Gen. Augusto Pinochet's violent
crackdown and the justification for his seventeen-year dictatorship.
According to documents I've unearthed in the AFL-CIO's archives,
AIFLD's program in Chile was closely coordinated with the US Embassy
and dovetailed with one of the CIA's key aims in Chile: to split the
Chilean labor movement and create a trade union base of opposition
to Allende, who was viewed as dangerously anti-American and a pawn
of the Soviet Union. The campaign's political agenda was summarized
in a 1972 cable in the archives from Robert O'Neill, AIFLD's
representative in Chile, to AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington.
Chile, O'Neill proudly told his superiors, had become the site
of "the first large-scale middle class movement against government
attempts to impose, slowly but surely, a Marxist-Leninist system."
Over the past two years, a coalition of grassroots West Coast labor
activists has been seeking to use those archives to spark a
discussion about the AFL-CIO's cold war past, when AIFLD and its
sister institutes in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe served as
labor's spearhead in the US wars against Communism and left-wing
liberation struggles. AIFLD's actions in Chile, Brazil and other
countries, activists say, blackened the name of the AFL-CIO among
the very people to whom American unions have been reaching out in
recent years to build a movement for peace and economic justice.
Questions about the past have mingled with concerns about the AFL-
CIO's current activities abroad, such as its financial support for
the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), which is allied with
Venezuela's business elite in a bitter campaign to topple the
leftist government of President Hugo Chávez. Initially, the AFL-
CIO's program in Venezuela was financed with a $150,000 grant from
the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was created by
Congress to support pro-US democratic movements abroad, and came to
light last spring, shortly after Chavez was briefly overthrown in a
military coup initially backed by the Bush Administration. To a few
critics, the incident resembled the interventionist days of old-a
comparison hotly denied by the AFL-CIO.
In response, labor councils on the West Coast have been pressing the
AFL-CIO leadership to "come clean" about the past and set the course
for the future by fully opening its archives-including materials
from the Reagan era that remain off-limits to researchers-and
creating a truth commission to analyze and publicize their contents.
The strongest resolutions, passed in 2000 by the San Francisco and
South Bay labor councils in California and in 2001 by the Washington
State AFL-CIO, asked the federation to "renounce" what it did in
Chile and elsewhere in labor's name, and allow union members and
independent researchers to make a full accounting of the past. Last
July the California Labor Federation put the weight of its 2 million
members behind the effort with a resolution asking the AFL-CIO to
open a dialogue about its government-funded foreign affairs
activities, past and present, and "affirm a policy of genuine global
solidarity in pursuit of economic and social justice."
Ultimately, the West Coast activists want to force the AFL-CIO to
draw a clear line between the cold war policies of George Meany and
Lane Kirkland and the new directions in foreign policy it has
started to map through its opposition to the Iraq war and Bush's pro-
business economic agenda. "To counter corporate globalization, we
need labor globalization," said Fred Hirsch, the vice president of
Plumbers and Fitters Local 393 in San Jose, who played an
instrumental role in getting the "clear the air" resolution before
the California federation. "But we can't embark on a path of genuine
solidarity, nor can labor unions overseas trust us, until we own up
to the past and divorce ourselves from those actions and the
government funding which made us a pawn of US foreign policy." Yet
ten months after the California resolution, Sweeney has yet to set a
date for a formal meeting with the state federation.
Sweeney was elected AFL-CIO president in 1995 with the support of a
broad coalition of union leaders who broke with Kirkland over
foreign policy-particularly AIFLD's support for US policy in Central
America-believing that the old guard's belligerent anti-Communism
had become a dangerous anachronism. After taking office, Sweeney
reorganized the four labor foreign policy institutes into a single
organization, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity
(ACILS) and forced several of the AFL-CIO's most notorious cold
warriors into retirement. The new center has refocused its mission
on global solidarity and the right to organize. In Venezuela, ACILS
insists, the US government money has helped the CTV build grassroots
democracy and protect freedom of association.
Barbara Shailor, the AFL-CIO's director of international affairs,
told The Nation that the federation is eager to begin a dialogue
with the California unions. "We won't ignore questions about the
past, but we're really going to focus on what we're doing now-
organizing opposition to the Free Trade Area of the Americas and
responding to the corporate governance meltdown," she said. But
Shailor would not comment on the activities or policies of Sweeney's
predecessors. Nor would she or her staff discuss what's in the AFL-
CIO's international archives, which are stored, along with thousands
of other documents from various AFL-CIO departments, at the George
Meany Center for Labor Studies in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Under the archives' rules, documents can only be released twenty
years after their creation, which means that the newest documents,
given staff time for processing, date back to the late 1970s.
Material about controversial AFL-CIO activities during the 1980s-
such as AIFLD's support for the Nicaraguan contras and labor
cooperation with US-backed counterinsurgencies in El Salvador and
the Philippines-remains classified under the twenty-year rule. When
I asked Shailor if the federation would consider speeding up the
release of that material or requesting classified documents from US
agencies that funded the institutes in order to provide the full
story of labor's cold war, she deferred the question to Michael
Merrill, director of the archives. Merrill said there is "no
consistent policy on what to do when someone wants to open the books
sooner." Any request to shorten the current twenty-year waiting
period, he added, would have to be approved by the senior leadership
of the AFL-CIO.
Over the past year, I've read hundreds of pages of newly released
documents in the archives. Reading through the letters, policy
papers, memos, newspaper clippings and declassified diplomatic
cables in the files, it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that
the AFL-CIO and its institutes were, in a few egregious cases,
willing handmaidens for the Pentagon and US multinational
corporations as they imposed their will on US allies and developing
countries. Nowhere was that clearer than in Chile.
Collaboration in Chile
Salvador Allende was elected Chile's president in September 1970,
and his Popular Unity government took office in November. Around
that time, a secret group within the Nixon Administration directed
the CIA to conduct a campaign of destabilization and sabotage
designed, in Nixon's unforgettable words, to "make the economy
scream." The archives contain no smoking gun directly linking the
American Institute for Free Labor Development with the CIA. But they
confirm that the AFL-CIO's program synchronized closely with the
CIA's plan to create social unrest by sowing divisions within the
labor movement and financing middle-class and professional
organizations-known as gremio-that led the opposition to Allende's
populist program.
AIFLD's primary target was the 1-million-member Central Unica de
Trabajadores (CUT), Chile's largest labor federation. It was led
during the Allende years by a Communist, Luis Figueroa, whom Allende
appointed labor minister in 1972. The campaign to divide the CUT
began in earnest in the spring of 1971, after Allende had
strengthened his governing coalition in municipal elections.
In response, AIFLD, in consultation with US diplomats and the Agency
for International Development (AID), became more aggressive in
seeking to expand US influence inside the CUT. That shift was
made "with the full support of the Embassy and AID" and
involved "the establishment of a dialogue between ourselves and the
non-communist Allendista trade unionists," Jesse Friedman, AIFLD's
regional director for South America, explained to Andrew McLellan,
the AFL-CIO's director for inter-American affairs. Under the plan,
Friedman wrote, AIFLD would invite "influential leaders" from
selected unions to Washington to show them "that they have been
misled in the formation of their concept of the United States."
Robert O'Neill, AIFLD's representative in Santiago, was
enthusiastic, pointing out that US visits by Chilean unionists were
the only way that AIFLD's allies "can grow and eventually control
the trade union movement here." (Emphasis added.) He urged other US
unions to get involved because a "reinforced effort would add to the
unrest." In another cable, O'Neill laid out an ambitious plan to win
over workers in the strategic copper, oil, maritime, airline and
banking industries so they "could initially form a block within CUT
to defend their positions and eventually be the basis for a break-up
of CUT." But he hastened to add that "undeniably and unfortunately,
the majority of organized Chilean workers still back Marxist
leadership, at least in trade union elections."
By this time, the Nixon Administration, working covertly with ITT,
Kennecott Copper and other US multinationals, was deep into its
campaign to weaken the Chilean economy and punish Allende for
nationalizing industries in which US corporations held major stakes.
In November 1972 O'Neill told McLellan that a CUT leader had
approached him with a plan to unite "trade union support against
multinational companies such as Kennecott." In response, he told the
official that "since the movement would obviously be communist-
dominated, I doubted if the AFL-CIO would publicly take a stand
against Kennecott." (It never did.)
AIFLD utterly failed to make inroads into CUT or win friends among
unions striking against state-owned companies, even the copper
workers, who took AIFLD by surprise when they went on strike in
1973, despite leadership by Communists supportive of the Allende
government. So AIFLD's strategy began to focus instead on the
growing right-wing and gremio movements. One of AIFLD's allies, the
files show, was the National Party, a notorious right-wing political
group that openly backed Pinochet's coup in 1973. In October 1972
O'Neill proposed to use AID funds to send the director of the
National Party's labor department to Washington. "He is not a trade
unionist in the strict sense of the word since he is a professional
but he does have influence in the party structure," O'Neill noted.
In the fall of 1973, a series of strikes by truckers, doctors and
shop owners paralyzed Chile, giving Pinochet the pretext to launch
his coup. The strikes, which were partially funded by the CIA, were
no surprise to the AFL-CIO: The last pre-coup document in the Chile
files, dated May 22, 1973, shows that at least two senior AFL-CIO
officials had advance knowledge of the work stoppages. Bus and
truckers' unions "plan for unified strike action" in "early fall,
1973," McLellan wrote to Jay Lovestone, the apostate Communist who
headed the AFL-CIO's international affairs department. Pinochet,
however, saw all unions, not just left-leaning ones, as the enemy.
One of his first acts after seizing power was to outlaw the CUT. In
the months following September 11, hundreds of trade unionists-
including some who had worked with AIFLD-were rounded up, many never
to be seen again. Figueroa managed to make his way to the Swedish
Embassy, where he suffered a nervous breakdown during a monthslong
stay. In a 1975 interview in Mexico, where he died several years
later, he accused AIFLD of "13 years of massive social espionage."
The significance of the AFL-CIO documents becomes clear in a 1975
report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA's activity in
Chile. "The scope of 'normal' activities of the CIA Station in
Santiago," the committee said, included "efforts to oppose communist
and left-wing influence in student, peasant and labor
organizations"; the use of "'black' propaganda to sow discord
between the Communists and the Socialists and between the national
labor confederation and the Chilean Communist Party"; and "combating
the communist-dominated [CUT]." In his final radio broadcast to the
Chilean people from the besieged presidential palace, Allende
thanked the Chilean "patriots who a few days ago were continuing to
struggle against the revolt led by the professional unions-that is,
the class unions who were trying to hold on to the advantages
granted to a few of them by the capitalist society." His widow, in
conversations with Hirsch and others, later identified O'Neill,
AIFLD's man in Santiago, as the "number one" US intelligence
operative in Chile.
The archives' Chile file for the year of the coup is remarkably
thin, as are the files on Brazil following the 1964 military coup,
in which AIFLD was heavily involved. Asked to explain, archive
director Merrill said, "It sounds like there was a pattern of people
looking through and pulling things."
One of the saddest things about the Chile files is the absence of
any statement condemning Pinochet's coup. The AFL-CIO's indifference
comes across in Meany's response to an October 3, 1973, telegram
from Patrick Gorman, then president of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters
International Union, beseeching him to protest the pending execution
of Luis Corvalan, one of Chile's leading Communists and a prominent
member of CUT. "A trade union leader in Chile could, with the
present reactionary progress of the world, be a trade union leader
of the United States tomorrow," Gorman wrote. But Meany ignored the
message: At the top of the cable appears a handwritten note by
Ernest Lee, his son-in-law and director of international
affairs: "No response."
In August 1974, after it had become apparent that Pinochet was
hellbent on destroying any semblance of democracy in Chile, the AFL-
CIO executive council finally issued a statement. "Free trade
unionists did not mourn the departure of a Marxist regime in Chile
which brought that nation to political, social and economic ruin,"
the council said. "But free trade unionists cannot condone the
autocratic actions of this militaristic and oppressive ruler." For
Chilean workers, that was too little, too late.
A Whitewash of South Korea
From 1961 to 1979, South Korea was led by Park Chung Hee, a former
general who made economic development his number-one priority and
created a police state notorious for torture and long prison
sentences. Some of the worst repression was directed at unions,
which Park saw as a threat to economic growth and national security.
The only legal union, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU),
was under tight government control and thoroughly penetrated by the
Korean CIA (KCIA). The situation was so bad that in 1970, a young
worker in Seoul committed a fiery suicide to protest conditions in
the garment industry, an action that Korean activists point to as
the beginning of their modern labor movement.
The AFL-CIO, despite its pledge never to support government-
controlled unions, financed and supported the FKTU from 1971 until
the late 1980s-with full knowledge of the government's penetration
of the FKTU. In 1971 Jack Muth, regional director of the Asian
American Free Labor Institute, wrote a report to his boss, AAFLI
executive director Morris Paladino, about a visit to
Seoul. "Undoubtedly, the US [Embassy] Mission is aware that the
Korean Government keeps a close watch on the activities of the
unions," Muth wrote. "Even during our visit, we were introduced to
two Korean CIA agents who were attending the FKTU political
seminars; they were introduced as CIA agents openly." (The toothless
nature of the FKTU is underscored by a CIA study of South Korea in
1979 that I obtained last year under the Freedom of Information
Act. "Union activities are restricted by law," the CIA
reported. "Many labor leaders still lack credibility among the
workers because they often are corrupt or have been co-opted either
by management or by the government.")
In the late 1970s US religious and human rights organizations began
calling attention to the appalling treatment of South Korean
workers. They were particularly concerned about the brutality
directed at young women laborers in the textile and garment
industry, and the lack of response by the FKTU. An AFL-CIO truly
concerned about workers' rights would have embraced those efforts by
denouncing the repression in South Korea or severing its
relationship with the FKTU. Instead, the archives show that Paladino
spent much of his time railing against the churches' involvement in
Korean labor affairs. At AAFLI's 1978 board meeting, for example, he
complained bitterly about Korean religious activists who had come to
Washington to protest "against the FKTU, alleging that women workers
in South Korea are being seriously abused by their employers and the
government without adequate representation by the FKTU unions."
Their charges, he fretted, had sparked inquiries from US textile
workers and the United Auto Workers.
At the next board meeting, in 1979, Paladino lashed out at the Urban
Industrial Mission, a religious group in Seoul that provided the
only support available to struggling young laborers. Financed by the
World Council of Churches, the mission's offices in an industrial
area of Seoul provided a safe place where employees in Korean
factories could discuss working conditions free from police spies,
learn basic organizing skills and connect to the largely underground
resistance to Park's dictatorship. Paladino, however, was incensed
that the mission's campaigns had "resulted in the diffusion of
slanted and partial information in the United States and in Europe"
about South Korea and the FKTU. In response, he told his board,
AAFLI has "attempted to keep the record straight and provide the
facts to American affiliates of the AFL-CIO whenever requested."
Paladino's goal, apparently, was to whitewash the image of one of
Asia's cruelest dictatorships.
In October 1979 Park was assassinated by the head of the Korean CIA
during a revolt in the industrial city of Pusan by students and
factory workers. Park's successor, Chun Doo Hwan, cracked down even
harder on labor, outlawing all industrial unions and sending
hundreds of church and labor activists to prison. In 1981, while
Paladino was visiting Seoul, a group of garment workers seized the
AAFLI office there to protest his refusal to meet with their illegal
union. Police were called, and dozens of workers were injured in the
ensuing melee. In a 1986 interview I conducted for The Nation,
Paladino blamed the violence on the "different ethnic standards" of
Koreans.
After military rule ended in 1986, Korean industrial workers
organized the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions as an alternative
to the FKTU; it wasn't officially recognized by the AFL-CIO until
1997. "Many Koreans know the truth about AAFLI and the FKTU's
relationship to the KCIA," Kwon Young Gil, a third-party candidate
in South Korea's recent presidential election and the first
president of the KCTU, told me during a recent visit to
Washington. "It's important for American trade unionists to
acknowledge those facts so we can move forward to build a better
relationship in the future."
Resistance in Okinawa
During the Indochina war, US bases on the island of Okinawa were
used by the US military to store nuclear weapons and to launch B-52
strikes on Vietnam. This infuriated the citizens of Okinawa as well
as many Japanese, sparking the political unrest that culminated in
the 1972 reversion of Okinawa to Japanese control. But in 1967 and
again in 1969, labor tensions in Okinawa boiled over, first after a
military base workers' union known as Zengunro called a general
strike to protest Okinawa's role in the war, and then when a new
labor code imposed by Washington banned strikes on US bases and
threatened strikers with severe punishment. The AFL-CIO became
directly involved in stifling Okinawan resistance.
In April 1967 F.T. Unger, the US Army's High Commissioner in
Okinawa, wrote a letter to Meany informing him that Zengunro "has
veered considerably" toward the "opposition reversion movement." He
asked Meany to send an AFL-CIO staffer to Okinawa because "the
Zengunro leadership needs a firm yet reassuring hand to protect them
from the hotheads." A year later, Meany's representative in Okinawa
warned his boss of the dangers to US interests presented by the
election of a prominent leader of the reversion movement-who was
also a member of the local teachers' union-as Okinawa's first chief
executive. Japanese leftists, he complained, were calling the
election "a mandate for immediate unconditional reversion, removal
of all US military bases and ultimate abrogation of the Japanese-US
Mutual Security Treaty in 1970"-developments anathema to the AFL-
CIO. The general strike in February 1969 infuriated Meany and his
staff, particularly because it was endorsed by Domei, the
conservative Japanese labor federation aligned with the AFL-CIO. In
a memo to Meany, his international affairs director, Ernest Lee,
warned that the strike was "primarily against the US government
authority on the island as well as US foreign policy" and "could
affect our Vietnamese effort and support a communist offensive in
Vietnam." Lee became livid when he learned that Victor Reuther,
international affairs director of the UAW and one of the few labor
leaders who challenged AFL-CIO foreign policy, was openly backing
the Okinawa base workers. Reuther's telegram of support to Okinawa,
Lee told his boss, "is one of the encouragements upon which
[Japanese trade unionists] will lean" during the strike. He
added, "I believe that both State and Defense should be aware of
that cable." Turning in one of the country's most respected labor
leaders to the Pentagon surely ranks as a low point in AFL-CIO
history.
Venezuela and Beyond
Since taking control of the AFL-CIO's international programs in
1996, Shailor and her deputy for Latin America, Stan Gacek, have
worked hard to transform relations with unions around the world.
Last fall, Sweeney and Arturo Martinez, the president of Chile's
CUT, signed a declaration urging their governments to
include "enforceable obligations" on workers' rights in any free-
trade agreement and rejecting the imposition of Chile's privatized
social security system "on the workers of the United States."
(Ironically, that pact is now threatened by US anger at Chile's
refusal to vote with Bush during the UN debate on Iraq.) And a
delegation of organizing directors from three US unions recently
used ACILS funds to visit South Korea, where they exchanged ideas
with their counterparts in the KCTU. Solidarity, in other words, has
now replaced intervention as the cornerstone of labor's foreign
policy.
The AFL-CIO's overseas work, however, retains close government ties.
ACILS obtains most of its $18-million-a-year budget from AID and the
Congressionally funded NED, with some additional funds from private
foundations. AID just concluded a five-year grant to ACILS of $60
million and will provide another $9 million a year for the next five
years. ACILS currently has programs in twenty-eight countries,
where, according to Tim Beaty, deputy director of international
affairs, staffers work with overseas trade unionists "to build a
better labor movement" by linking unions within the same industry
and building coalitions with social movements. (The day of our
interview, Beaty was coordinating meetings between US unions and a
delegation of environmental activists from Taiwan trying to win
compensation from RCA for the pollution it caused there before
pulling out in 1992.) Proof of the AFL-CIO's independence from the
government, Gacek told me, "is in the application. Can we basically
follow an agenda that is not tied to any geopolitical interest other
than international trade union solidarity? Without making any
comments about the past, I think yes, that is something we are doing
now."
But the AFL-CIO's experience with Venezuela's CTV illustrates how
the line between geopolitics and solidarity can get blurred. The AFL-
CIO's relationship with the CTV goes back to the 1970s, when
Venezuelan unions, through their alliance with the Democratic Action
Party, were for many years part of the center-right government. The
archives show that the AFL-CIO and the CTV worked closely in those
years to isolate Cuba and counter the influence of left-wing unions
in Latin America. The labor federations were used by the US and
Venezuelan governments as unofficial channels on oil. In a 1974
meeting with the CTV, for example, the AFL-CIO pointed out that "the
oil pricing arrangement of OPEC and of Venezuela are wrecking the
economic balance of the free world." The CTV assured Meany "that
Venezuela is a secure source of supply for the United States. We are
not the Middle East. We are similar people. We dress the same. We
have the same unions. We have the same capitalists and the same
military. When you talk with us it is not a conversation between
Kissinger and the shieks [sic] but between brother trade unionists."
Today, the CTV and the AFL-CIO remain very close, though President Ch
ávez has denounced the CTV and its political supporters as part of
the oligarchy that is out to weaken his attempts to redistribute the
country's oil wealth. To counter the CTV, Chávez encouraged the
organization of a rival labor federation and refused to recognize
the results of a CTV election won by former oil workers' leader
Carlos Ortega. In response, Ortega built an alliance with
Fedecamaras, the Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce, with the aim of
toppling Chávez's government.
A year ago, they came close to that goal when a general strike they
organized became the pretext for a brief military coup. When the New
York Times revealed that NED had funded the opposition, the AFL-CIO
was swamped with questions about its ties to the CTV. The AFL-CIO
immediately put out a lengthy statement condemning the coup and
explaining that the CTV used its US funds to fight Chávez's
attempts to undermine labor rights. "There is no evidence that the
CTV or its leaders went beyond the democratic expressions of
discontent," the AFL-CIO concluded. In a significant break from the
past, it added that Chávez's programs, including "agrarian reform
and assistance to Cuba, are and should be the sole and sovereign
concern of the Venezuelan people and their government." Gacek
maintains today that ACILS's support for internal democracy within
the CTV boosted progressive forces in Venezuela's labor
movement. "We assisted a process that actually brought more of the
left, and including some elements sympathetic to the admirable
redistributive rhetoric of the Chávez government, to the leadership
of the CTV," he said. But with tensions still high in Venezuela,
questions remain about the CTV and its tactics. Tellingly,
strategic, non-Chavista unions in steel, oil and the public sector
didn't support the CTV during the general strike last year. A member
of a recent fact-finding delegation to Venezuela from the
International Federation of Journalists wrote Gacek last summer
that "the CTV was actively, directly involved in the illegal
plotting for the April coup." Gacek rejected that assessment, but
made it clear that the AFL-CIO was trying to defuse the situation.
He is working with Brazil's new government and a "friends of
Venezuela" labor group formed at the World Social Forum in Porto
Alegre, Brazil, to "bring down the temperature" in Caracas by
negotiating amnesty for some of the 16,000 fired oil workers Chávez
has threatened to jail. (Ortega, who was on Chávez's list, is now
living in exile in Costa Rica.) Overall, said Gacek, the AFL-CIO
wants Chávez to respect the "democratic rule of law" and insure
that "violence and force are not employed to force regime change."
Using labor funds to undermine a foreign government, he added
forcefully, "goes against my fiber."
A Full Accounting
Today the labor movement is facing a multitude of challenges, from
Bush's attacks on unions to the failing economy and the fallout from
the war. Given the internal politics at the AFL-CIO, whose unity was
shaken by the recent departure of the Carpenters Union, Sweeney's
reluctance to embrace the "clear the air" movement is
understandable. Many of the unions most closely identified with the
federation's cold war policies, such as the Bricklayers and the
American Federation of Teachers, fought bitterly against Sweeney's
election. Sweeney himself, and several members of his executive
council, were board members of AIFLD and the other institutes, and
would likely be uncomfortable with a full probe of the past-as would
ACILS executive director Harry Kamberis, a former Foreign Service
officer who held senior positions in AAFLI during the 1980s.
Meanwhile, ideologues on the right may be seeking to revive their
old labor alliances in an effort to popularize American goals in the
war against terrorism around the world. Recently, American
Enterprise Institute scholar Joshua Muravchik cited Jay Lovestone
and Irving Brown-the godfathers of the AFL-CIO's overseas operations-
as leading lights in "the war of ideas that we waged in the cold
war." Those battles, he noted candidly, were fought "largely through
the good offices of the CIA," but are now being "carried out overtly
by US broadcasting agencies [and the] National Endowment for
Democracy." Although it is unlikely the AFL-CIO would join such a
campaign, these pressures raise serious questions for labor. Can the
AFL-CIO continue to work with institutions like the NED and AID and
still maintain its integrity overseas? If, even in this political
climate, Colin Powell can proclaim, as he did recently on Black
Entertainment Television, that the US role in Allende's downfall "is
not a part of American history that we're proud of," could John
Sweeney finally say the same about AIFLD?
"I think every country and every institution has a right to its own
history, particularly in the case of AIFLD, which was publicly
funded," said Robert White, who served as US ambassador to El
Salvador during one of its worst periods of repression and is now
president of the Center for International Policy. During those
years, White said, AIFLD "became a total instrument of US foreign
policy. It seems to me that the public has a right to know." Indeed,
meeting that simple demand would go a long way toward restoring the
global prestige American unions enjoyed before the cold war as the
folks who invented May Day, industrial unions and the eight-hour day.
Tim Shorrock (tshorrock51@hotmail.com) is an investigative
journalist based in Silver Spring, Maryland. Research support was
provided by the Investigative Fund of the Public Concern
Foundation. He thanks Fred Hirsch for his help in interpreting the
AFL-CIO files on Chile.