10

Conclusion
The “Cold War” Within the Cold War

The years examined here began with the bulk of the international labour movement seeking worldwide unity within the World Federation of Trade Unions, with the strategic goal of securing a genuine role at the decision-making table and an authoritative voice in shaping the architecture of postwar international economic relations. They ended with a growing number of unions affiliated to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, engaging in contacts with Soviet bloc labour bodies in the context of East-West détente. The years in between saw the hardest phases of Cold War politics, affecting social, economic, cultural, and military relationships. At the start and at the end, however, the one unchanging element was the AFL/AFL-CIO refusal to join in the process. Courting isolation, its preference was to stand apart from the main representative body of organized workers.

One thread running through this study is the concept of “free trade unionism,” the label adopted by the ICFTU’s founders to distinguish themselves from the WFTU. Never precisely defined, it was as much aspiration as description, a pointer to a preferred form of trade unionism, but it was still susceptible to different interpretations and thus to disagreements. Nevertheless, it provides a prism through which to view issues that were often contentious in labour circles. Free trade unionism was rooted in a conviction that workers had an inalienable right to form trade unions as the natural expression of their interests. Axiomatic was the belief that these should be self-governing worker organizations under the control of their members and entitled, if they so chose, to federate with other similar bodies. For free trade unionism to thrive, a democratic polity and pluralism in social organizations was essential.

Free trade unionism for the AFL was a long-standing and fundamental principle, born of hostility to the Bolshevik revolution and the unwavering opposition to continuing efforts by communists deploying Leninist tactics to gain a toehold in the US labour movement. Bitter experience gained from “united front” tactics and campaigns of “entryism” taught the lesson that communists only took would-be partners by the hand the better to take them by the throat. The AFL therefore believed there was no such thing as a partnership of equals with communists in which different groups respected the integrity and independence of the other; the basic rule was thus to have no truck with them. In the context of totalitarian communist regimes, trade unions were seen essentially as agents of the state to be totally opposed. The AFL believed that help should be given, where feasible, to workers in communist countries who challenged their communist party’s monopoly of representational rights. The principle was also applied by the AFL to unions in fascist and authoritarian countries, notably Franco’s Spain and Argentina under Perón, though over time there would, in practice, be less concrete opposition to unsavoury, authoritarian regimes in Latin America or, indeed, in post-colonial Africa.

How free trade union principles were to be drafted into the ICFTU constitution was subject to fierce debate at its foundation. Memories of this founding disagreement lingered long and injected for years to come a bitter edge into relations between those who had been involved. The AFL had wanted an explicit statement that trade unions should be free from control by political parties, government, employers, or the church, but facing opposition from the British TUC, the Americans settled for a formulation more attuned to union practices in Western countries where organic union links with a labour or socialist party existed. The AFL, however, secured a compensating constitutional reference to trade unions as “bargaining agents”—a corrective to the European trade unions’ greater reliance on legislative gains to be sought and achieved through their political partners.

By the time of the formation of the ICFTU in 1949, early hopes for a peacetime world based on a continuation of the wartime big power alliance had given way to one polarized between East and West, with both sides heavily armed. Since the WFTU’s foundation, the international labour movement had witnessed divisions, not unity, paralleling the harsh realities of the developing Cold War. But it was not simply a case of the Cold War impacting on the labour movement; the AFL was itself an important protagonist in the birth of the Cold War. Its efforts in France, Germany, Greece, and Italy were of fundamental importance in shaping the labour movements in those countries and in steering a significant portion of trade unions into the Western camp. The AFL gave strategically important assistance to French and Italian trade unionists who were already resisting the increasing communist domination of the CGT and the CGIL in pursuit of a shifting sectarian political line. The Americans considered that they were simply striking a blow for the principle of free trade unionism.

The ICFTU, formed in 1949 and to which most Western union centres belonged, symbolized a rejection of the way the WFTU had served as a pawn of the communist bloc in opposing Marshall aid. At the outset, the one clear policy of the ICFTU in terms of external relations was to distrust the WFTU and to reject its determined pursuit of contacts and dialogue: there would be no relations between ICFTU and WFTU. How to deal with other bodies in the communist orbit remained to be determined.

The ICFTU was a component of the Western bloc. Testament to that was the appointment in 1951 of a trade union–approved representative in the NATO secretariat as liaison to the ICFTU.1 It was an arrangement that backfired on the ICFTU when it failed to recruit into membership Japan’s largest trade union centre, Sōhyō, which feared Japanese embroilment in the Korean War. Denials that the ICFTU supported either rearmament or the Korean War cut no ice with the Japanese, but they did serve to fuel early AFL doubts about the ICFTU’s wholehearted commitment to waging the Cold War. The AFL remained the most stalwart trade union champion of NATO and, indeed, of a close organizational link with the NATO secretariat.

In this climate, the AFL opted to continue its separate program of international labour relations by focusing its work and its funding on the “independent activities” developed by its Free Trade Union Committee since 1945. The AFL also kept a watchful eye on the ICFTU leadership, criticizing from within any perceived backsliding by the ICFTU secretariat and other affiliates in their opposition to communism. The AFL’s justification for its continuing go-it-alone international program was that American unions had a special role to fulfil, and a unique competency. As Irving Brown put it, the ICFTU could not and would not do what the AFL could and must do.

The AFL’s Free Trade Union Committee aimed to strengthen the anti-communist capability of Force ouvrière and CISL, its client centres in France and Italy, and explored ways of extending the anti-communist crusade behind the Iron Curtain; but it looked askance at developments within the ICFTU when affiliates accepted invitations from the non-aligned (though still communist) Yugoslav trade union centre to its congresses. The AFL was outspokenly opposed when there were signs from time to time that international trade secretariats might be willing to entertain membership by a communist-led union. Yet such choices by self-governing bodies were entirely defensible under the rubric of self-governing “free trade unionism.” The problem for labour was that whereas “unity” remained a deeply held value, a Holy Grail for international unionism, for the AFL the battle against communism took precedence.

Questions that were of an essentially administrative nature, such as whether or not to admit into membership in the ICFTU the Australian Workers’ Union, the Unione italiana del lavoro, or the Japanese centre Zenrō, were judged by the AFL according to perceptions of the likely impact on the way the latter had chosen to fight communism in these countries and on the particular impacts on anti-communist alliances that it had already forged. The recommendation of the ICFTU’s first exploratory mission to Asia to base the regional organization in Singapore was evaluated by Jay Lovestone entirely in terms of what it meant for the fight against communism in Asia should the ICFTU locate its subsidiary body in a British colony. His hostile reaction, based in part on his mistrust of the British TUC, led to a breach with General Secretary Oldenbroek that was never healed. The failure of ICFTU affiliates to take a firm position in opposition to the Soviet Union’s application to take its seat at the ILO—an agency of the United Nations to which the USSR was perfectly entitled to belong, even though trade unions in that country were simply instruments of the state—was judged as a sign of the lack of firm anti-communist resolve within the ICFTU. And for the AFL, the appointment of an ICFTU director of organizing became a test of whether or not the person chosen would prioritize organizing for the anti-communist struggle. In practice, it became a question of whether or not the job should be handed to the AFL’s Irving Brown.

In 1955, following a proposal by the AFL, the ICFTU stance on free trade unionism was clarified with a policy that ruled out contacts with all communist organizations. Yet just as its affiliated national centres were often powerless to stop their own unions from having such relations with communists, so also the ICFTU had no means of enforcing its new policy: free trade unionism did not sit easily with the idea of any central body imposing top-down discipline. A typical argument of those unions that did not comply was that while they fully endorsed the ICFTU constitution, their policy had to be adapted to the practical needs of the situation at hand.

As the cold-war climate eased from the mid-1950s, and with the Soviet Union proclaiming a “new look,” East-West dialogue led to the introduction of cultural exchanges and a parallel increase in the number of invitations to Western unions to visit communist organizations behind the Iron Curtain. Willing takers there were, mostly hoping to learn at first hand what communist societies looked like, and in turn keen to share their Western understanding of trade union principles. The trend in “trade union tourism” continued into the 1960s, growing stronger when President Johnson’s administration became focused on “building bridges” to the East and the West German government began to shape Ostpolitik as a way of regularizing relations with its eastern neighbours.

Differences there undoubtedly were between ICFTU affiliates on the advisability of such visits. Honest attempts at dialogue were criticized by anti-communist hard-liners as an unnecessary lowering of the guard that would naïvely serve the purposes of communist propagandists. Absent the central power of the ICFTU to impose a “disciplined line,” the situation called for diplomatic skill and a plentiful supply of pragmatism and goodwill. Here the role of the AFL-led FTUC invites examination. In staffing the FTUC, the AFL chose to fight fire with fire, deploying former communists to take on present-day communist opponents. As FTUC director, Jay Lovestone maintained that only those who had experienced the communist movement from within could ever be reliable anti-communists. Thus he hired ex-Lovestoneites Irving Brown and Harry Goldberg, with other personal allies from Communist Party (Opposition) days in supporting roles. To critics it was the application of “communism in reverse.”

The particularly close relationship between Lovestone and Brown was a key feature of FTUC work. They were obsessive in their pursuit of “the project” and in the way they buoyed up one another’s commitment, sharing the same sense of impending doom at the perceived international drift toward communism. Prone to dramatize events, and with the self-image of lonely warriors fighting valiantly against the heaviest of odds, they maintained a subtext in their reports to the AFL leadership of their indispensability: they alone understood the nature of the communist threat and the way to defeat it.

Reflecting this passionate anti-communist mindset, the correspondence between Lovestone and Brown often described colleagues within the ICFTU disparagingly as ineffectual or as liabilities: some were viewed as knaves, others as fools, but either way they were the subject of ad hominem criticisms and wounding personal put-downs. Their opinions were hardly a secret and over time could only have a negative influence on the way senior AFL-CIO officers perceived the ICFTU, implicitly raising the question of whether continued American membership in such a body was worthwhile.

Within the wider international labour movement the Lovestone-Brown style often exacerbated already strained relations. Speaking at a conference of the Industrial and Labour Relations Association in the 1950s, Lovestone informed his audience in characteristically dismissive terms that “the ICFTU wakes up sometimes when we kick it in the shins. The ICFTU lacks the drive, force, vitamins. It is asleep, but sleep is not an occupation. It’s a disease.” Walter Reuther, the president of the United Auto Workers and a sharp critic of the AFL-CIO’s approach to the problem of communism, deplored this ongoing “cold war” against the ICFTU. As the respected American labour media correspondent Jack Herling commented, the substantive issues over which opinions on international matters differed were not nearly so divisive as the tactics deployed and the personal animosities thereby generated.2

Yet if Lovestone and Brown inflamed relations with other trade union centres, they were doing so with the tacit consent of AFL-CIO president George Meany and after he, personally, had set the tone. Indeed, Meany stoutly defended Lovestone and Brown against “the hatchet job” on them he believed Walter Reuther was engaged in. As early as 1951, it was Meany who turned a deaf ear to the private plea by TUC general secretary Vincent Tewson that he intervene to end Lovestone’s scope for publishing for overseas consumption tendentious statements that casually insulted sister organizations. Meany’s low regard for the ICFTU as led by Jaap Oldenbroek was evident from the earliest days, first reflected in the prolonged AFL boycott in 1952 and subsequently in a continuing skirmish over the finance needed by the ICFTU to operate effectively. And by abetting Irving Brown in his calculated defiance of Oldenbroek’s successor, Omer Becu, Meany undermined and eventually destroyed his one-time ally’s authority as general secretary. Meany’s failure in 1967 to respond to Jef Rens’s request that Brown cease aiding Colonel Mobutu’s strong-arm centralization of the Congolese trade unions finally robbed the ICFTU of the prospect of appointing a widely respected general secretary.

Despite Meany’s public image as an irascible, cigar-chomping union boss, those close to him considered that his effectiveness as a leader derived from his characteristic personal decency and sense of principle, seeing in him a man who was essentially humble and even inclined to shyness. Yet it was a different, belligerent Meany who tended to appear on the international stage. To Stefan Nedzynski, who dealt with him at close quarters as ICFTU assistant general secretary, he seemed to be always angry.

Meany was never in doubt that his trenchant criticisms of the ICFTU and fellow leaders of certain national affiliates were fully justified. The ICFTU lacked his sense of urgency at the threat posed by communism. He saw this issue in moral terms: communism was a conspiracy against freedom that needed to be fought everywhere. Yet on this, as with other matters, Meany found Jaap Oldenbroek intransigent and prone to arrogance. The TUC’s Vincent Tewson also irritated Meany with his overly cautious approach to fighting communism and belief that the ICFTU’s general effectiveness would be reduced if it were tagged with the cold-warrior label.

Anti-colonialism, a key item on the ICFTU’s agenda, was closely linked to the anti-communist struggle inasmuch as the continuation of the colonial system was likely to play into the hands of communists operating inside third world nationalist movements. Here the AFL-CIO had an exemplary record—in both supporting movements for national independence and in strongly criticizing the way the US government indulged foot dragging by European colonial powers averse to a speedy process of decolonization. The AFL-CIO was often unfairly accused of following US government foreign policy. In fact, the accusation could with more justification be levelled against European unions with organic links to a party in government—especially when engaged in the administration of colonialism. Meany could fairly argue that the British TUC operated according to double standards. It expected loyalty to the ICFTU from others, while being determined to retain for itself a proprietorial interest in trade union affairs in British colonial territories, with a program equivalent to the AFL’s “independent activities” that were so disapproved of when practised by the FTUC. For the AFL-CIO, the close relationship between Oldenbroek and Tewson evoked memories of European domination of the pre-war international labour movement and especially the way leaders of the TUC and the now defunct International Federation of Trade Unions were the axis on which the movement had operated. It was an imperial British arrangement that the AFL had been determined would not be repeated in the ICFTU.

The perception that the ICFTU was too much influenced in its approach to Africa by its European affiliates with colonial interests caused Walter Reuther to overcome personal differences with Meany and join forces in opposing the way ICFTU policy was implemented in Africa and in forcing Oldenbroek from office. The AFL-CIO’s preference for playing a lone hand in Africa through the African-American Labour Centre in the 1960s was in part a reaction against the lingering colonial instincts of some European trade union centres. It was also a factor behind the close relationship that Irving Brown developed with Colonel Mobutu in the Congo.

Despite the common interest of George Meany and Walter Reuther in replacing Jaap Oldenbroek, there was recurring friction within the AFL-CIO between the two men over international affairs. For some, this was portrayed as no more than a manifestation of Reuther’s ambition to succeed Meany as AFL-CIO president, yet the significant, substantive differences between them over foreign policy cannot be brushed aside. As the British labour attaché in Washington noted in 1960, the mere fact that Reuther had a high profile internationally and was admired by trade unionists in other countries grated with the AFL-CIO president. Meany accused Reuther of trying to diminish his standing around the world. He particularly resented the fact that the TUC kept in close contact with the UAW president, and he considered that, through his activities overseas, Reuther made it easier for the British to play off one section of the US labour movement against the other. It made Meany all the keener to assert his primacy in the international field.

International trade union relations highlighted the different emphases Meany and Reuther drew from the concept of free trade unionism. These were captured in the slogans they coined, mostly for use against one another. The FTUC was criticized for its “negative anti-communism,” which fed labour’s “cold war” within the Cold War. In turn, Reuther was mocked by Lovestone as the naïve proponent of “belly communism,” his view that an assault on poverty and hunger in the Third World, and primary attention to increasing workers’ living standards in the West, was the best defence against the spread of communism. Reuther’s slogan, “neither Standard Oil nor Stalin,” never expressed Meany’s approach to international trade unionism.

In contrast with the AFL’s activities, the CIO program conducted by Victor Reuther in Europe in the early 1950s had at its core the aim of improving negotiated terms and conditions at work by assisting French and Italian non-communists in their industrial struggle against employers. The ambitious program launched by the UAW in the 1960s and financed by the interest earned on its strike fund largely fitted the same mould. The sums involved were significant, and in 1967 alone, when the UAW’s departure from the AFL-CIO appeared increasingly likely, Jay Lovestone calculated that the union had spent close to $1 million on international affairs.3 The UAW program was unique in attempting to carve out a genuine role for union members at the base—something almost universally lacking in the conduct of international policy by organized labour everywhere, whether or not they subscribed to some notion of free trade unionism. The UAW’s suspicion of the American Institute for Free Labour Development (AIFLD), the AFL-CIO’s flagship regional agency in Latin America, and especially the formal role it accorded to employers, also pointed to a fault line between competing emphases within free trade unionism, suggesting for some a boundary line beyond which the concept began to lose all meaning.

No less anti-communist than Meany, Reuther differed with him in believing that it was worth engaging with communist opponents—as with Soviet leaders Mikoyan and Khrushchev, to confront them at the level of ideas, or with Tito, to obtain a first-hand view of how much scope there might be for dialogue with the Yugoslavs. Victor Reuther’s meeting with AUCCTU leader Alexander Shelepin during the Prague Spring was no attempt to cozy up to the Soviet trade unions but rather to impress on a ranking member of the Politburo the UAW’s support for the liberalizing Czech metal workers’ union, which it continued to assist even after the country’s attempt at liberal reform was crushed when Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia.

In the years covered by this study, American trade unions began to rely significantly on finance from government sources for their international work. Some came directly from the Central Intelligence Agency, some via government aid agencies from counterpart funds “owned” by the CIA, and later, more commonly, from the Agency for International Development under its own auspices in support of the AFL-CIO’s regional institutes and for disbursement to selected international trade secretariats. Labour leaders justified the practice on grounds that their communist opponents were even more generously funded from Soviet government sources.

The fact that the CIO was also clearly in receipt of CIA funding in the early 1950s, if on a smaller scale, became a serious source of friction between the AFL and CIO in their years of organizational rivalry before they merged in 1955. The unconvincing claim made by Walter and Victor Reuther was that they understood the money to come from counterpart funds of the aid agency, which were voted publicly by Congress for programs that included international activities conducted by the labour movement. Even so, union accounts failed to record these sums, and the union leadership was clearly conscious that attempts to procure aid agency funds for programs administered by the ICFTU necessarily involved deceit.

Funding from the CIA was channelled secretly and avoided public scrutiny. The membership in whose name it was spent was kept entirely in the dark and received no accounting. While for many years there was no general awareness of the source of funding, Irving Brown especially earned a reputation overseas as a moneybags and because of that came to be viewed with suspicion. There was too much of a tendency to “buy” the support of fellow trade unionists. In France, Force ouvrière’s dependency on AFL subsidies was long-standing, and even as it failed to grow in membership Irving Brown felt a continuing need to talk up its prospects, so much personal credibility had he invested in the organization. Over time, the word “free” liberally attached to trade union bodies that were artificially funded opened up the whole concept of free trade unionism to criticism.

The issue of CIA funding—denied for so long—proved difficult for the AFL-CIO to live down, and doubtless accounts for delays in opening up its files on international affairs. The practice is clearly impossible to square with the precepts of free trade unionism, except by persuasive definition, arguing in circular fashion that its use by unions in the struggle against Soviet communism—where unions, by definition, were not free—must have been in the cause of free trade unionism. Apologists have suggested that the real problem derived from the secrecy surrounding the arrangement and, optimistically, that the controversy could have been diffused had there been openness about the source of funding.4 Others point out that the collaboration between organized labour and the CIA’s forerunner, the OSS, during the war against Nazism was never regarded as a source of embarrassment. Therefore, they argue against different values being applied in the battle against Soviet communism. That would appear to have been George Meany’s attitude, given the way people with apparent intelligence backgrounds found work in sensitive areas with the AFL-CIO, whether they were formally on the books or not. Yet notwithstanding such cases, it is necessary to recognize that the AFL-CIO’s links with the world of intelligence in no way paralleled the situation in the Soviet Union, where the head of the AUCCTU was the former head of the KGB!

Only in the second half of the 1960s did the facts relating to secret funding surface, when they became an important issue in the developing conflict between the UAW and the AFL-CIO. That conflict led in turn to the autoworkers’ disaffiliation from the AFL-CIO and its subsequent attempt to rejoin the ICFTU as an independent centre. This was the proximate cause of the AFL-CIO withdrawal from the ICFTU in 1969. It was a reflection of the fall in the AFL-CIO’s international standing that a number of European affiliates responded with equanimity at the prospect of its departure. They were upbeat at the prospect of the UAW taking its place as an altogether more congenial American partner.

There was now disillusionment on both sides of a growing divide within the ICFTU, with serious consequences for international trade union cohesiveness. For years, with ever-lower expectations of the ICFTU, the Meany-led AFL-CIO had been gearing up to work abroad through its three regional institutes. Equally frustrated at the continuing impasse within the ICFTU, the Europeans had also started to turn inward, focusing on their particular regional concerns and beginning to think in terms of a new Europe-wide international body—what finally emerged in 1973 as the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). Within a few years this development would highlight serious differences of attitude toward free trade unionism among Europeans themselves.

Although the AFL-CIO identified the German DGB and the British TUC as the chief culprits in defying ICFTU policy through their contacts with the USSR, and thereby undermining the principle of free trade unionism, there were important differences in motivation between Europe’s two leading national centres. The DGB was acting in support of the West German government’s Ostpolitik and claimed to be engaging in diplomacy rather than seeking institutional links. The Germans did not dispute the essential difference between free trade union practices and those in the Soviet bloc. But equally they understood the case for making every possible effort to help reduce tensions and divisions due to the Cold War.

In contrast, and as judged by the public musings of its general secretary, George Woodcock, the TUC no longer regarded the gap between itself and unions in the Soviet bloc as unbridgeable, nor the organizational split between the ICFTU and WFTU as in the best interests of union members. Woodcock argued that in an imperfect world free trade unions had no choice but to deal with communist organizations that “represented,” however inadequately, workers in totalitarian countries. He was no ideologue, and was not proposing any dramatic new initiative; the cautious expression of his views was doubtless intended primarily to mollify an increasingly vocal British trade union left, among which a communist-supporting minority was the most cohesive component. Yet this emerging TUC position logically implied a wholesale rejection of free trade unionism as understood by the AFL-CIO. Indeed, it could imply rejecting the rationale behind the ICFTU’s existence.

Had it remained within the ICFTU, would there have been scope for the AFL-CIO to exploit such Anglo-German differences? To some ICFTU affiliates, the Americans’ unbending refusal to deal with Soviet bloc unions may have come to sound like a one-note refrain, but in its well-founded belief that there could be no common purpose with the communists on the essentials of trade unionism, the AFL-CIO was certainly not alone.

Yet there was another dimension to this situation, less focused on general hopes for détente and reflecting more immediately the quotidian concerns of trade unions in pursuit of their members’ interests. The late 1960s witnessed an increase in unrest among workers on both sides of the Atlantic that translated into a new pattern of militant trade union behaviour—the frequently cited “blue-collar blues” in the United States—and would characterize industrial relations in many Western countries in the 1970s. It reflected both a generational change in trade union leadership and an increasing self-confidence among workers following a sustained period of full employment. It also coincided with organized labour’s first experience of the disruptive power of multinational corporations and a new awareness of the urgent need for greater transnational union cooperation as a countervailing force.

The renewed quest for trade union unity placed in the spotlight centres such as Italy’s CGIL and Japan’s Sōhyō, to take two prominent examples. Both were powerful organizations yet firmly outside the ICFTU fold. Their estrangement from the ICFTU raised the question of whether their potential value as allies in cross-border industrial campaigns should take precedence over such political litmus tests as their stance on the virtues of NATO, or the desirability of the US-Japanese peace treaty under which American military bases existed in Japan.

In the case of the CGIL, the “hot autumn” of 1969 and the imperative need for national union unity in Italy had already induced moves to federate with the Christian Democrat and Social Democrat–led centres from which it had been separated since the early days of the Cold War. And if trade unionists from these two non-communist Italian centres could see their way to cooperating with the CGIL, the case for union bodies elsewhere to reconsider their attitude toward the “communist” CGIL in the interests of international solidarity was surely no less compelling. In the face of AFL-CIO warnings against entanglement with communists, many labour movement activists of the time might simply reflect that the communists they were aware of were more often than not highly committed and even self-sacrificing trade unionists rather than fifth columnists in an international conspiracy. In the climate of late 1960s and 1970s radicalism, there was also a tendency among some to take at face value the WFTU propaganda—its rhetorical militancy was aimed exclusively at a Western audience—and in some quarters it was accepted as a sign that the WFTU was simply a more full-blooded trade union body than the stolid ICFTU.

The forum within which such issues were debated was the European Trade Union Confederation launched in 1973. For many of its founding members—all of them ICFTU affiliates—its primary focus was to be on labour’s concerns within the EEC. However, the British TUC and the Nordic trade unions envisaged a wider ETUC role in Europe, extending beyond the EEC, and the prospect that it would be open to Eastern European centres joining one day, thereby healing the breach caused by the 1949 schism in the WFTU. To this end, the British—playing hardball as much as the AFL-CIO had ever done within the ICFTU—insisted successfully that the emotive word “free” be removed from the suggested name of the new organization: there would be no letter “F” in the ETUC. In short order, the CGIL became the first communist-led organization to be admitted to membership. The ETUC was demonstrably not to be a “free” trade union body in the sense that the AFL-CIO understood the term. In further pursuit of the same strategy, the British and Nordics were also the driving force behind a series of biennial East-West trade union conferences of European labour organizations through the 1970s aiming to deepen understanding between participants from blocs that were now, so the argument went, increasingly obsolete.

How these initiatives played out in detail is necessarily the subject matter of another volume. Suffice to say that where purely European issues were concerned, the AFL-CIO was mostly no more than a disapproving onlooker. By this point it is doubtful that it could have intervened with any effect: the drift in Europe toward accommodation with Soviet bloc unions simply had to run its course. Time alone would reveal whether Western European labour movements would gain much from such a project. It meant that for the duration of the 1970s, with trade union militancy at a postwar peak, but with organizational strength threatened by an upward trend in unemployment as the long boom ended, the international labour movement based in the West was subject to a major division.

Acting largely alone in these circumstances, the AFL-CIO redoubled its effort in defending its vision of free trade unionism within the International Labour Organization, the one major international forum open to it. This was where it considered labour’s real cold-war battle had to be fought by holding up to international criticism the abuse of workers’ rights in the Soviet bloc. And as a result, it was to be the AFL-CIO that proved best placed to provide an international lead in support of Poland’s Solidarność in the 1980s. The launch of this body in 1980 presented Soviet communism with its biggest and—as events proved—its most decisive trade union challenge. Tellingly, the official Soviet bloc labour bodies so assiduously courted by Western European unions offered no help to the new Polish free trade union movement.

At this remove in time, it can be difficult to grasp the full meaning of the passionate conflicts that characterized the international trade union movement in the years of the Cold War. It is perhaps even more difficult to imagine a world where that movement played such a significant role in the relations between the dominant forces. In 1949, Walter Schevenels had predicted that the AFL would have little to offer European trade unions but money. That was always too sweeping an indictment. When the AFL ventured abroad in 1945, it did so armed with a simple but powerful message about the basic difference between free trade unionism and the “state unionism” version allowed under communism. And in the 1980s, it was this free union vision that Polish and other Eastern European workers found most appealing—with catastrophic consequences for the legitimacy and functioning of an entire communist regime.